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Executives from Alaska Air, John Wiley & Sons, and Vans discuss how digital and customer expectations are changing their approach to marketing.

Driving marketing forward

Yvonne Genovese kicked off the Gartner Digital Marketing Conference reminding attendees that, in marketing, old and new are colliding: “The theory of ‘right’ [right customer/message/time/channel] is still here,” the Gartner group VP said, adding the caveat that the explosion of channels has many marketers challenged to get “right” right. “You have to find customers where they’re living,” she added. In many cases, she said, this means rethinking how marketing is organized, adding or changing roles, and learning new skills.

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Avanade’s CMO asks and answers questions troubling many marketing leaders today.

Winning the marketing race

“Everything is changing from a marketing standpoint,” Avanade CMO Stella Goulet said when we met to talk trends. “The fastest way to get to a mass [B2B] audience in the 1980s was the fax machine. Now, there are so many choices and so marketing is so complicated.”

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Consumers make irrational purchase decisions; help them choose you.

compass and maps

A friend once said to me, “When it comes to shoes, ‘need’ is a relative term.” We’ve all experienced a similarly loose definition of need when making purchase decisions.

As Shar VanBoskirk, a Forrester Research VP and principal analyst, pointed out in her keynote at Forrester’s 2015 Forum for Marketing Leaders: Most choices are the triumph of “something” over reason.

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The exaggerations in marketing are, well, overly exaggerated.

shooting star

It’s not just the holiday season. It’s also predictions season, and I’ve spent the past few weeks immersed in reading predictions for 2015, 2016, and beyond. One trend I’ve seen within those predictions is the sweeping pronouncement of the end of X; for example, the complete demise of mass marketing within the next five years.

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