• Marketing Mag Website

  • Marketing Blogs

by Geoffrey McDonald Bowll

on Mar 21

Guerrilla Guide: E-marketing

Advertise with us

It’s here, right around you, washing you forward. You, as a professional marketer, are as wedded to e-marketing as your feet are to comfortable shoes. We have simply moved on, taken e-marketing on like we took on mobile phones. Doing business via a machine and Bluetooth is life now. When was the last time you sent a memo via snail mail? Did your banking at the branch? Shopped by pot luck, not after internet search?

I view e-marketing like the big bang theory. I see no trends, no directions. Everything is developing so fast it’s more a matter of observing the cloud edges expanding, with us surfing on it.

Web, phones, TVs, radios, emailing, SMSing, sending you clips, sounds, ads, into your car, house, train seat, on your fridge, on your ear, seducing you, educating you, pumping you, scaring you, enveloping you.

It’s fabulous fun when you get down to basics. I can now have a thought and in minutes have researched it enough to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Anything from where to meet a friend, to what to wear or how well things will wear. I’m constantly thrilled by the daily advances.

Soon we’ll be living in a 35-millimetre version of Second Life. All your PC and phone systems will be open online – quality cameras sending you quality images of whatever thing/person you want to see and talk to. And shopping online in any of these worlds.

On that note, virtual life gaming has already got its grip on many. Take the above mentioned Second Life, with a following of 4,424,419 residents as at March 2007, and a following of 7,198,548 residents as at June 2007; almost a 50 percent increase in three months… With US$1,664,868 spent in the last 24 hours, there is some serious value in the game. Why else would giants like Adidas and Nissan have invested?

Speaking of big brands, how do you defend them? What do you do when you stumble across a blog post slamming you? With 87 percent of consumers busy researching online the product they’re about to buy in a traditional store environment, and lots of them blogging when things go wrong, the success of the sale is pretty dependent on your online media and your management of opinion.

Recently Engadget wrote a story saying both Apple’s iPhone and Leopard OS were to be delayed. The info came from what appeared to be an email on Apple’s internal mail server. The result was $4 billion knocked off Apple’s share value in half an hour. Apple was forced to issue a denial and the stock recovered, but it’s an indication of the power of blogging.

But, for all its scary promise and the likely smashing of status quos, e-marketing is, without any shadow of a doubt, absolute marketing Utopia.

  • Article links
  • Article links

Be the first to have your say...

To have your say, login at the top of the page or register free and start commenting.