With the advent of the internet, mobile communications and digital interactive Television (iTV), consumers have ensured that at almost every moment of their waking lives they have the opportunity to interact, participate, decide, and provide feedback. You’d think that this would be a marketer’s dream but unfortunately, marketing in many companies still remains a nebulous soft function. The ‘build it and they will come’ attitude to multi-million pound marketing campaigns appears to prevail in too many organisations.

Many companies that have used internet and mobile advertising claim that they have been disappointed with the results.

Executives still stuck within the traditional media paradigm have yet to understand the full value of interactive advertising and immediate customer response. In addition, they rarely have the necessary information infrastructure in place to capture and extract value from interactive campaigns and the customer feedback they provide.

There are a number of companies however, that are emerging as veritable maestros of interactive marketing. They see the opportunity and take advantage of the potential of each channel to add value.

They embrace the digital customer, and they know exactly what roles the internet, the mobile, and digital TV play in their customers’ lives, as well as how and when these technologies are used.

These companies understand that traditional media, internet, mobile telephony, and iTV provide complementary marketing channels that can be used to influence customer behaviour at the different stages of the purchasing cycle.

Domino’s Pizzas

A good example is Domino’s Pizza which is deliberately associating its brand with specific content (The Simpsons, family show), at a particular time of day (dinnertime) with a highly distinctive signature ( jarring, loud sounding siren to denote heat). The campaign simultaneously creates awareness, an impulse and the opportunity to purchase. The red interactive button on the television remote allows viewers to act on their impulse immediately, minimising the opportunity to change their mind.

Dominos Pizzas

Cookies keep track of previous orders and choices and literally allow customers to have dinner delivered to their door at the touch of a button (‘same as last time?’). For Domino’s, the interactive television remote control has proven to be a magic wand. Not surprisingly, sales through online channels now reach a significant £300,000 per month from 20,000 orders.

Domino’s website let’s you order by web or by text – what’s next, telepathy?

Lastminute.com

lastminute.com

Lastminute.com is also adopting an increasingly sophisticated digital marketing programme. Through its multi-platform strategy the company has successfully achieved higher brand visibility by creating an impression of omnipresence. In addition, Lastminute.com ensured a high level of service (anytime, anywhere), and enhanced customer intimacy by targeting the right customers, at the right time. The company’s digital marketing strategy is designed around platform peak-times: internet peak-times around lunch-hour, digital TV peak-times around home/family/dinner time, and WAP/GPRS peak-times during weekend leisure time.

Being available on the most suited platform at the most promising time allows Lastminute.com to deliver highly targeted messages to tightly segmented audiences. This strategy has enabled Lastminute.com to maximise its revenue by allowing the customer to use their response mechanism of choice.

Implications for marketers

Understand the concept of the dynamic customer: static social and demographic segmentation is no longer sufficient to effectively target customers.

A customer’s propensity to purchase a product or service keeps changing.

Organisations now have media options available to them that can respond to and anticipate these changes.

To successfully utilise all available media options they have to ensure the message and desired customer response is appropriate for the medium, whilst also ensuring that the outcome meets or exceeds customer expectation. Though customers may be happy to wait 28 days for a mail order product they may not be happy to wait that long if the purchase was made on a mobile device.

Take advantage of the role that technologies play in the lives of the target audience: in order to maximize value from these new digital channels, it is critical to work with and learn from the insights they give into the different aspects of consumers’ everyday lives.

Digital channels have not changed the fundamentals of marketing in any way: capturing and keeping the customer is still what marketing is all about.

Thanks to: www.nccmembership.co.uk