360 degree Marketing

360 degree Marketing is all about creating a unique brand philosophy. It’s a way we merge our left brain rationale with our right brain creativity to nurture or establish a story around your brand targeted at all touch points of your consumers. Whether you're a business-to-business player or a clicks-and-mortar partner, or you're just trying to win your strong customer loyalty, the first and, probably, best step for you to take is to dig into your history. May be you have a golden store house somewhere that can be used to create your full 360-degree branding. A story that will keep your customers connected to you.

360 degree marketing is actually the evolution of "cross-channel" marketing - less about media integration and more about a consumer-centric media strategy. It not only includes a heavy online component, but also television, radio, print, events and other offline media.

The Online part of this holistic marketing strategy aims at engaging experiences to both educate and excite consumers through creative utilization of internet and mobile marketing space – interactive website, SMS and On-line Gaming (remember the STORY I mentioned earlier). However, the challenge here being designing a piece of creative that will work within the context of highly divergent media environments and managing these divergent media as well.

In today's market, consumers' self-service access to information means that messages must be consistent and coherent. Great creative is only a small piece of the puzzle. And there are clear signs that marketers are rising to the challenge of managing the complexity of the world and delivering much sought after accountability back to the board in the process.

Without doubt, 360 degree marketing is challenging: it is hard to keep track of creative work, oversee increasing numbers of agencies and ensure messaging is consistent and up-to-date across the board. And it cannot be managed effectively using the poor tools and processes still endemic across marketing departments.

Nonetheless, turning away from 360 degree marketing is no more an option.

For more information, please visit www.thesmartideas.in or send me an email at susmita@thesmartideas.in

Interactive Marketing - who is the customer?

Marketers are accustomed to taking a generational look at their customers in order to find out the most fitting media mix, creative treatment, and call-to-action. This analysis matters even more for those who are in interactive marketing. Young consumers (Gen Yers and millennials) interact with digital media in a fundamentally different way than their older siblings, parents, and grandparents. Here is a closer look at Interactive Marketing:

· Gen Y is redefining the future of interactive marketing. Gen Yers internalize technology like no other generation -- giving more credence to investments in interactive channels. Compared with other adults, they're more than twice as likely to be Creators of original content (31% versus 14%) and Joiners of social networks (54% versus 22%). Like all adults, they regularly use portals for email and search but are more likely to tap other portal resources, like calendars (18% versus 11%) and video search (18% versus 7%). There are reports available on these from Forrester - The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2008 and Benchmark 2008: Gen Y Comes Of Age -- both must reads for any interactive marketers who needs quantitative insights to plan campaigns and grow the overall digital budget.

· Teens multitask more than ever. Anyone with a 16-year-old knows that, at this age, relationships eclipse almost everything. So it should come as no surprise that young consumers, ages 12 to 17, engage in all sorts of social activities while engaging with traditional media channels. Did you know that younger teens multitask more with video games while older teens are more likely to multitask while listening to music and interacting with their peers? Both groups have a tendency to multitask while doing homework (sorry teachers!).

· Social media requires new rules of engagement. Since young consumers -- with their different expectations -- love social media, marketers must become fluent in the language of these tools. In the case of blogs, marketers must answer the questions, "Will we allow posts that criticize our products?" and "Do we want our customers talking about our competitors on our blog?" With desktop and Web widgets -- much more popular with youth than adults -- the question is: "How can we leverage widgets for marketing purposes?"


For Those Of You With Other Customer Segments
Not all of you market to millennials or Gen Yers -- exclusively or even primarily. There are marketing tactics that appeal to other generations. For example, mobile email has specific appeal to Gen X (the average age of consumers who use mobile email at least monthly is 37). Marketers can ready their email programs by asking subscribers about their mobile preferences and understanding how email renders on mobile devices.