Today there are more than 1, permutations and combinations available, with options running the gamut from different colors and portability to answering machines and programmability—as well as services. There is the further promise of optical fiber and the convergence of computers and communications into a unified industry with even greater technological choice. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the National Bicycle Industrial Company in Kokubu, Japan builds made-to-order bicycles on an assembly line.
Even newspapers that report on this technology-led move to customization are themselves increasingly customized. Faced with stagnant circulation, the urban daily newspapers have begun to customize their news, advertising, and even editorial and sports pages to appeal to local suburban readers. For all of its bandying about as a marketing buzzword, customization is a remarkably direct concept—it is the capacity to deal with a customer in a unique way.
According to quantum physics, things act differently at the micro level. Light is the classic example. When subjected to certain kinds of tests, light behaves like a wave, moving in much the way an ocean wave moves. But in other tests, light behaves more like a particle, moving as a single ball. So, scientists ask, is it a wave or a particle? And when is it which? Markets and customers operate like light and energy. In fact, like light, the customer is more than one thing at the same time.
Sometimes consumers behave as part of a group, fitting neatly into social and psychographic classifications. Other times, the consumer breaks loose and is iconoclastic. Customers make and break patterns: the senior citizen market is filled with older people who intensely wish to act youthful, and the upscale market must contend with wealthy people who hide their money behind the most utilitarian purchases.
Markets are subject to laws similar to those of quantum physics. A fad, after all, is nothing more than a wave that dissipates and then becomes a particle. Take the much-discussed Yuppie market and its association with certain branded consumer products, like BMWs. After a stage of high customer energy and close identification, the wave has broken. Having been saturated and absorbed by the marketplace, the Yuppie association has faded, just as energy does in the physical world. Sensing the change, BMW no longer sells to the Yuppie lifestyle but now focuses on the technological capabilities of its machines.
And Yuppies are no longer the wave they once were; as a market, they are more like particles as they look for more individualistic and personal expressions of their consumer energy. Of course, since particles can also behave like waves again, it is likely that smart marketers will tap some new energy source, such as values, to recoalesce the young, affluent market into a wave. And technology gives marketers the tools they need, such as database marketing, to discern waves and particles and even to design programs that combine enough particles to form a powerful wave.
Take audiocassettes, tapes, and compact discs. For years, record and tape companies jealously guarded their property. Knowing that home hackers pirated tapes and created their own composite cassettes, the music companies steadfastly resisted the forces of technology—until the Personics System realized that technology was making a legitimate market for authorized, high-quality customized composite cassettes and CDs.
Rather than treating the customer as a criminal, Personics saw a market. Today consumers can design personalized music tapes from the Personics System, a revved-up jukebox with a library of over 5, songs. Launched in , the system has already spread to more than stores. Smart marketers have, once again, allowed technology to create the customizing relationship with the customer. We are witnessing the obsolescence of advertising. In the old model of marketing, it made sense as part of the whole formula: you sell mass-produced goods to a mass market through mass media.
Ad agency staffing, research, and profitability have been affected. Three related factors explain the decline of advertising. First, advertising overkill has started to ricochet back on advertising itself. The proliferation of products has yielded a proliferation of messages: U. In an effort to bombard the customer with yet one more advertisement, marketers are squeezing as many voices as they can into the space allotted to them.
Predictably, however, a greater number of voices translates into a smaller impact. Customers simply are unable to remember which advertisement pitches which product, much less what qualities or attributes might differentiate one product from another.
Take the enormously clever and critically acclaimed series of advertisements for Eveready batteries, featuring a tireless marching rabbit. The ad was so successful that a survey conducted by Video Storyboard Tests Inc.
Batteries are not the only market in which more advertising succeeds in spreading more confusion. The same thing has happened in markets like athletic footwear and soda pop, where competing companies have signed up so many celebrity sponsors that consumers can no longer keep straight who is pitching what for whom. In , for example, Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi used nearly three dozen movie stars, athletes, musicians, and television personalities to tell consumers to buy more cola.
Or why it really mattered. The more advertising seeks to intrude, the more people try to shut it out. Last year, Disney won the applause of commercial-weary customers when the company announced that it would not screen its films in theaters that showed commercials before the feature. More recently, after a number of failed attempts, the U. This concern over advertising is mirrored in a variety of arenas—from public outcry over cigarette marketing plans targeted at blacks and women to calls for more environmentally sensitive packaging and products.
The new marketing requires a feedback loop; it is this element that is missing from the monologue of advertising but that is built into the dialogue of marketing. The feedback loop, connecting company and customer, is central to the operating definition of a truly market-driven company: a company that adapts in a timely way to the changing needs of the customer.
Apple is one such company. Its Macintosh computer is regarded as a machine that launched a revolution. At its birth in , industry analysts received it with praise and acclaim. But in retrospect, the first Macintosh had many weaknesses: it had limited, nonexpandable memory, virtually no applications software, and a black-and-white screen. For all those deficiencies, however, the Mac had two strengths that more than compensated: it was incredibly easy to use, and it had a user group that was prepared to praise Mac publicly at its launch and to advise Apple privately on how to improve it.
In other words, it had a feedback loop. It was this feedback loop that brought about change in the Mac, which ultimately became an open, adaptable, and colorful computer. And it was changing the Mac that saved it. Months before launching the Mac, Apple gave a sample of the product to influential Americans to use and comment on.
It trained over 4, dealer salespeople and gave full-day, hands-on demonstrations of the Mac to industry insiders and analysts. Apple got two benefits from this network: educated Mac supporters who could legitimately praise the product to the press and invested consumers who could tell the company what the Mac needed. The dialogue with customers and media praise were worth more than any notice advertising could buy. It is accomplished through experience-based marketing, where companies create opportunities for customers and potential customers to sample their products and then provide feedback.
