Milko Georgiev’s Blog

With the cordial help of Rich and Forts, while answering their questions on the future of marketing and communications, we managed to collect some interesting thoughts - not only my answers, but also a growing list of marketing professionals. After the break, please find my answers as well as the link to the other interviews

1. What is the place of the traditional marketing in the changing new reality?

First of all, in my humble opinion, there are no such things as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ marketing. Being more a craftsman work, marketing is a set of rules, tools and approaches to resolve the problems in the product-customer relationship. Every marketing professional with a broad vision has the opportunity to express himself using this broad range of solutions that marketing science has built over the years. However, we should not perceive any of those tools and rules as a one of God’s Commandments on Marketing. Technology, being the most rapidly changing element in our environment, has created the biggest challenge since ever commerce exists – the one-to-one relationship opportunity between sellers and buyers. This dramatic shift is changing how marketing is applied, not the marketing science itself. We’re facing new opportunities and threats in terms of research, segmentation, differentiation, positioning and communication of our products and services, but we’re not challenging the basic rules of marketing. So, at the end, my answer is – marketing has a growing and already overwhelming role in the new market reality.

2. Communication and communicating has changed. What are major new opportunities and treats?

Technological advance has created new ways and means of communication which are aimed at the individual. As a consequence marcom is facing rapid transformation from a mass to an individual model – both in terms of media mix and messages. Research then segmentation, then targeting are rapidly evolving into the profiling of the individual. From the customers’ point of view, Internet, Social Networks, Blogging and all other forms of social connectivity, personal expression and sharing have dramatically changed how sellers and customers interact. Now the voice of the unhappy is much stronger and the discontent is spreading at flu-like, viral models. We’re facing a radical fragmentation of media in terms of audience. Traditional communication is doomed if not ready to adapt to those challenges. The fragmentation of the audience has created a huge number of micro-groups, tiny networks of interest. Determining the stakeholders and focusing on how to create mutually beneficial relationship with them, transforming them into evangelists of your product – that will be the biggest challenge of marcom professionals in the upcoming years. A good success story is Apple’s road to success, especially with the launch of iPhone.

3. How the traditional media should adapt to fit the changes?

They are already adapting. It’s just a question of time that business models of media will change. IPТV, Video on Demand (VoD), time and place-shifting devices such as TiVo are completely reshaping the TV model – the King of Advertising - 30” spot – is slowly dying. RSS, social networks, social bookmarking, blogs and civic journalism are reshaping the world of newspapers and magazines. Sharing information has transformed the society into an ‘instant news, instant comment’ model. Corporate interests that were used to control and moderate media are losing its grip over news monopoly. The omnipresence of Internet on all interactive devices – PC, handhelds, TV, Set-top-boxes (STB), mobile phones – is creating a brand new type of media services – news aggregators (aggregating several flows of information into a single pipe), optimization and filtering news services (to reshape the pipe in terms of interests and type of device used). Simply broadcasting radio on the Internet is not interesting anymore – new models of personalizing streams according to tastes are the most successful ones (such as www.pandora.com, www.last.fm, www.soundpedia.com). At the end media will generate content for the individual, accumulating more and more information on his usage, buying and interest behavior. As content creators, media will have to seek reliable and accessible personal channels of distribution, as well as completely new business models in terms of marketing communications.

4. How the relationship brand-person evolves?

It will deepen. Brands are emotional expression of our needs and the enormous amount of information we use will create deeper relationships between customers and brands. Brands will evolve into a 360-degrees user experiences. Brands will be extremely dependant on stakeholders and evangelists, and communication will essentially turn into reputation management.

All interviews can be found here