A new study of marketing trends and concepts was conducted by Anderson Analytics, taking a look at what is important to marketers in 2008, and what they think will be the trends for the next year.
One thing in the study I particularly wanted to comment on and talk about was in their top priority and concern, which was marketing basics. When realizing that the survey inluded marketers from Marketing Executives Networking Group who are at a VP-level or higher, it's actually encouraging to see they're focusing on the basics.
I think the reason why is so many theories have thrown around about breaking from past models, that things may have been thrown away or neglected at the cost of proven strategies and techniques.
Marketing basics in the survey was specifically identified as customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, customer retention, segmentation, quality and marketing ROI.
To give you a quick example of wrong thinking, take brand loyalty. It's been the buzz over the last several years that brand loyalty is dead. It's simply not true.
When someone says something like that, they're mostly referring to young people that haven't made brand decisions yet. When any of us are young, we are in the stages of trying different things in order to eventually make a decision on the brands we like. So to take the younger demographic and make blanket statements isn't representative of the reality really out there.
Even with young people it's not always true ... think Apple iPod (AAPL). That's definitely a brand decision by whoever uses it: young or old.
It's good news to me for the industry to take a step back and look at all the hype and assertions being made, and get back to basics and what has been proven to work. That doesn't mean there won't be new things to try, and new ways to reach people, it means that people in general pretty much stay the same, even if their habits change.
By that I mean consumers may try something new, but will still expect quality and satisfaction. Those types things are never going to change.
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