New marketing paradigm

There is a lot talked about a new marketing paradigm - a new way of interacting with customers and prospects in this 21st century world.

What is the same and what is different between the old style and the new style marketing ?

What is the same
- find out what the market needs and the extent (value) of their current pain
- check what the competition offer and how/where you can beat them consistently
- develop the product/service/packaging to meet their needs and relieve the pain
- communicate so that prospects come to you (or at least are receptive to your approach)

What is different
- prospects are less influenced by supposed authorities (whether it be consumers trusting professionals less or companies being more questioning of established suppliers)
- on the other hand, prospects look to what is new in the market, and feedback from other users (e.g. via forums and blogs)
- new technology allows communications to be faster (e.g. eletronic publishing, photo messaging), from more sources (e.g. blogs, auctions) and to be more personalised (e.g. online interest groups, web search)

So the changes are more to do with the way we marketers can market rather than altering what we are trying to do. I will give some thoughts on the ways the tools have changed in a later blog.

Sales and marketing ecosystems

Interesting to note the differences between some successful ecosystems - Apple with its iPOD services does the hardware, software and services themselves, though it licenses the music, making it a very closed system. Seems to be working against the competitors, both from consumer companies and from mobile phone companies.

i-Mode succeeded in Japan because DoCoMo drove the standards for data presentation, transfer and usage on mobile phones but allowed lots of companies to contribute (content,games etc). Whereas in Europe, the mobile data ecosystem has not been encouraged to flourish in the same way.