The dog that didn’t bark
Posted by Kamil Michlewski on October 11, 2012
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Yesterday we had the pleasure of attending the Jump digital marketing conference organised by eConsultancy at a great venue by the Thames in London. With a packed agenda the organisers were trying to cover a lot of ground in a dynamic field. There were eight concurrent tracks dealing with everything from digital leadership to engagement and execution.
All the big themes found their place. There was talk of attribution strategy, multichannel and omnichannel, ROI from social and of using big data to provide a single customer view. What struck us was the dog that didn’t bark; brand.
Not for the first time it became apparent that a lot of discussion in digital marketing is driven by IT, with clients preoccupied with the micro level of marketing activities. It is evident in the language they use and the issues they choose to discuss that the focus is on execution and operations.
Not a single talk or panel focused on brand. This is both disappointing and encouraging. Disappointing, because it appears that too much attention and money is being devoted to the mechanics of jumping on the digital bandwagon. Encouraging, because it reassures us we’ve got a strong proposition at The Value Engineers which helps to address the central issue many people are not addressing.
Through our work with global brands we’ve been able to acquire knowledge of digital and multichannel marketing that goes beyond the technical and the transient. We’ve found that often the received digital wisdom doesn’t work and a proper, grounded, multi-channel view is required. For example clients’ assumptions on customer segments are often in contradiction with the multichannel reality. Where you’d expect to find older, more ‘analogue’ groups, you often find younger, more agile groups. Where you think a brand is great at digital delivery, it often owes its success to traditional channels. Where you think digital is the answer, actually it is just a sound strategy, with a properly crafted and integrated digital component.
Whatever your views on what should be the centre of attention of the digital marketing efforts, we believe the brand and the classic, grounded view of what’s required should be given its due attention.
But don’t take our word for it, you can ask our clients how our strategic marketing thinking helped them crack the digital/multichannel challenge.
Get in touch with Kamil Michlewski or Paul Gaskell if you would like to talk about how we can help.
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