One of those marketing tenets I often still hear is that people typically have to see your marketing message nine times before they'll act on it.
I've never been entirely happy with this. If a marketing message comes at me nine times (and I still haven't bought), all I can think is that the company concerned hasn't bothered to get its targeting right. And in the case of email, I'll have unsubscribed by then anyway.
It all reeks of the old-style numbers-game marketing that says the more people you hit, the more often, the better - because then you only need 1% of them to succumb and you're laughing. Imagine a huge upside-down pyramid - millions of 'prospects' at the top and a handful of conversions at the bottom. Which is of course how spammers operate.
I wonder if social media marketing is turning the old pyramid on its head. Better to have one conversation with someone who's interested in what you're selling, then allow/encourage/enable her to talk about it in her network, and her friends in theirs.... than to tell her nine times about something irrelevant. (And have THAT talked about.)
Forresters reported on this over two years ago, questioning the received wisdom of the purchase funnel and noting that the internet was making engagement into the new key metric for marketers. And this well before the current social web frenzy took hold. But you'd hardly know it - as recently as last week, Mark Ritson in Marketing magazine blustered about 'pointless' name-changing and how we need to get back to 'the four Ps', as if the last 10 years never took place.
Ritson is well-respected and influential - in his own words he 'trains the next generation of MBA students who aspire to a career in marketing'. But how are marketing qualifications to be taken seriously if they are still based almost entirely on theories from pre-internet days?
