The web marketing of the future

The web marketing of the future will have nothing to do with the marketing of the past, or even the marketing of today. We present you with a perspective from the consumer’s point of view, the powers that be and the counter-powers.

Marketing principles

In the beginning, marketing meant choosing a target and adapting the offer to the needs of the target clientele. Adaptation is achieved by harmonizing the marketing mix, the 4P,b5P,6P,7P, 8P, for: Product, Price, Placement, Advertising and Promotion. Marketing offers two main strategies for selling products: push marketing and pull marketing. Push is achieved by the sales force, who “push” products towards the customer, while pull is maintained by advertising, which encourages consumers to “pull” the product by picking it up at the point of sale. The winning company plays on an optimal combination of the two strategies.

Internet marketing gives consumers a new choice

The Internet destroys the balance between the two strategies, since consumers can now choose. So why should he accept a sale when he can search for what he wants in Google, when he wants it? It’s said that a customer hates to be sold to, but loves to buy, so this would be the decline of call centers and sales forces that push the product towards the customer in favor of the internet, which gives the freedom to choose, compare and buy the best, when you want.
Consumer choice on the Internet is often illusory
In fact, freedom of choice on the Internet is often only apparent: search engines give us more or less guided choices, AdWords are a way of pushing information and therefore products; the same goes for Facebook, which pushes information, but also ads, according to its members’ topics of interest. Any owner of a Facebook business page can now target customers by location, age, socio-professional category or area of interest. It’s a much more refined, optimized and accessible promotional tool than traditional advertising.
The principle is much the same on Twitter, with the ability to push content to people or themes defined by hashtags.
What we have here is a system that gives customers the illusion of choice, when in fact choice is limited to the choices offered by the medium.
Google and other search engines still offer a certain degree of freedom, as consumers can identify the URLs promoted by paid keywords. It’s interesting to note that the majority of consumers avoid these identifiable ads at the top and bottom of pages, the reflex being that they’re present at the top because they’ve paid to be, not because they’re good.

The internet marketing of the future

Nevertheless, the marketing of the future will greatly reduce consumers’ room for maneuver and freedom of choice, thanks to very precise targeting by marketers.
First of all, Google is going to offer SEA (Search Engine Advertisement) or AdWords campaigns linked to e-mail addresses, i.e. when we open our search engine, the first companies to appear will be those where we have made purchases whose merchants have our e-mail address.
Another source of information is the various social networks, which currently collect an impressive amount of personal information about our interests and habits, and trade it to advertisers.
All our internet searches will therefore be influenced by specific information that will be pushed towards us whatever channel we use.
– When we arrive on a social network, we’ll see ads in the form of editorial content about the objects or services we’re interested in.
– When we go to a company’s website, analytical software will establish our profile and bring up on our screen ads or pop-ups to present us with products or services corresponding to our profile
– When we call one of our service providers, the agent on the phone will also have our profile in order to make offers corresponding to our presumed needs.
– When reading the newspaper, which will be mainly electronic, our identification by e-mail address will enable us to push targeted advertising. Taking La Presse + as an example, two members of the same family reading the same article won’t see the same ads.
You open your digital newspaper and see interactive ads for the type of vehicle you’re looking for. You open Facebook and ads for the type of vehicle reappear, along with the insurance that goes with it, you carry out your banking transactions and a pop-up appears on your screen offering you the loan, you Google “car” and the first ads on your page target the same brand and type of car, you open YouTube and comparative test drive videos of the vehicle arrive on your front page, of course positive tests for the brand only. This brand is not necessarily the one of the vehicle you currently own, but perhaps a competing brand that has managed to obtain your information and organized targeted, integrated marketing towards you in the various media.
So we’re moving towards an increasingly digitized world in which we’ll be identified, profiled thanks to shared databases and targeted for ads; we’ll be left with the impression that we can choose, whereas our choice will be influenced by exposure to targeted ads, but also by choice that appears free, but is in fact limited.
In short, marketing will become push again, while trying to make consumers believe it’s pull, trying to make them believe they have a choice when in fact they’re being guided.

Counter-powers

Bad news? No, not really, it’s always been like that, but with different means, and with three factors that will give us back freedom of choice:
– competition will broaden the offer and avoid monopolistic situations of information control.
– Competition between social media and search engines will mean that some will try to stand out from the crowd by making a clear distinction between information and ads, to maintain consumer appeal.
– It is also possible that laws will be introduced in certain countries to limit profiling and the mixing of advertising and editorial.
It’s a spinning wheel!

Jean-Pierre Mercier