It is accomplished through beta sites, where a company can install a prelaunch product and study its use and needed refinements. Experienced-based marketing allows a company to work closely with a client to change a product, to adapt the technology—recognizing that no product is perfect when it comes from engineering.
This interaction was precisely the approach taken by Xerox in developing its recently announced Docutech System. Seven months before launch, Xerox established 25 beta sites. From its prelaunch customers, Xerox learned what adjustments it should make, what service and support it should supply, and what enhancements and related new products it might next introduce. The goal is adaptive marketing, marketing that stresses sensitivity, flexibility, and resiliency.
Sensitivity comes from having a variety of modes and channels through which companies can read the environment, from user groups that offer live feedback to sophisticated consumer scanners that provide data on customer choice in real time.
Flexibility comes from creating an organizational structure and operating style that permits the company to take advantage of new opportunities presented by customer feedback. Resiliency comes from learning from mistakes—marketing that listens and responds. The line between products and services is fast eroding. What once appeared to be a rigid polarity now has become a hybrid: the servicization of products and the productization of services.
When General Motors makes more money from lending its customers money to buy its cars than it makes from manufacturing the cars, is it marketing its products or its services?
When IBM announces to all the world that it is now in the systems-integration business—the customer can buy any box from any vendor and IBM will supply the systems know-how to make the whole thing work together—is it marketing its products or its services? The point applies just as well to less grandiose companies and to less expensive consumer products.
Take the large corner drugstore that stocks thousands of products, from cosmetics to wristwatches. The products are for sale, but the store is actually marketing a service—the convenience of having so much variety collected and arrayed in one location. Or take any of the ordinary products found in the home, from boxes of cereal to table lamps to VCRs.
All of them come with some form of information designed to perform a service: nutritional information to indicate the actual food value of the cereal to the health-conscious consumer; a United Laboratories label on the lamp as an assurance of testing; an operating manual to help the nontechnical VCR customer rig up the new unit. There is ample room to improve the quality of this information—to make it more useful, more convenient, or even more entertaining—but in almost every case, the service information is a critical component of the product.
In marketing education programs, students learn the basics of business communication, consumer behavior, and market research analysis, among other topics. Through hands-on projects and extensive research, students gain an in-depth understanding of how to analyze data of existing marketing campaigns and use consumer behavior profiles to adapt marketing efforts for maximum value. Marketing degree programs also offer a highly creative, innovative environment, giving students all the skills they need to craft effective messages that reach their target audiences.
Marketing students are encouraged to explore creative ways to deliver their message for the greatest impact and return on the investment of marketing dollars. They learn to identify new content distribution channels and to adapt the tone and tenor of a campaign to be more relevant to a target audience. These skills are transferrable to the business world and are essential to launching or managing a successful article marketing campaign. Marketers must be able to quickly analyze campaign performance and either modify the content or the overall strategy on the fly to deliver better returns.
See also Marketing Data Analyst. Understanding how and why consumers seek out specific content allows article and social media professionals to focus on sourcing content specifically relevant to those needs. By identifying specific market segments and their desired content, marketing professionals can compile trusted sources of content for each vertical niche.
This allows marketers to develop a delivery schedule to provide consumers with timely, relevant content that keeps the business moving forward. To learn more about how a marketing degree can help you achieve success in article marketing, request information from schools offering marketing degrees. All Types of Marketing Article Marketing. Last Updated: November 12, Who employs article marketers?
What kinds of customers are effectively marketed to with article marketing? How is an article marketing plan developed and employed? What types of careers work with article marketing strategies? How can a marketing school help you succeed? Articles used for marketing typically fall into one of three categories, Articles used for blogs or websites Articles used for press releases Articles submitted to article directories for distribution.
Here are 4 of the most important factors in a successful article marketing campaign: Keyword search optimization. Thoroughly research keywords that fit the needs of your targeted niches. Find keywords or phrases containing unique keywords, and make sure that competitors use the keywords. This ensures that the keyword actually has value. Develop article content. Develop article content that addresses the personality and needs of your niche market consumers.
Articles can be developed in-house or outsourced to freelance writers for a fee. In both cases, relevant content is the key component. Submit the article. Placing summaries of your articles on product or service pages of your site is also considered as an essential practice for effective article marketing. It is essential to add Social Media Sharing buttons on your articles, as this will optimize the presence of your articles on relevant Social Media channels. You need to find out article directories, so you can get the best-suited article submission sites where you can publish your articles.
You should find out the blogs that are related to your market niche and famous for guest posting. You should inquire about the blog owners if they accepted guest posts. If yes, then you should write high-quality blogs for their site and post them with your bio and link.
People who are employed in the marketing department are also supposed to plan well for the article marketing campaigns, as they are assigned different agendas of such kinds of marketing to fulfill.
On the other hand, a marketing coordinator is assigned a team that works on its daily task of creating content for marketing. They know every detail about the audience from where they can be located majorly and where the marketing will be most useful to gain the relevant views that can ultimately get converted.
They analyze and strategize, keeping the audience at the center, as they are the ones being targeted with the article marketing campaigns. Even though article marketing is a way of improving the numbers only, still, when it comes down to its benefits, there are some key features of it. Online article marketing helps in effectively improving organic search results; the following are the ways of how it is done:. There are so many start-ups evolving that need recognition; people starting their careers as bloggers require promotion to help them build their community on social media sites likes Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
All of these promotions and acquiring recognition is possible not only because of article marketing but mainly due to it. The strategies are made keeping in mind the audience that would be suitable to target. The main focus is to have as many views and public traffic on marketed websites as possible. This not only increases the demand but also shoots up the sales.
How significant do you find article marketing campaigns for your business? Update us with your views in the comments below.
0コメント