Using Digital to Reconstruct your Clients’ Brands in the Connected Era
By Chinedu Abili-Mordi
Globally, our landscape has experienced a seismic quake that has seen models that stood the test of centuries come apart in seconds. The emergence of the digital level playing field and the rewritten rules of modern engagement specially crafted to accommodate new champions across a wider range of industries are just a few of these new mind blowing developments.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to welcome you once again to the Connected Era – the next stage in Digital evolution of Humanity; the stage of ‘collective intelligence’, created to help us stay highly connected and still be human.
Various schools of thoughts predict this could signal the beginning or end of humanity as we know it, but that would be a topic for another article.
My focus is primarily on the Marketing Communications industry and the increasingly pressing need to keep close tabs on the rate at which the industry is evolving to ultimately ensure that we stay ahead of both local and global transformation happening across all industries.
Is the enveloping strategy of “going Digital” adopted by many agencies within the industry just a result of fight or flight to save the profit margins or a well thought out effort to do what agencies were designed to do – deliver value to our Clients?
The fact is, we are at the point of no return, every organization and consumer will become a digital one eventually, where digital by my definition simply means the ability of an entity (organization / consumer) to connect with another entity (entities, staged or simultaneously) to receive and deliver information (data) within established space and time (hence the saying – anytime & anywhere or real-time) parameters.
Therefore, I recommend the first exercise to do is really answer the issues that plague our industry by looking inwards as leaders and begin to question who our clients should be and understand their problems and proffer solutions to it – this must become our reason for being.
Most agencies would eventually have to re-adopt new models that are either B2B-focused, B2C-focused or Hybrids that are driven by digital and not just assumptions of having to sell the ‘concept’ of digital to win. This is because there is technically no such thing in this connected era where everything is digitized – it’s like trying to sell air, eventually – people would figure the hoax out.
I truly believe we were created to do one thing, whether as Marketing or Media Agencies within the Communications space and that is to build Brands for our Clients. Everything else is secondary and our clients are quick to show us the door once we fail to accomplish this primary task. Therefore, in this new age of digital – we must incorporate this strongly in our partnerships moving forward or risk irrelevance.
Bringing us to the final exercise and my hypothesis to deliver on the topic of this article. Considering that our role as Agencies is led by our Client’s Marketing Objectives, it is safe to assume that these should be driven by the 5 out of the 8Ps of Market mix that strongly align with Communication – Product, Promotion, Place, Price and Positioning.
In this connected era, we should replace this 5Ps with S.A.V.E.D where S = Solution (vs Product), A = Access (vs Place), V = Value (vs Price), E = Education (vs Promotion) and D = Design (vs Positioning)
I personally like Education vs Promotion because this is where Digital truly disrupts the conventional mix of Advertising, Publicity, Direct Marketing, Sales Promotion and Personal Selling. If we drill down further, we can understand how a tactic like social media marketing for instance totally channels all these to deliver brand building values that clients seek.
As agencies of the future, digital is already a thing of the past and must become the tool we use to creatively tell our Brand Stories moving forward while weaving in all the necessary tactics of marketing, technology and media to differentiate our values to our numerous clientele and achieve Return on Investment that truly impacts their businesses.
Chinedu Abili-Mordi is Chief Operating Officer at HotSauce, a leading digital marketing agency.
He is a preferred Leader in providing Digital Innovation for Brands playing on the Continent.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/freakichinedu/
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Comment
No comments found.