Evolution of Brand, Digital Marketing

Where do brand and digital marketers meet?

Not only is the sales funnel not really a funnel anymore, but the process by which we do things has flipped around.  In the days of costly distribution channels, analog content, and limited consumer choices we needed to Plan > Execute > Track.   Today, digital interaction means we have to change things up.  The idea behind agile marketing is: Execute > Track > Adapt.

A three-part series by Simon Ward of Ayzenberg outlines the agile marketing side of the equation focusing on the intersection of brand (long term) and digital (short term) marketing. 

A collaborative relationship between brand managers and digital marketers begins with addressing key questions:

• Where should brand management and digital marketing meet?
• Can marketing activity creation, approval, and implementation get more efficient and effective?
• How can digital marketers see brand management systems as a help and not a hindrance?
• How can brand managers strike the right balance between brand guidance and control and the marketer's freedom to iterate, innovate, and implement more effectively?
• How can brand managers "get" digital?

As an example of the new world order:

"Heineken CMO Lesya Lysyj recently referred to their real-time marketing. She said, "We use Facebook as a research platform…we just put stuff out there and learn from the response.""

That learning has to come from leveraging the underlying data.  And to borrow a line from another article "Effective measurement and analysis are the keys to making money in {your} industry." 

Capturing, analyzing, and acting on relevant data to optimize the customer experience and increase online revenue is easier said than done. Here are some important questions to ask:

• How can you capture real-time data based on user engagement and use them to build personalized experiences that take into account user context?
• How do you determine which data points provide the most accurate picture of the way users are consuming your media content across all channels and touch points?
• How do you integrate data from multiple .. systems in a way that allows you to draw connections between disparate customer experiences?
• When is the collection and use of personal data useful for consumers, and when is it an invasion of privacy?

It seems that those digital questions are very brand oriented. 

In the future there will just be marketers.