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

“Insumers” – the new market segment

In US, ~ 23 million people run business from their home, while ~ 10% “telecommute” from their home with their employers sitting across the globe. In India, the numbers could be interesting as well, particularly when lots of companies are allowing their employees to work from their home in order to save precious fuel, electricity, or simply to allow more work-life balance, or during maternity / paternity leaves.

These telecom users have very distinct communication requirements since they are using these services for both personal and official uses, and there could be a good opportunity on the part of the telecom cos, or ISPs, to customize offerings to such users. The “Insumers”, as I would like to call them, since they are not “con”summers, are growing slowly but steadily into new market segment and service providers who can customize offerings, keeping in mind their specific requirements, could very well reap the benefits of an innovative first mover.

To create a market value for this “insumer” segment, the telecom companies need to focus on having a dedicated insumer product strategy with the right mix of product offering, service features, etc keeping in mind the very unique home users.

The insumers could eventually turn out to be an attractive marketing messaging board for the business world.