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Wunderman Defines The Age of Influence Marketing
Posted by Shar VanBoskirk on November 15, 2007
Mark Taylor followed Jaap by discussing a new take on Wunderman's long-term strategic approach to relationship marketing. Specifically, he mentioned marketers must acknowledge the shift to "The age of influence marketing" by embracing two new channels:
1) The Channel of Me and 2) The Channel of Us
Both channels actually leverage the *consumer* as a marketing vehicle as well as as a target audience.
In response to audience questions about how to best prepare for this shift, Mark asserted guidance Forrester supports as well: "Listen to your customers, and participate in the communities that they use." He also encouraged marketers to think about leveraging new technologies (blogs, podcasts, online communities) into existing CRM or loyalty strategies. His belief (and mine, frankly) is that CRM and "influence marketing" should not be separate efforts. Loyalty works when you increase the engagement your customers have with you by talking (and listening) to them in any of the channels they use with you.
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Comments
re: Wunderman Defines The Age of Influence Marketing
This is quite provocative.There is currently still a WIDE chasm between the customer and advertisers and/or marketers -- and some companies/organizations believe they "ought to" act as intermediaries. However, as Wunderman seems to argue: there is no reason why this is actually necessary. Customers and producers can interact DIRECTLY in forums designed for exactly this purpose. There are some intriguing examples where such "frontiers" are already being developed (I don't know why, but the baby.com site/community springs to mind as a good example of this)....
re: Wunderman Defines The Age of Influence Marketing
There are some amateur internet marketers that think about renting domain names for promoting their sites. Well honestly it’s a bad plan but it also can be a good business idea.