Joe Kraus: “The 20th Century was about dozens of markets of millions of consumers. The 21st Century is about millions of markets of dozens of consumers.”
Understanding this helps to develop successful digital marketing strategies. Failing to understand this, and concentrating on just a few markets is rarely effective in the 21st century.
The Internet has changed the power balance between large and small, allowing small businesses with effective digital marketing to outperform their larger rivals. This is because they can beat their large rivals in many of the smaller ‘digital markets’.
By contrast, consider a large business that is accustomed to being the major player in a few very large markets. They now find this market place fragmented. Different tactics are required to be dominant in each of these smaller markets. Yet managing this is proving difficult for many large businesses. Your marketing managers need to be skilled mathematicians or statisticians capable of dealing with and analysing huge datasets.
With online search and digital targeted advertising being the dominant method of marketing for many products and services it is important to understand these “millions of markets” and have the tools to exploit these. Simply throwing a large sum of money in the general direction of online advertising is not the most efficient. Instead targeted marketing should be done across the many different tiny markets. This probably requires micro-management of very large numbers of campaigns. This needs a new set of skills – the ability to handle a huge amount of data whilst still thinking creatively and looking at the big picture.
Article by Rachel Cornish
