Digital knowledge key in marketing

There is no doubt that the dawn of the digital revolution has systematically changed the way marketers attract, engage and do business with consumers, the 600 or so delegates heard.

“The essence of marketing consists of attracting, engaging and exciting consumers. But most of all let's engage customers in a more exciting way,” Ives said.

“First let's understand the continuum. The internet is a valuable portal. Extend this to suppliers and partners, use tools including Mobility to improve business processes, extend it to commercial websites – after all it is a network,” he said.

However, Ives warned that marketers sometimes need to work with the IT guys to ensure that whatever they do online do not violate some government policies.

“You could be sued for being too ambitious but perhaps ignorant of laws regulating some online policies.”

Online spend increasing

It is important for a business to ask this question time and time again: ‘How is our brand doing? How do we improve it?', he advised.

“Increase in online spend is up by 58% across all companies and TV commercial share dropped 45% this half alone in the US,” Ives said, quoting an online report by Nielsen Monitor Plus.

According to the same report, Ives added, Nike's global sales have climbed in the last four years – to more than US$16 billion (R112 million) from US$10 billion (R70 billion), mostly due to online marketing.

And Nielsen Monitor Plus quoted Nike executives as saying that the new type of marketing is part of that trend.

Ives brought these concrete examples to demonstrate that it is indeed cheap but successful to market one's product online.

“The network is there and you can start in many places,” he said.

“Make sure that you understand the dynamics of the market – the consumer market determines how they will interact with you – think of what will happen in mobile technologies and let's learn from other economies.

“Technology opens up interesting opportunities, quite often not identified or solved by technical people.

“But most of all, be human first and a technologist second,” he concluded.

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