Dealing with marketing's increasing complexity

“The world is changing but not everything is changing. It is wrong to believe that the dawn of the digital revolution means everything is dead, and only the web matters the most now,” Michael Fassnacht, Draftfcb Worlwide global chief strategy officer, said at the presentation lecture hosted yesterday, Wednesday 28 October 2009, by Draftfcb in Sandton, Johannesburg.

TV remains number one

“Rest assured that TV will remain number one in the world globally in the next three to six years,” he said, adding that the South African TV market is headed to a boom due to the entry of new players - something he believes will bring new marketing opportunities.

Reports said that SA is in the list of top 10 countries in the world for future TV opportunities, and media and marketing spending is set to increase systematically by 2011.

Fassnacht said that these changes will bring a dramatic complexity in the world of marketing, citing four big areas as core sources of that complexity.

While TV remains important, print is slowly dying and the focus now lies on top opportunities in the changing marketing game.

Media proliferation

“Media proliferation means more communication channels, and consumer fragmentation will engender micro-segments, and all this will bring velocity and disruptive technologies, resulting in human beings to move fast and furiously.

“We as marketers need to react to that and deal with that complexity,” he warned, calling on marketers to identify the complexities in their space and figure out how to get faster (constant prototyping).

“Build a plan and a team and execute against it. Marketers need to embrace something more complex than just having big ideas.

“Reduce uncertainty and increase success probability. You will have to understand what matters the most to consumers and build strategies and programmes accordingly.

Forecast reports

According to forecast reports, search marketing is set to increase to 61% in 2011 from 59% in 2008, resulting to a growth of US$7 billion in the market.

“You will have to use data intelligence - use more data to find customers, get broad then narrow. Search is unbelievable and more important than most believe - every search is a glimpse into the brand and mind of an individual.

“Technology is fundamentally changing the ‘listening to consumers' - when the brand says, the consumer hears and the consumer says.

“Practise the ‘art and science' of marketing, which I believe has been separated so long from one another. Bring both sides into the marketing.”