As I was listening to talks on how to make brands relevant and develop innovative marketing strategies at the BRITE 2014 conference put on by Columbia University Business School, I started thinking if how we think of brands and marketing actually lines up with what’s going on around us. Many of the talks at the conference focused on how, due to mobile technology, there is less separation between virtual reality and reality. One of the key observations was that we live in a world where the virtual and the physical are blending and that consumers are experiencing brands in a holistic way. This is definitely something we as researchers, who are focused on consumers, can attest to.
Yet, when marketers set out to create marketing strategies they divide them as online and off-line. Furthermore, they typically have different departments responsible for each. Interestingly though, the companies which are successfully growing and attracting new customers are the ones who are not bound by a specific medium and have come up with an overarching medium agnostic strategy. The marketing and business development experts at the conference were rightfully (if you ask me) predicting that in the very near future those who strive to effectively build their brand stories and communicate with their customers will end up drastically revamping their marketing departments and philosophies when it comes to the physical and digital.
That’s all great, but what does it mean for market research? It’s highly unlikely that we will effectively measure successes and failures by using the old research methods and talking about impressions, or online vs. off-line media. It seems to me we will need to develop a research approach that takes all this into account, while also considering how consumers are interacting with brands and how marketers are communicating with them.
