How to Define New Marketing? Is It Really New?

Amazon has changed the way we buy books a decade ago. Now they are trying to change the way we buy electronics. Is it time for you to market smarter?

Is the Internet, it's use and our behavior changing enough to change the way we market? Marketers look at the younger generation to see how they behave and how things change. Usually this predicts what will happen in the future. Marketers are also interested in the use of the Internet to become more effective. So is there enough change to call marketing with the Internet "NEW MARKETING"?

The idea of "New Marketing" just started to ferment in my head about two years ago. I tried to explain a product manager what he can do with a wiki. He was vaguely familiar with Wikipedia as a place to get information. But he didn't realize that all that content came from a large number of independent unpaid volunteer "experts". I tried to make an analogy to the software world. But the message was not getting across. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that understanding a technology is one thing. Benefiting from it, is a bigger step.

What is "new marketing"? My definition is using current tools to do old tasks better, OR doing new things that could not be done before. -- For example, with Blogs, one can post any kind of opinion, idea or information article without the need to pay for the channel (newspapers, fliers, newsletters and magazines.) For a long time, a marketer's job was to get things into the channel, in B2B the trade press. There was the whole world of advertising, PR and collateral creation and dissemination. Notice, how the Internet changed the way we perceive the "channel" in a short time, the trade press changed because of independent web sites and blogs (approximately 1995 to 2002). Now magazines write about blogs not the other way around. This switch can be attributed to the wide range of information and specialization of blogs and their ability to keep current. Besides providing much more information, the content is searchable, referenceable, and can be linked to related information easily. Again, technology changes many things and on a fundamental level, this is not a new phenomena.

It seems to me that very few managers and executives in marketing are using blogs. Marketing people always have things to say. They love to talk to customers that know their product. They love to talk to developers that create new products. They love to talk to researchers with new technologies. They love to talk to sales people about what is going on with the "market". They love to talk to market researchers about "statistics" - what is going on "big picture" ... OK, enough with "they love to talk ..." - you get the point.

This brings up the final point in this post. If you are ahead of the competition with the use of the "new" tools (I call them current tools) you can be ahead of the pack and set a direction in your own domain. New marketing is doing things that were done before better. It's also about beating the competition without more resources. It's about being smart and pushing the envelope of tool use to your benefit. For the first time in a long time you can benefit from new technology, new way of doing things and new market behavior: DON'T WAIT - MARKETS DO NOT WAIT FOR ANYONE