Posted by Frances Laing on Wednesday 18 November 2009
Adaptive Brand Marketing
This new trend in marketing is being discussed everywhere this month - but does it really have any new thinking?
I've been sent this week a number of articles and links regarding a new report about to be published by Forrester Research on Adaptive Marketing. I'm always interested to find out more about the latest in marketing thinking, but I'm challenged with this concept to know whether there really is any new thinking, or whether this is just marketing best practice at work.
The idea behind Adaptive Marketing is about marketers reacting quickly within their environments to align the goals of consumers and brand, within the aim of maximising return on equity. Marketers need to become much leaner and quicker in their activities and reaction times - that almost goes without saying, and I couldn't agree more. Certainly, as a supplier, we work to ensure that we are as effective as possible without unnecessary overheads, but staying true to both the core needs of consumers and the commercial objectives of a client.
However, is this really a new concept? Is this not really just about marketers understanding their consumers (one of the basics they teach you on day 1 in Marketing School), and then ensuring that their communication strategy and products (development, delivery etc) are aligned with needs and wants. I do appreciate, without question, that there is need to understand and adapt to a technology environment too, and in this day and age, this becomes ever more challenging. Just as you feel you've understood The Next Big Thing, there is Another Big Thing, which questions everything you thought you knew.
As far as I'm concerned, I think that consumer understanding should be at the heart of every piece of marketing, big or small, but perhaps by forcing a quicker and more agile reaction, marketing needs to be able to work within the whole organisation to manage this speed of change. Investment in marketing must be re-assessed against this constantly changing environment, allowing enough flexiblity for marketing to operate, but still meeting commercial requirements in terms of ROI. I think that companies need to consider their processes throughout an organisation to see if they can manage this adaptive approach (or good marketing, as I like to think of it). For me, again though this is still aligned with good business practices in general - creating a lean, mean fighting machine.
If you'd like us to take a look at your marketing approach, and assess your levels of flexibility, then please do get in touch. Perhaps together we can come up with our own terminology for the future of marketing!