Why I hate funnels. It's kinda funny how I've founded an email marketing service with over 3 million users around the world, but I've never felt comfy calling myself an "email marketer," let alone a member of the email marketing community. That's partly because I nearly failed Marketing 101 in college (don't tell anybody). But mostly, it's because I hate funnels. And professional marketers just won't shut up about those God forsaken things. You know the funnels I'm talking about? They always look like this: The idea is that you need a ton of website visitors, then some of them become become leads, and then after you do something (the usual recommendation is to bombard the leads with marketing automation) they relent and pay you money, thus becoming a "customer.
" I hate this, because it's shortsighted. There. I told my friend that we discovered this "upside down funnel" approach in the early days, and never really grew out of it (because it's worked). Related and highly recommended: A little self-marketing: I spread your idea because... Why do we care about football? For someone outside the US, the visceral connection with football seems mysterious. You can understand a lot about the future (and past) of marketing once you understand how the sport turned into a cultural touchstone. Tribes -> TV -> Money -> Mass -> TV -> Tribes Football as we know it started in colleges. It was an epic muddy battle, pitting one alma mater against another, a war-like, non-balletic battle that united (at a pretty elemental level) the tribes on each side. As it grew as a college sport, it became as much of a social event as a sporting one, with alumni and students finding connection around a game.
But if that's all it was, today wouldn't be the biggest day of the year for several industries. No, it turns out that, quite accidentally, football, more than any other sport, is made for television. It's not an accident that the commercials are as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game. No one stands for movies, or ice cream or double-entry bookkeeping. Are You A Strong Node? After around 15 years of advocating for the embrace of "Digital Marketing", we're in the early stages of being advocates for embracing marketing for a digital world. I first heard this from Mark Comerford, but like all truisms, i feel like i had heard it before. It's a nice verbal flip, of course, but it's also true: "Digital Marketing" as a separate, distinct category for marketing needs to go away, and in it's place we need to simply be marketers to people who are connected digitally across so many devices, applications, networks, and touchpoints.
That is, all marketing is or should be "digital" marketing. But, Commerford actually makes a point of distinguishing between the word "digital" and "networked", preferring "networked", presumably, because it implies what happens (we get networked to each other) instead of how (via digital means). Those of us who have been around for a while owe it to others to be at our best, to ensure they're benefiting from our experience and knowledge. 1: AMC "Zombie Experiment" | The 15 Best Ads of 2012. This list, called Best Ads on purpose, is intended to showcase what brand creativity can be beyond advertising, or, if you like, demonstrate that advertising means many more things today than paid ad units. The ideas on this list include achievements in content marketing, one of advertising’s most important, still-developing disciplines.
But the list also includes developments in brand utility, that other critical, long-term mandate--for brands to create things that make people’s lives better, easier, or more fun. If Red Bull Stratos represented the pinnacle of brand content, Nike Fuelband is the premium example of brand utility. Nike has demonstrated an ongoing virtuosity in communicating its essence through great stories. But the brand has also evolved such that it’s made a priority of producing things, like Fuelband and Nike+ before it, that give new form and new purpose to that essence. Check them out (in reverse order--the top pick is the last slide) in the slide show above. : State of Digital Business in 2012. Emotional Attributes Do Nothing for Sales | CMO Strategy. The Gap Between the Vision for Marketing and Reality.
The ideal role of marketing was articulated 60 years ago. How close to the ideal have we come by now? The growing number of chief marketing executives reflects the increasing importance companies attach to marketing. Yet the average tenure of a chief marketing officer (CMO) is three and a half years, well below that of the typical CEO. Both the prevalence of the CMO position and its precariousness give rise to the question: Has marketing realized the vision to which its adherents have long aspired? For more than 60 years, marketers have had a clear vision of the ideal role of marketing, which consists of two core ideas. The second fundamental idea is that marketing decisions should be based on a solid understanding, supported by hard data, of target customers and other stakeholders. To answer this question, we turned to the IBM 2011 Global CMO Study, consisting of face-to-face, hour-long interviews with more than 1,700 CMOs from 64 countries and 19 industries.