We are living in a digitized world, with technology being omnipresent in everyone’s lives. This presence enables marketing specialists to do great things for their brands, with the added bonus of empowering consumers. This power can lead to enhanced effects or to quick failures for marketing campaigns, depending on whether you have the appropriate consumer approach.
What is the value of the products offered for free? How much are they worth for the ones getting them? And how much do they cost for the ones giving them?
Everyone offers free things during their lifetime. One example is taking care of the family and offering them affection and attention without asking anything in exchange. Another example is represented by the society’s humanitarian actions destined to help the less fortunate. Probably not too many of us think of these gestures as “free”, but this is one of their main characteristics. The reason is obvious: society provides free care due to love and compassion.
The contrast between offline and online marketing campaigns
Due to the Digital Revolution and the constant improvement of Information Technology, marketing specialists have powerful means for reaching, observing, and convincing consumers of the value of their products and services. This leads to less expensive marketing actions with high performance, and easier to measure results, all in a shorter time-frame. But, unfortunately for marketing specialists, the world is not prepared for a full online-approach. Therefore, traditional marketing is still playing an important role in brands awareness and consumers’ buying decisions.
Benchmarking is acknowledged as being a core component of the marketing performance improvement, and its main purpose is that of assessing an organization’s strategy, products, and processes, and comparing them with those of the world’s best-in-class organizations. Benchmarking can bring several benefits to the organization, including cultural change, improved performance, better trained employees, as well as more efficient and effective marketing activities.
In the digital world, the need to better understand marketing actions has generated the apparition of a new concept: analytics. One year after Forbes proclaimed 2014 the year of the analytics, the importance of the discipline has not dropped one bit: with the ever increasing role of the digital element in our lives, marketers continue to require insights into what the impact of their campaigns is, how users respond to marketing messages, or how often websites are visited, and so on.