Is traditional marketing dying?

Yes, it is. Traditional marketing is about command and control positioning, messaging, and campaigning. In this world, the vendor decides broadcasts or pushes a message to a target audience. This works particularly well with mass media vehicles such as TV, print, and radio.

The internet changes that. Your audience is now highly fragmented and difficult o reach - think of micro-media, not mass media. Your audience is now readily able to collect opinions, reviews, ratings, etc from peers - a source of information that the audience implicitly trusts more than you as a vendor. And the audience can consume information and media when, where, and how they want to - you and media companies no longer control this.

That means that traditional marketing is dying. In fact, what we do in the future might not be marketing at all.

What we should really do is build great products and then have conversations about them with our customers. Maybe we should start a movement to rename all of our Marketing Organizations to Conversation Organizations.

Traditional marketing is not dying but its certainly losing ground to areas of marketing that are more measureable and accountable. Branding will always be important but its harder to quantify its value versus lead generation and other programs and if someone has tight or decreasing budgets, they will tend to allocate as much as possible to those programs that are proven to bring in ROI and spend the "left-overs" on those activities where their impact is unknown. I think this trend will be amplified within smaller companies who have smaller budgets and greater need to pay the bills in the short term with their marketing efforts.

Rob

The greatest ROI is the result of the RIGHT combination of offline, online and DIGITAL branding (and yes those last two are mutually exclusive) that is appropriate for what you are selling.

Per Jake's earlier announcement of the complete death of offline mediums, I suggest you try preaching that to the big brands who continue to invest in all three based on what is right for the brand.

As an example, radio is still a VERY powerful medium. And I am speaking from serious, and current experience. I also do use Social Media heavily in my work, but again, Facebook, Twitter and even SEO are NOT for everyone.

Absolutely not. You still have to build a brand and while social media is definitely a vital part of that these days, you can only say so much in a 140 character Tweet.

Many Facebook and Twitter users consider commercial messaging to be a negative and do not respond positively to it going as far as blocking the messenger or removing them as a friend.

The key is to make the message fit the medium (duh) and to really explore what is going to carry the message through in words and pictures. Twitter of course offers no visual acumen.

Be sure to hire someone to craft your message who understands all these options.

Traditional media is dying only in the sense that your ideal customer profiles are no longer using them.

What Find New Customers recommends is that businesses go talk to them and learn where they find their information -- print media, television, trade shows, Twitter, search, etc. Customer preferences ought to drive media selection, not where the budget was spent last year. If customers prefer traditional media -- spend there. If not, don't waste your money.

I recommend marketers go with zero based budgets. Start with zero and justify the spending on each media channel. In these tough times, that's sound advice.

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

Absolutely not.

When you boil it down, marketing is all about changing a target market's thinking in your favor — so that they will ultimately buy more of what you're selling.

The long-proven best way to accomplish that is to put compelling, mind-changing messages in front of the target audience — and do that repeatedly (once or twice is not enough). And you need to do that in a way that enables you to control what the message says and who sees it and how many times.

Unfortunately, no social media that I know of enables the marketer to do any of the above. Which is why social media to date remains VERY WEAK as a PRIMARY marketing tool — though it's fine as a complement to "traditional" marketing tools that do enable the necessary control.

But when the mega-marketers have a big job to do they still lean on traditional marketing vehicles as their PRIMARY marketing tools — see the recent Wall St. Journal article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754804574494290698479688.html#

Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com/

There should be a strong balance between both medium. In developing countries like Pakistan, Traditional medium of Marketing is still working effectively but proactive organization use social medium as well.

I think we have to use both medium of marketing time by time.

Salman Hamid

Thanks for all the great answers. With the shift of marketing mediums leaning towards mediums where conversations can take place and where consumers can take control of the message, which traditional marketing medium do you think will suffer the most?

Which mediums are you using for your business? Which one yields the greatest ROI?

There are certain businesses which have moved online and this is the reason why traditional marketing is suffering. However, certain businesses such as Restraurants, Hotels and several others still invest heavily into traditional marketing.

Traditional marketing is not dying!
Yes there are so many new forms like facebook, twitter etc.. but thr key word here is definately.... BRANDING!

Social Media really came on the scene a couple years ago and made a big impact on the business world. I don't think traditional marketing is dying because someone invents or creates the next best thing every 5 years. I'm still curious to see where social media will truly go in the next couple years. Does it die out? Do we have to pay for services? Does something better come along? Traditional marketing will always be the core of a new business, but social media acts as an extra crunch for any business. It's free! and who doesn't like a free business tool!? Great question, Leslie!

There is no way traditional marketing is dying.

Ironically, I think its contributions are becoming more integrated, measured and evaluated than ever before. Interactive and social media are making it easier than ever before for brand marketers to create integrated marketing campaigns (IMC) that stretch across traditional marketing strategies and platforms, and online media.

Consider how many consumer marketers are using traditional marketing to drive traffic to their websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Also consider how once a prospect has engaged in a buying cycle through interactive or social media, its possible survey them to see how they got there. For many prospects, they arrived at the interactive and social media sites via traditional marketing strategies and programs. Professional sports teams, events marketers, entertainment attractions including the master of IMC campaigns, Disney, and services businesses including insurance companies all rely on traditional media to drive traffic to their interactive and social media-based channels.

Finally in the B2B markets, consider how effective Salesforce.com is with the blending of traditional marketing and interactive, social media. They are without question the most effective event marketers in enterprise software. In the book Behind the Cloud, The Salesforce.com Playbook, Marc Benioff explains that early on in the history of his company, he realized he had to make the software real to prospects. Events supported through traditional marketing were the direction he chose to go in. Today that strategy continues to be a core part of their efforts.

Link for the Benioff book on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Cloud-Salesforce-com-Billion-Dollar-Company/dp/0...

Product, Price, Promotion, Placement.

The foundations of marketing will never die. The way in which companies view these foundations have changed, but that has always been the case. The part of the marketing equation that has been most effected is promotion. Thanks to technology, this is an ever-evolving game that marketers play.

So tuned for the next shift...

In my opinion, yes and no. Marketing has become too tactical over the last 20 years.

The silo and tactical approach of functional marketing is dying and it should die. Simply going through the tactical motions of producing collateral that sales doesn't use, cluttering a lead funnel with poorly targeted "contacts" and focusing on tactical promotions isn't important nor is it truly customer focused. CEO's don't care about promotions-based tactics and that's why they often view marketing as non-strategic. Nirmalya Kumar has an excellent book called "Marketing as Strategy" that shows the decline of marketing as a strategic pillar within an organization and how that must change. That means "Big-M" Marketing becoming customer focused leaders that perform cross functional initiatives and have revenue accountability.
Cheers,
Brian Hansford
http://www.Zephyr47.com