Monday 21 September 2009

Light at the end of the tunnel

I have not written anything in the last month because in the words of a colleague - I have even got bored with myself. Don't be silly, that is not possible! But i know what they meant. I don't know whether this is a common affliction in marketing, I suspect it is.

The problem is similar to the one in the 90s when we all talked about the wonderful world of what CRM technologies would deliver. We could all talk an infinitely better game than any clients internal system would let us deliver. And even today when businesses undergo a CRM audit or CRM capability analysis, the good ones score 40% or even lower. That wouldn't even get you an A* in media studies.

The same is happening with digital. We can can create a wonderful vision of tags, cookies, virtual databases, personalised web environments and collaborative filtering (what amazon do) but delivering is a bit tricky. The frustration is the deliverable gets diluted and can be miles away from what we can do or are allowed to - unless of course you are a pure play e-commerce or your business is doing badly enough to force you to re-engineer yourself.

That i am afraid is the silver lining upbeat swing at the end of the downbeat article, some organisations have no choice but to do things differently. Lack of budget focuses the mind. However i am an optimist - eventually.

And no I am not thinking about my clients.

Only positive cheery comments please.

About Me

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United Kingdom
Just curious about marketing, psychology, economics, business, irrational behaviour, people, models, communications, advertising, market imperfections, b2b marketing. I work in the marketing communications industry for OgilvyOne.