I've been working on a marketing article for several months, but haven't really had as full a perspective as I'd like to have on the "picture". It's grand theme is measurement. I want to describe how a division has taken place in the universe of marketing, into the category of tactics that give effects we can measure and those that yield results we cannot. Online is in the former category. Most traditional marketing is in the latter. I would also describe how it has been (for most of the history of the marketing praxis) a big part of what marketing "does" to try to establish correlations between specific marketing actions and specific sales reactions. I would then go on to describe how the ability to precisely determine ROI (a given with online advertising) has commenced a massive flux in the way marketing budgets are being divided, in favor of measurable online. At the same time, marketing departments and ad agencies are coming under the leadership of "online marketers"... by that I mean executives who came up through the ranks buying and selling clicks. It is likely a grave disrespect to many talented and well-rounded marketing professionals to say that people who understand "traditional" marketing (PR, print, and all that's not online) are in decline. But I think it's generally true. Then again, perhaps all I am doing is observing an evolution, and there's no reason to lament the disappearance of methods that don't work anymore... or at at least that do not work well enough to warrant investing in people who have those skills.

These dynamics suggest all sorts of opportunities for smart people to seize upon, based on bridging and translating between the 2 realms marketing. There are also opportunities to transfer familiar skills into exciting new forms. That's what I think has happened to PR in the blogosphere. There's a link to a piece I wrote a while back that helps bloggers who may be coming from low-tech/offline to understand some of the new paradigms and how they can be used by regular folks to gain an audience and acquire significant influence.

While I keep indulging in "practice throws" of my article like this one, I've also been doing research and exploring attitudes among all types of merchants... both online and offline. I have observed how poorly represented the brick and mortar retailer still is, among search engine results, even as all the search engines boast greater local intelligence. The reality is that, just as marketing practice has become divided, so too have (to an inescapable degree) offline merchants become alienated from their online counterparts. The dollars and the attention have followed the measurement. Shop owners have been left to their own devices to either put up web sites and fend for themselves in a medium they don't understand and that (for many of them I have learned) feels very irrelevant to how they operate and promote themselves.

But before I could begin to feel sorry for all the brick and mortar retailers, I began to appreciate how there were things a business with a storefront could do that a business with just an e-storefront never could. I realized that their addiction to measurement was keeping online marketers from taking advantage of many, many things they might do successfully, but with lesser clarity of measurement.

One of the models I came up with for testing my theories became a web site (also based on Drupal). The gist is I am betting that I can make an "affiliate" model work with one leg and one arm in meatscape, lol. So far, the idea has been well received. As for how well old-fashioned "door-to-door" marketing can compete in an online marketing world, we shall see. I'm hoping to be successful enough with it to be excused an approximate ROI -- :)

Jack

menukarma.com