Friday, January 9, 2009

360 degree Marketing

360 degree Marketing is all about creating a unique brand philosophy. It’s a way we merge our left brain rationale with our right brain creativity to nurture or establish a story around your brand targeted at all touch points of your consumers. Whether you're a business-to-business player or a clicks-and-mortar partner, or you're just trying to win your strong customer loyalty, the first and, probably, best step for you to take is to dig into your history. May be you have a golden store house somewhere that can be used to create your full 360-degree branding. A story that will keep your customers connected to you.

360 degree marketing is actually the evolution of "cross-channel" marketing - less about media integration and more about a consumer-centric media strategy. It not only includes a heavy online component, but also television, radio, print, events and other offline media.

The Online part of this holistic marketing strategy aims at engaging experiences to both educate and excite consumers through creative utilization of internet and mobile marketing space – interactive website, SMS and On-line Gaming (remember the STORY I mentioned earlier). However, the challenge here being designing a piece of creative that will work within the context of highly divergent media environments and managing these divergent media as well.

In today's market, consumers' self-service access to information means that messages must be consistent and coherent. Great creative is only a small piece of the puzzle. And there are clear signs that marketers are rising to the challenge of managing the complexity of the world and delivering much sought after accountability back to the board in the process.

Without doubt, 360 degree marketing is challenging: it is hard to keep track of creative work, oversee increasing numbers of agencies and ensure messaging is consistent and up-to-date across the board. And it cannot be managed effectively using the poor tools and processes still endemic across marketing departments.

Nonetheless, turning away from 360 degree marketing is no more an option.

For more information, please visit www.thesmartideas.in or send me an email at susmita@thesmartideas.in