In my experience, a lot of marketing departments view the growth of the web as a major challenge – as a disruptive force that makes marketing more difficult. But in fact the web has the potential to make life easier and strengthen most marketing activities. All it takes is web intelligence.
Consumer research for instance, can be done a lot cheaper and better if firms learn to collect and interpret web data in smarter ways. The web can also support direct sales activities in more efficient ways for instance through clever lead generation. Direct marketing is obviously much more efficient online, not to mention customer service and after sales. Also many aspects of the mobile revolution, e.g. augmented reality, holds great promises for point of sales promotions.
I say, the only activity that the web is really, really bad for is advertisement. People online click away from advertisement, they even get annoyed by it. That type of push communication will only become less efficient as web content gets more and more debundled and widely distributed.
So instead of continuing to put many resources into advertisement, marketing departments, must learn to leverage the online opportunities in new and innovative ways.
Time has come for intelligent marketing.