What is Marketing 2.0?

Marketers will have noticed that Web 2.0 is spawning dialogue in Marketing circles online, and that some people now refer to Marketing 2.0 as a distinct field of business practice and theory. It is perhaps natural that a great deal of what is written about Marketing 2.0 is by authors of blogs and online collaborations. Many are practising marketers rather than academics, but their dialog on the topic is credibly educated and, in the very dynamic area of online behaviour and marketing trends, perhaps more current than much academic publishing.

The dialog about Marketing 2.0 appears somewhat fractured and incoherent; basic assumptions in this area appear to vary among specific interest groups and industries.

One specific presumption and focus is on SaaS and the internet becoming a computing platform, and in this context marketing 2.0 becomes a variant of marketing that is specific to the IT and software business. As the Director of Marketing at Sage Software and Sun Microsystems Emmanuel Obaida has combined a business interest in SaaS and observations about media usage shifts in his prominent blogging (Obadia, 2007).

Another group’s focus is concerned with online marketing specifically. Distinguished from broader web 2.0 influenced thinking that directs CRM 2.0 to consider releasing control of dialog and relationships to consumers, these writers focus on online marketing and limit the context of marketing practice to one where the internet is the primary if not sole channel of marketing communication. Writers like Neil Patel, and Cameron Olthuis (focussing on online marketing services relative to their own online marketing practice) and Darryl Siry (focussing on web 2.0’s importance with specialty in specialty automotive marketing for Tesla Motors) specialised in tracking the latest shifts in online behaviour and online tools at a level of scrutiny that is in lead of popular internet usage, aiming to interpret the direction of flow of the rapidly-evolving medium relative to an informed practice of marketing (Patel, Saleem, Olthuis, & Fujiu, 2008; Siry, 2008). Writers at Beeline Labs’ collaborative blog and online community aim broadly to explore how the social web is becoming a part of fundamental marketing practice. The complexity of this field pulls their writing across social media and networking, software, online marketing practice and the evolution of broader marketing theory. The complexity is aimed, though, at distilling complex changes down to a comprehensible understanding of marketing in the web 2.0 era.

“A good marketer today must spend an extraordinary amount of time reading news and blogs, actively participating in the venues and mediums that your customers are engaging in and communicating through” (Siry, 2008).

Marketing 2.0 also embraces Web 2.0 practices like democratic outcomes and 2-way online exchange. As with CRM, Marketing 2.0 stresses that control shifts into the hands of consumers.

“CMR (customer management of relationships) will require modifying your traditional marketing efforts. It will demand more than promotions and advertising, and will require new tools for customer communication. A challenge for some companies will be getting a CMR strategy in line with the need to grow customer value when the advertising agencies (and their media planners) are more interested in customer acquisition and giving the brand image a makeover. Instead of fighting against CMR projects that appear to threaten their power base, marketing directors will have to recognize the transferability of their skills to CMR and learn to use these tools for more profitable media investments. Your strategy will have to include training programs to teach all personnel the objective of passing control of the relationship to the customer and the effective use of CMR tools.” (Newell, 2003)

The buzz about marketing 2.0 has quieted dramatically over the past two years. In part this owes, I suggest, to the futility of re-naming a field of business just because a tide of change (in this case web 2.0) has emerged in the external environment. But also it owes to the diversity of possible definitions for Marketing 2.0.

Compared to CRM and its spawn CRM 2.0, the broadness of the field of Marketing appears to create a diverse range of interpretations of what ‘Marketing 2.0’ might refer to. Unlike the community’s development of CRM 2.0, with Marketing 2.0 it is difficult to find coherent lessons or even a coherent identity, except what we might have predicted having examined Web 2.0 and CRM 2.0: Consistent ideas within Marketing 2.0 are basic hallmarks of Web 2.0 thinking:

    a) Organisation-wide, silo-breaking orientation to consumers is necessary, and

    b) Control of communication, strategy and the ultimate success of businesses all lies in the hands of consumers.

(I think many exceptions exist for idea (a), and I’m not so nihilistic as to completely accept idea (b), but both are valid syntheses of many people’s recent writing on Marketing 2.0 and contemporary IMC alike.)

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions?
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new?
   
5. What is Marketing 2.0? (You are here)

References:

Newell, F. (2003). Why CRM Doesn’t Work : How to Win by Letting Customers Manage the Relationship. Bloomberg Press

Obadia, E. (2007, 23 June 2007). We’re moving from Desktop to Webtop. Marketing 2.0

Patel, N., Saleem, M., Olthuis, C., & Fujiu, R. (2008). Pronet Advertising.

Siry, D. (2008). Marketing 2.0.