Noh Review on Marketing - August 31, 2012

Harvard Business Review "Marketing Is Dead" by Bill Lee

Overview: This article discusses how the traditional marketing (advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications) is not as effective any more. The author suggests peer influence and community-oriented marketing which fit better into the current trend.

Key Lessons:

• Buyers often get their information from other sources, such as the Internet, word-of-mouth and customer reviews. The current social media trend has made the traditional marketing communications irrelevant and ineffective. Consumers are less influenced by the traditional marketing methods these days because there's no place for traditional marketing in their purchasing decision.
• Extending traditional marketing logic into the world of social media does not work. For example, the effects of marketing on Facebook are controversial.
• Peer-influence-based, community-oriented marketing has a better chance of creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.
• Community Marketing: As a consumer, you are more likely to trust what your neighbours or friends have to say than salespeople or corporate website content. Accordingly, you should focus on aligning your company's social media efforts with community-oriented buying experience.
• Peer-Influence-based Marketing: Get customer influencers to talk positively about your products. 
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) shouldn't only be based on the money that the customer pays you through his purchases. You should look at the potential value of that customer, including his social status, influence, power and the size of his network. 
• Reward the best customer advocates and influencers with social capital, such as reputation, access to new knowledge and larger affiliation networks instead of traditional cash rewards or discounts.
• Florida Teen Tobacco Case: In order to reduce the teen smoking rate, the State of Florida got influential customer advocates (cool teens who were student leaders or athletes) to deliver the message. Instead of pushing the traditional warning message, which consisted of the critical health problems caused by smoking, they utilized people who had the most influence on teen smokers. As a result of the peer influence, teen smoking in Florida dropped by nearly half between 1998 and 2007.

Article: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketing_is_dead.html