Psssst... See What's Hot in Marketing!
Keeping customers interested in your company requires a continual flow of new and exciting marketing strategies. Take time this month to brush up on what’s hot in marketing. Here are three trends in marketing to help get you started:
- Buzz Marketing – "Hey – come here! I want to tell you something!" This kind of conspiratorial information sharing is exactly what is behind the hot new trend of Buzz Marketing. Buzz Marketing (also called viral marketing and underground marketing) is a marketing strategy in which a small number of trendsetters in the community are targeted and enticed to sell your product for you. Successful examples of recent Buzz Marketing include models hired to ride around on Vespa Scooters and tout their praises and undercover marketers hired to buy unsuspecting bar-goers a brand new drink... For more information on Buzz Marketing, see Business Week’s July 30 Cover Story or track down a copy of the New York Times Sunday Magazine article, "Phenomenon (Buy Me)", July 15, 2001.
- Global Branding – Brand awareness is more important than ever before. With the internet inundating consumers with so many choices for every product and service, final buying decisions are becoming more influenced by brand loyalty. Global brands are defined as effective brands that have at least 20% of their sales outside of their home country. Securing global brand recognition is a guarantee for market success. But be careful, even the most well-established brands can fall – just look at Coca-Cola’s branding fiasco with a failed attempt to launch "new coke", or more recently, Ford’s debacle that began with bad press and ended with a significant loss in earnings. To learn more about global branding, see Business Week’s August 5 Cover Story "The Best Global Brands".
- Marketing to Women – According to Market-Smarter.com, an internet resource for people wanting to start their own businesses, women-owned firms provide more jobs than Fortune 500 industrial firms, and generate trillions of dollars in sales. And according to author Faith Popcorn, women own 1/3 of all firms. This means that you need to know how to market to women in order to succeed in today’s economy. Futurist Faith Popcorn’s book EVEolution asserts that because women are a powerful new force in the marketplace, there has been a shift from old-style hierarchical marketing towards a new relationship-based approach, which is more likely to open women’s pocketbooks. To find out more about the buying power of women, visit Amazon.com for information on Popcorn’s book.
For more information on how to keep your company on the cutting-edge of marketing, contact us.
— Posted 08/29/2002