Almost everything marketers learned 10 or more years ago is way too labor intensive, which means it's costly. Let's look at an oft-discussed marketing task: brand building. Groundbreaking innovation management tools like Spigit and Bright Idea do the brand building blocking and tackling faster, better and cheaper than we ever could in the good old days. Creativity is no longer the exclusive domain of marketing and advertising types. Many marketers are learning that some of the best creative ideas for a product or brand don't come from agencies...they come from within the company. Yes, a company's rank-and-file employees in Engineering, Operations, Purchasing, Sales and other functions are loaded with creative marketing ideas. Up until recently it's been cumbersome to poll employees. More importantly the perceived risk in not assigning the task to outsiders (agencies, et. al.) has been high enough to discourage an internal brand-building process. The two new tools I mentioned have come up with ingenious ways of collecting inter-company info and massaging it into brand building roadmaps. In addition, social media is already starting to obsolete traditional, cumbersome market research . If these tools do such a great job of leading the brand building process how much longer will the world need as many brand building experts as we have today? The demand for great marketing will never diminish...however the demand for marketing labor, especially the non-current type, is already sliding downhill.
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