The New Tenets of Marketing Plans

What are the foundations of marketing planning?

A recent request on what the technology trends are led to thinking about some core elements that now have to be a part of any discussion about marketing plans.

Mobile is the center of the experience.

• Point-Know-Buy:  Consumers will be able to find out about anything simply by pointing to it.  The trend is to understand any object, not just those with codes or embedded activation.   Great examples from trendwatching.    

• Showrooming:  in-store mobile commerce; the trend to leverage both a network (phone calls) and the Internet while standing in a store.    

• Wireless Wallet: cash and cards will be marginalized as the wallet itself pays for everything.   

 Consumption gives way to Sharing.

•  Continuation of a trend; sharable content will overtake content designed for consumption.  Time spent on Facebook is now >15% of Internet minutes.    

• Content Know Thyself: Intelligence will be built directly into content for tracking and linking;   based on personal conversations with Adobe folks. 

Marketing and CIO are Joined at the Hip.

• Digital advertising now exceeds 30% of spend; will push toward 50%.  Because we're dealing in bits – the advertising world is often a technology one first, a marketing one second.  Complexity of just display illustrated here by LUMA and simplified by PerfectMarket. 

• Contact platforms will first extend horizontally to cover channels and then move vertically up into the business.   Already seeing this with platforms moving from email to multi-channel management.

•  Marketing firms are creating 'chief marketing technology' roles that effectively join the CMO and CIO roles.

Modularity and Place Independence.

•  Stuff will simply be there.   While the cloud was originally thought of as a cost-saving alternative to the DIY Glasshouse; the unintended benefit is that content is accessible from anywhere.   From Dropbox, match from iCloud, to telematics in cars the notion of content storage as part of an app will evaporate.

•  Mashups will succumb to modules.   The open nature of APIs allowed individuals to create new things; but that doesn't always scale.  In its place will be higher-order modules that connect with a host platform. Facebook, Amazon, salesforce and Adobe all have visions of being the center of a Hub and Spoke architecture because they own a verb.  The best apps will disappear because they become part of the device.

Data Makes Decisions

•  Personalization, relevancy, and customization will be driven by the math – gone will be the sessions trying to prioritize offers.  If we can optimize a banner ad on a publisher's site for a particular set of eyes, we should be able to do it for coupons.  Real time bidding and other sophisticated analytics will be applied to flyers.     

•  Big Money from Big Data:  the ability to wrestle the sheer magnitude of data into submission, never mind gleaning insights, will be a premium.   McKinsey predicts a 50% gap in required skills by 2018.   

Guess I'll have to update those planning templates and dig out my old slide rule.