This week there was an interesting debate around P&G CEO - Bob McDonald's comment. He had mentioned that:

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions.”

The word  "free" had raised a lot of eyebrows and threatened many on the future of advertising & marketing services business models. He was almost  saying that digital is the new mass market and that P&G does not have to pay big bucks to catch the attention  & mindspace of  such consumers, which they normally end-up spending for their brands offline. 

While I agree with him - some platforms will have to be leveraged where millions of consumers are already there in the digital market place, other marketing technologies need to be identified, invested and nurtured very carefully as most of these will increasingly become fragmented as more disruptive marketing technologies emerge in the years to come.

In fact I hold a contrarian view  that everything will not be free but I see technology marketing creating a new model of marketing spending - micro investing & budgeting - A lot of small budgets will have to apportioned intelligently across mutiple-technologies which can help marketing meet its brand objectives! Instead of a bazooka approach, it will be a stealth-gun method.

As I see the future, many new technologies will keep coming-up and world of technology marketing is going to see many disruptive innovations - by way of customer engagment technologies, customer experience platforms, payment technologies, BIG data & Analytics etc.. Today, it might be the facebook, google+ , twitter etc. and tomorrow it might be Pintrest, Instagram, some kind of a 3D software game etc.

The question really is how should brands decide which of these technologies do they need to invest and grow their marketing spends on? When we interact with many companies & their marketing departments, we do find them adopting marketing technology basis "flavour-of-the-season" approach.

1. Many a times, there is a need to adopt more depth to their thinking on how these technologies can leverage their current marketing strategies
2. Also, they need to evaluate and prioritize them from a host of options available to them but need to see which ones amongst them has a best-fit match to their marketing objectives.
3. They must refrain from having a herd mentality basis the buzz some of these technology marketing platforms create and start to adopt them without any framework or approach
4. Given they have limited resources and time to invest, it is important to debate & agree with all their marketing partners - both internal & external on how it will help achieve brand KPIs
5. Also, CIO & CMO will have to start working very closely as many of these technologies will link many of the company's internal departments like never before.

It was interesting to read Brian Solis  blog about the same topic and he had an interesting infographic which many of the CMOs can adopt as they evaluate and adopt many of these disruptive technologies for marketing:

It is important for CMOs to invest and back the right marketing technologies. They must carefully evaluate & measure the brand-fit & marketing objectives against each of them.

I was reading a post by Seth Godin on embracing lifetime value. He mentions in his post on the value of a two year contract for AT& T or Verizon as worth as more than $ 2000 in lifetime value of a customer to them. And he writes asking companies and professionals to embrace this thinking.

It's funny and I fail to understand how many companies don't understand this and still continue to acquire new customers by extending significantly higher promotional freebies than to their existing customers. The question really is, if am an existing customer, should I not expect better renewal privileges than a new customer rather than go to a new service provider?

This experience happened to me last week, when I tried to renew my broadband account of Tata Indicom, a leading ISP in India. I have been their customer  for over a decade now! They are currently running a new customer acquisition program, where new customers get 3 months of broadband free plus one month( T&C incl.) and a laptop sweepstake thrown in!  When I enquired, if there was anything of similar value, they did not have anything to offer for me to renew!! It made sense to let the existing relationship die and start a new relationship afresh!

The key here is designing and extending a customized tariff plan to such customers. It starts with the following steps:

1. Bring a culture a "customer-driven pricing" into the company. Rather than think pricing only for unknown customers, they should think pricing for known customers too. 
2. Banks have perfected this for years with credit scores driven differential pricing for customers. Similar thinking need to be extended to such service-driven businesses too. They should bring customer value-score driven pricing to existing customers.
3. Value scores can be built very easily.They know their vintage, usage, approx monetary value, cost-to-serve etc. to them as subscribers but they fail to take account of the relationship customers share with them. 
4. Online recharge and newer channels of customer interaction provides an excellent opportunity to bring this differential pricing to execution as they can really customize the pricing offers.

CMO council has come-up with an interesting report that many marketers have faced as consumers themselves - irrelevant communication!  Many of these marketers talk about it but do nothing about it for their own brands or products. Here are some startling facts to think about:

• While 64 percent of consumers say promotional offers dominate both the email and traditional mail they receive, only 41 percent view these as must-read communications.
• 91 percent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 percent are driven to brand defection because the messages are simply not relevant.
• The threat of customer churn and disconnection intensifies as 41 percent of consumers say they would consider ending a brand relationship due to irrelevant promotions.
• An additional 22 percent say they would definitely defect from the brand!
• Nearly three quarters of consumers have received promotions for products they have previously purchased from the company
• 73 percent of consumers would be open to receiving print statements if mailed materials were recyclable or part of a sustainability program
• Nine out of ten consumers open monthly bills delivered via traditional mail, compared to 72 percent who open bills delivered via email
• When given the opportunity to choose, 51 percent of consumers prefer to receive product or service promotions via traditional mail while 44 percent prefer email.

It's really true esp.for myself  as a customer(as the report highlights)- I have seen many companies calling me to buy the product when am already their customer!

There is a need for marketers to add a relevance filter to their customer management process. It's high time they start integrating the channels of customer interaction & communication to make this happen.