In the 1970s, Philip Kotler famously defined the basic principles of marketing as the 4Ps — Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Underlying the 4Ps was that consumer usage of products was a bundle of physiological needs and psychological wants.
While, at a basic level, consumers knew what they needed to do to fulfil physiological needs, their nuances and the psychological wants were areas where marketing had to step in to offer consumers a complete solution. Following this train of thought, it was posited that the underlying consumer behaviour followed a continuum whose stages were Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action, or AIDA.
In practice, the combination of the 4Ps and AIDA translated into creating consumer memories of brands that could fulfil the their needs and wants, optimising the availability of the brand and price-points and hence, enabling them to acquire the product. Marketers thus continually aimed to exploit the informational inequality between them and the consumers. Therefore, a brand which was widely advertised had an advantage over one that was not, and among brands widely advertised, the product’s availability made a critical difference to market share, and so on.
Different ballgame
Digital marketing upsets this paradigm completely.
The physicality of a product is still required as it still is analogue. However, digital technologies have disrupted pricing, distribution, and promotion models. In this environment, what should drive marketing? Here are the operating paradigms of digital marketing:
On command communication: On the web, consumer memory is not a pre-requisite because ‘search’ is only a click away. Therefore, consumer attraction is determined by the primacy in search results and not consumer memory. Consumers on the web want communication when they need it.
The needs vary across various behavioural stages and devices. Communication that is not matched to these needs is ignored as vapour-ware. For example, consider a search on a mobile device for restaurants around lunch time. Chances are that search results that rave about cuisine in a particular restaurant will be ignored in favour of a restaurant that is in the neighbourhood of the device from which the search query was raised.
At a different time, though, the reviews of restaurants would be important. Thus, information needs vary when the consumer is sorting between options and when they actually want to make a purchase. The consumer will ignore communication that does not recognise the nuance and is not tailored to the decision framework.
In order to do this, web communication needs to take into account the underlying purpose of the search and the action intended to be taken from it, while crafting the information to be supplied. In the restaurant example, therefore, a search for a restaurant from a mobile device around lunch-time suggests that the searcher is probably looking for a restaurant to dine at and, hence, there is an added preference for locational information rather than the rating of the cuisine.
Gratify, don’t just communicate: Online consumers seek instant gratification; and gratification is experienced. Understanding what constitutes gratification, and delivering that experience is the ‘wow’ factor in web success. Gratification can be in many forms — a demonstration of how things work, a reference to the user’s ‘personal’ needs, or even a presentation that is different and engaging. Gratification can also come from giving the users a sense of accomplishment; a sense of control, or making things easy for them.
For example, when people have to fill in a long form, a clear tracker of how much has been accomplished or how the information collected is going to help the user would go a long way in making sure people don’t drop off because of sheer boredom while filling the form.
Enable two-way communication: Web communication, for the most part, is being sought by the consumer — whether it is via search or a click on display advertising. Thus, unlike most other marketing communication — where the information is being received involuntarily — consumption of web communication is ‘active’. Quite naturally, it follows that web communication should be participative and complementary rather than intrusive and disruptive.
Internet communication is touted for its interactivity. However, what is often unrealised is that, unless there is a reason to interact, browsers are not going to connect. Accordingly, planning an interaction is a critical function of creating content for the Internet.
Use multiple touch-points: The web is no longer a single, monolithic medium analogous to conventional mass media. Instead, it is an eco-system that provides opportunities for proprietary communication, both on a stand-alone basis and also by making use of other platforms. Thus, brand websites, social media networks, content sharing platforms and aggregators are only some of the communication outlets that make for a complete web strategy.
Continuous optimisation is the key to web success: Web communication, with its unique blend of real-time measurability, quick turnaround, and low unit cost, allows for continually tweaking the communication framework to maximise return on investment.