In the rush for everyone to get on board the web 2.0 bandwagon, and the dominance of online marketing (at least in terms of coverage and "chatter"), are we in danger of marginalising traditional (off-line) marketing?
With the growth of social networking sites and other new online applications like blogging, its easy to see why some businesses may be tempted to put all their marketing eggs in the online basket. But this would be a mistake.
There's a trend back to traditional marketing's principles in the online marketing space. By this I mean that the concepts of brand and brand marketing are becoming more important in the online marketing mix, and online marketing is becoming more important to brand marketing activities. And ultimately, marketing is still about satisfying the customer.
The biggest advantage of online marketing is that it is now easier for a marketer to connect cause and effect. For example it's extremely hard to connect the purchase of a car with the buyer watching a cinema ad for that car. Nowadays, with Google Adwords and other online marketing collateral, it's much more viable to track the purchase and the effectiveness (or not) of the banners, paid for search or other interventions.
The point though is that we are not very good at monitoring or understanding the longer term effects of off-line marketing (like that cinema ad) on someone performing a search through Yahoo or Google. In brand marketing it is going to be increasingly important to integrate both on and off-line measurements.
The key thing for marketers is to be able to be sure that the experience that a consumer has of a brand, whether on or off-line is consistent. This means that the consumer who sees an online ad for a car, receives the same experiences and messages throughout his interaction. If at any point there is deviation, a rude salesperson, a car that is not prepared for a test drive, or one that is unreliable, or even if the after sales experience does not match his initial expectations, then the brand promise has been broken.
With the transparency that the web brings its never been easier for a customer to find and select other providers...