Expert interview Charles Gilbeau

Expert interview with Charles Gilbeau
Director in the Business Strategy Practice at Zyman Group

Posted on November 8, 2007 - Filed Under Innovative marketing strategies, Expert Interviews |

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1. What are your views on the future of marketing? How is it going to look like?
As a beginning perspective, I think it is useful to begin by looking at where marketing is today versus where it was in the 1960”s and 1970’s. If you look at marketing from those periods, it is very clear looking back how much it has evolved from those simpler times. I think marketing will continue to evolve so that when we look back 20 years from now today’s marketing will look just as naïve as what we see looking back to those times.

I think the biggest difference is that you will see a greater diversity in approaches to marketing driven by what works. The seeds of this are already evident today Audience fragmentation, new technologies, and new media have been the most evident catalysts leading to unprecedented experimentation in the past decade in reaching consumers. Less so evident is the influence of government regulation. Throughout the world alcohol and tobacco companies which face increasingly more restricive media environments have had no choice but to be pioneers in this area. At Zyman Group, we are working with just such a client today that is unable to use traditional media and therefore must develop and validate new approaches. Its fun…and it works!

Marketing has a built in feedback mechanism…things that work by profitably driving the growth of a business are repeated and replicated by others. Things that don’t work are abandoned by companies (and as we know all too well so will the marketers responsible for them). Recently for example, E-Bay which was a big advertiser on Google stopped and determined that they were actually getting greater effectiveness from offline marketing.

I believe the future will bring more such customized marketing models where the marketing model is an essential ingredient to the success of the business model. Just think about how Starbucks and Red Bull have been able to establish powerful brands through experiential consumer touchpoints beyond media. In the future marketers will be far less likely to reach for off the shelf solutions and will focus on the task of selling to the consumer through the best means. As you heard from Sergio in the conference, marketing innovation begins with marketer innovation.

2. How global and how local is marketing – how does it differ between the US and Europe say? Is this going to change in the future?
Here again it is useful to look where we have come from to understand where we are. In the past 20 years, global marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonalds have ried a range of approaches from very monolithic (one sight, one sound, one sell) through very centralized marketing approaches to highly localized and customized marketing through very decentralized and autonomous marketing efforts. Not surprisingly neither of the extreme approaches proved to be ideal. The latter in particular failed to leverage both the power and efficiency of having a global brand to begin with. I think you see much more of a balance today from global marketers whereby strategy is global and tactical execution is local. I don’t think you will see it move away from this balanced approach in the future.

3. Is the internet just another media we as marketers can utilize in our media portfolio? And how does it differ from the other traditional media in terms of reaching the consumer?
It is important for marketers to view the internet much more broadly than as a form of media. I tend to think of the internet foremost as a channel, secondarily as a source of buying information and thirdly as a media. To use an offline analogy, it could be used like an auto dealership, like a buyers guide, or like a billboard for the auto dealership.

The internet is already a preferred channel by many consumers for categories like travel, banking, and consumer electronics. Not only that, internet retailers are often successful in delivering higher levels of satisfaction than their off line competitors.

Consumers like to seek out information before they buy. Before the internet the choices were pretty limited beyond a trip to the local library. The internet is now continuing to fulfill a vast unmet need for consumer buying information through product reviews and efficient comparison shopping. This results in 2 big differences vs traditional media: consumers are in many cases proactively seeking out product messages in their search for information and they find the information more credible, especially if it is provided by a trusted source or expert. The implication for marketers is clear: we need to make it easy for consumers to come to us to get information.

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