While most of the impact of technology on marketing has been tactical so far, over the next decade or so there will be a major strategic transformation.
Josh Leichtung's insight:
Greg Satell in Forbes Magazine proposes the next decade of marketing will take us from:
> THE RATIONAL TO THE PASSIONATE
> MESSAGES TO EXPERIENCES
> STRATEGIC PLANNING TO ADAPTIVE STRATEGY
> HUNCHES TO SIMULATIONS
> FROM BRANDS TO PLATFORMS
This article is insightful in many ways, but gets pretty fuzzy when it comes to hunches to simulations. He claims our numbers are always wrong, backward looking, fraught with error, etc... I don't disagree, though it IS the "state of the art".
Then the author claims that we will be moving our marketing from hunches to simulations. He says, "Rather than argue the merits of a new approach in stale conference rooms, we can test them in simulated environments built from real world data."
It seems to me that you just can't have it both ways. After all, simulations are built on real world data, therefore, they are also backward looking. That said, will the simulations be BETTER predicting marketing success, perhaps. Better is often enough because profit starts to soar once your fixed costs are covered.
However, what machine simulations really won't be able to deal with (at least in the next decard or two) are:
> CURRENT MARKET CONDITIONS
> COLLECTIVE MEMORY
> CREATIVE QUALITY OF THE MESSAGE
Current market conditions are always changing. When all players are using simulations, marketing differentiation is in danger. Likewise, it would be a tall task to simulate our collective memory since comparatively very little “data” exists from the pre-internet days.
The biggest challenge I see here is the creative quality of the message. With all the simulations and adaptive strategies that will eventually be in place, it will still come down to human insight and creativity. Regardless of all our data, we still have not been able to dependably synthesize a hit song or write a compelling new story.
Though the world is definitely headed in the direction Mr. Satell projects, I believe that the creative marketing mind will still be the major differentiation, and will have the largest impact on marketing success.
What do you think?