Marketing Respect Your Elders
In Respect Your Elders, Stein and Delvaney (2012) make a case for traditional, offline marketing techniques. They predominantly make the case that these can serve as a complement to digital techniques, and they support their argument with a number of key points. The first is that while everybody seems to have fully embraced digital marketing techniques, this has left offline techniques less saturated than they were before. The second point the authors make is that markets respond differently to different types of marketing, and there are certain advantages that offline techniques have over digital techniques. The authors cite in particular that fostering brand loyalty is easier with offline modes of reaching the customer.
Digital versus Traditional Marketing
Schwarzl and Grabowska (2015) provide an overview of some of the principles of digital marketing strategies, but in doing so they highlight a key factor in the importance of offline marketing techniques. First, they readily admit that offline techniques are still widely used, despite the popularity and growth of online. But they also highlight the concept of the buyer\\\'s journey. The basic concept of attention-interest-desire-action implies a multi-stage process for the buyer\\\'s journey for many products and services. While a company that is uniquely focused on digital marketing is generally going to assume that because all of these steps can take place online that they should, the reality is that for many brands, consumers engage with the brand in a number of different ways. In some cases, consumers are engaging with the brand in non-digital ways, and that provides an opportunity to incorporate more traditional marketing techniques into different stages of the buyer\\\'s journey. Conventional techniques, for example, might prove more effective in gaining attention if you are in an industry where almost all marketing is conducted...
The rest of the buyer\\\'s journey might take place online, but attention is achieved through an offline, traditional technique.
The Role of Data in the Digital vs Traditional Discussion
One of the perceived appeals of digital marketing, aside from its rapid growth and new means of reaching people (which often delivers a different audience) is the fact that digital usually also offers a lot of metrics that are easy to gather in volume, and at low cost. Measuring is just as important in offline transactions, but the lower degree of visibility with respect to interactions (i.e. you don\\\'t really know who saw that TV ad) makes offline marketing less appealing in a world of data-driven marketing. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Stein & Delvaney feel that offline strategies can be highly effective. First, there are still metrics for offline, and they have been used for decades. Second, pricing something like an online ad is precise, so there is little room for a company to open up a huge gap between acquisition cost and customer net lifetime value. Offline, there is more room for such arbitrage if the advertiser knows more about customer lifetime value and cost of new customer acquisition than its partners. Serpico and Ruggieri (2015) make a valuable point in discussing the differences between digital and offline marketing, that a mix can offer a blend of different types of metrics, and of course can serve two completely different markets.
Xu, Frankwick & Ramirez (2016) explore this concept of data, because there is an underlying preference in modern marketing for digital in part because of the lure of big data analytics. But for many smaller companies, they will never really have the data set that they need in order to achieve such analytics mastery. More traditional techniques for gathering and analyzing data are going to be just as effective. The authors recommend what they term as a…
