According to a new survey of the Marketing Executives Networking Group, conducted by Anderson Analytics, 60% of respondents say the most important marketing trend for 2008 is a concentration on marketing basics. That includes specific concepts such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, segmentation, brand loyalty and ROI. Guess what number two is.
Marketing has been changing as quickly as technology has, so it makes sense that SEO (42%) and personalization (36%) came in at the number 2 and 3 spots. Pulling up in fourth place is green marketing at 32%.
When asked what was the most important demographic to target, marketing executives said the baby boomers (88%), closely followed by Gen Xers and Hispanics.
And congrats to our own MP blogger, Seth Godin, for being selected number one on the most important marketing guru list.
Here’s the news release:
So what is this telling us? Are we pulling back to our comfort zone to focus more on basic marketing strategies? What is your company doing next year? What do you think?
Tags: 2008, boomers, demographic, marketing basics, marketing trends, SEO
Elaine, getting back to basics like segmentation, ROI etc is important, but I’m not sure that when we get back to them, we’ll do them any better than we had before.
I wonder if the sentiment of the survey was that we’ve been unfocused and perhaps distracted by the hype (Web 2.0 for example) and need to return to marketing fundamentals?
Elaine,
Anderson has let out the secret! Marketers sometimes get too excited about using the new stuff without stopping to see if it actually supports their marketing goals. Without the fundamentals in place, how will we know how best to use the new stuff? I hope none of my competitors is reading that report.
Thanks for your comments. Both your posts are essentially saying the same thing. I think Web 2.0 is the best thing to come along in marketing, but not at the expense of other tried-and-true tactics.
Hi Elaine:
Nice post. I put one up today about the “back to basics” trend – in the context of the Dell WPP Megadeal.
http://humanvoice.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/dell-consolidates/
Tom O’B
Thanks, Tom!I can’t even begin to imagine how behemoth a job it must be to align the brand across a global company like Dell.
Elaine, Great post.
Back to basics. Cheers to that.
I guess this means that marketers have been doing things wrong the past couple of years?
The truth is that fundamentals should never leave our marketing strategies. The trick is to incorporate the new with the basics.
Jay, I don’t think the point of this was that people are ignoring the new. Basics are defined to include, “specific concepts such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, segmentation, brand loyalty and ROI.” This seems very sensible.
SEO and personalization came in second and third respectively. These are not exactly old fashioned.