New Rules of the Marketing Environment

Part of capturing consumer attention is being visible where the customer will find the brand—and that, too, is becoming increasingly difficult. “Technology has become integral to the lives of consumers,” said Samsung CMO Ralph Santana at CES. The Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) recent findings support his point, showing that one in five U.S. adult consumers—especially those ages 25 to 34—now engage in mobile commerce. Another study estimated mobile commerce sales at more than $3.4 billion last year, leading MMA Vice President of Market Intelligence Peter Johnson to say, “Mobile commerce is beginning to insert itself into the mainstream of U.S. commerce.”

Add to this a projection by Infoworld’s Galen Gruman that mobility will go hands-free, voice-recognizing and wearable by 2020, and the brand environment will undoubtedly become enormously distracting and potentially chaotic. To complicate matters further, consumer awareness is building around cloud-based applications that provide nearly unlimited potential for consumers anytime, anywhere. Among the most affected by the chaos is the 77 million-strong Millennial generation, which Kiplingers described as having “cut its teeth on computers and digital media and has technology in its DNA.”

How Brands Are Establishing Themselves

Clear and convincing as the digital media and mobile consumption trends are, constantly chasing the latest of them could be wasteful, if not hazardous. Technology may be “the enabler of all that is going on,” as Santana pointed out at CES, but as one online commenter wrote of the tablet frenzy at that event, “To have a desktop computer, laptop, pad and smartphone is an awful business decision. You fragment your data into pockets on different machines and immediately become less organized.”

Facebook has mastered the challenge, becoming a social hub for 750 million people and one of the planet’s most recognizable brands, by creating an “open platform” that invites developers of devices, apps, websites and services to create the channels for an unprecedented level of content integration, cohesion and access. In today’s rapidly proliferating marketing ecosystem, that is precisely what marketers must look to achieve, because content has become the lifeblood of brands, and once-intangible brands have become the lifeblood of companies.