I love Marketing Week. It’s such a treat to extract my head from my PC and read a real, printed magazine about marketing in real life. It’s full of new about exciting things like loyalty marketing, brand building, press, TV, radio, direct mail and integrated work. And Mark Ritson’s BS-free zone is pure joy.
Here’s a handful of snippets from – and comments on – stories in last week’s issue to whet your appetite and inspire your DIY marketing efforts.
Top marketing news
1. Social media marketing budgets under threat – Apparently “top marketers are struggling to secure budgets for social media campaigns as their seniors are not convinced of the discipline’s commercial value”. In other words they can’t prove social media marketing sells stuff.
New customers almost always tell me where they heard of me without being asked. Direct marketers are trained to ask customers where they came from to track back response. So surely it can’t be that challenging to find out when someone’s come via Twitter?
2. A Marketers’ Forum ad highlights the stellar rise of mobile internet and gives startling predictions about how it’s due to take over from desktops. But don’t throw the marketing baby out with the bath water. Radio didn’t kill newspapers. Telly didn’t kill radio. Video didn’t kill the cinema. TV on demand hasn’t killed regular TV channels. The internet hasn’t killed the high street. Mobile internet isn’t going to kill anything off either, least of all desktops and laptops. It’s just another way of seeing and doing stuff. A brilliant addition to the marketing portfolio. Not the end of the world as we know it.
3. Legal Services Act 2011 – Soon everyone and his dog will be offering legal services and the prospect is throwing many traditional partnerships into a spin. Some are preparing re-branding and marketing campaigns against the storm of competition from supermarkets, banks and so on. But as Andy Hoe of Russell Jones & Walker acknowledges, it’s about more than re-branding.
There’s not much point looking new and shiny if your service is still old fashioned, slow, baffling and outrageously expensive. Legal firms will need to walk the walk and become customer friendly or sink like a stone.
4. Mark Ritson has a splendid turn of phrase. As a freelance writer I salute it. Here’s this issue’s favourite. He’s talking about the riots and the media’s illogical obsession with attributing them to so-called ‘irresponsible’ brands.
“What does this mean for brands? Nothing. What does it mean for marketing? Nothing. Are there a large number of greedy morons living in urban Britain? Yes. What do we do about it? No idea.”
There’s a lot of tosh talked in marketing. He doesn’t talk any of it.
