This year, while the world re-awakens from its economic slumber, consider how you make decisions, take action, and interact with your consumer — from touchpoints to pricing. Marketing itself requires innovative thinking. 2011 is the year.
2. 5 mArKeTING
IdeAS for
2011
This year, while the world re-
awakens from its economic
slumber, consider how
you make decisions, take
action, and interact with
your consumer — from
touchpoints to pricing.
Marketing itself requires
innovative thinking. 2011 is
the year.
2 ANTHem’S TreNdS for 2011
3. MARKETING IDEAS
1 Build focus and flexibility.
With the world around us changing so quickly, it’s difficult to create business and marketing plans that don’t seem as if
they are being re-written every other week. In such a situation, how do you make progress? As is often said, the first step is
acknowledgement and acceptance. The second is building plans that have a long-term focus in mind - the end game - coupled
with a degree of flexibility. You need to know what parts of your plan are fixed to keep you on the road to your vision and which
can change on a dime. Build this into your planning and into your everyday management of the business.
2 Follow your consumer.
Today there are more tools than ever to get close to your consumers and develop an intimate understanding of them. Using
online tools and social media, you can “follow them,” per se, to understand their methods of communication, influences, and
motivations to purchase. Instead of coming at marketing expecting consumers to follow our brands, in today’s age it would be
more powerful to follow them, to understand their “path to purchase.” Understand what triggers their purchase journey and
understand what touchpoints are influencing them along the way. With so many touchpoints at our disposal these days, by
following your consumer you can find the critical paths along which to create dialogue and rich brand experiences.
3 Unpack the story.
When doing marketing planning and developing integrated plans, think about a campaign as if you are telling your consumer a
story. It’s like unpacking a box. What’s the outside - the first thing you want them to encounter and what will get them to take
the next step to learn more? What’s the next interaction - how does that further build the story? And, because you can’t control
where the consumer goes, think through the elements of the plot that can make your brand and the story cohesive wherever they
turn.
4 Use numbers wisely.
Data analysis should definitely be a part of business and marketing and can help us make critical decisions, from who to
target to where and how to optimize our marketing spend. But don’t put all your eggs in that basket. Business leaders need to
accept that numbers can’t make all the decisions for them and that building good, solid insight for decisions of judgment is
just as important. With a lot of marketers focusing on more numbers these days, we’d like to just wave a flag of caution and
acknowledge that judgment will always come into play.
5 Discover the new era of pricing.
With all the technologies at consumers’ fingertips to check and compare pricing while shopping online or at the shelf, the world
of pricing is going to change. What strategies are retailers going to deploy to create competitive advantage? Will it get beyond
EDLP? What are the implications for the manufacturer and your pricing strategy? Does it allow companies to take some of the
pricing power back that has been in the retailers’ hands for so long? The point here is - the pricing landscape is changing. This
is the year to learn about the implications and develop new strategies of your own.
3 ANTHem’S TreNdS for 2011