can these approaches live together, or not?
The traditional marketing communication is a one-way system, but in recent years, the coming of the so-called Web 2.0 has made the marketing communication system much more complicated and difficult to control than ever, because those environmental characteristics that marketers have so far considered inborn have been changed by the new technologies.
I have found three articles about these changings:
- “We’re all connected: The power of the social media ecosystem”, where it’s said that a company must develop a strategy in which traditional and social media are strongly interconnected to reach consumers on every possible platform;
- “The uninvited brand”, where a more dramatic view is presented: the marketing ecosystem is drastically changed since the birth of Web 2.0, and now the only thing a company can do is trying (without certainty of success) to hold control of how customers are using social media to target its brand;
- “How to inspire value-laden collaborative consumer-generated content”, that shows how the collaborative CGC is really valuable, because it is a multivocal marketing communication based on the participation of as much customers and consumer collective as possible, never mind if the engagement is social media originated or not.
The common feature of these three articles is the awareness of the fact that, independently from the approach suggested, whether mainly social media based or combined with the traditional one, the firm has to achieve as much customers’ engagement as possible, and also to control it, or at least try. The customer is no longer an end user, but needs to be involved also in the marketing process.
