Its 2009, and my, hasn’t the year begun on an interesting note? At times I feel as if we are living in a version of the ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
During a recent NPR interview on technology, a tech guru made the comment: “…The Obama campaign not only used technology to its advantage, but drove those less tech-savvy to USE these tools. Now many Americans are fully conversant with online video, YouTube, email and website communications, webcasts, online transactions (donating), email feeds, texting, and related forms of ‘one-to-many-to-one’ communications.”
Interesting, and very true. For years, many of us in marketing have personally adopted the new forms of communication as they were developed, and lamented that most of the mainstream public were luddites and were not yet tuned into these new forms. Frustrating. We came up with tremendous ideas for brand-building using some of these tools, but quickly realized that our target audience was not yet ready to receive our new-form messages.
I’m not sure any of us would have predicted that Americans would become so engaged in a political campaign that the campaign organization could create a pent-up demand for information that would boldly lead consumers to become “early adopters” of new forms of communication. Interesting.
This expansion of consumer communication channels has a direct impact on B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing. We have seen it already with web-based campaigns, brand blogs, email couponing, and even brand-centric Twitter feeds, while traditional ad forms (newspaper, magazine, television, radio) are suffering losses.
But how will this impact B2B (Business to Business) marketing? How are you communicating with your customers today? If it’s in the same way you’ve always communicated (trade advertising, distributor deals and contests, coupons) then you are missing a huge opportunity to communicate on a much higher level. Webinars, rich-media email, social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook), and focused web advertising to drive traffic to your website are just a few of the simple tools available to B2B marketers in foodservice.
Don’t assume your foodservice audience is still stuck in the traditional communication channels. Use the internet to explore and study these new communication phenomena. Try a few things and see what works. The cool thing is that many of these new forms are so cost effective that testing some ideas requires only a minimal investment.
“May you live in interesting times.” Some curse.
"A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities." --Herman Melville, American author