Subtitle: the engineers who bridge the Marketing-Sales Gap.
Before Google, Sales would use shot-gun approach (and work the Law of the Average) in Cold calling.
Marketing would do research to uncover the mind and motive of consumers. But it has been more an art than science, at least not hard science, until Search. Customer’s post-purchase remorse belongs in the realm of academic exercise in postmortem (Toyota).
Now, advertisers can confidently pay-per-click, start and stop campaign with click through data to test effectiveness.
Marketing in the age of Google. Continuously improved algorithm.
Better techno/social/psycho graphic data profile for us time of click, key wording and percentage of click-through.
Verizon is letting its consumers access Skype without using up their allocated minutes ( data channel on 3-G).
It even recycled MCI’s Friends and Families tag line.
And Skype use will drive Verizon’s stickiness while AT&T , despite burdened down by I-Phone , keeps wasting money at ad assaults .
We are seeing a realignment of Pre-sales from traditionally engineering-driven to a more Marketing-centric model.
IT investment is on the rise, while the price of chip set declines. Led by financials, many companies who would otherwise cannot afford to get into the IT space, now do. Everyone wants the co-lo cage closest to peering points.
Sales now looks like James Bond, armed with data, map, software, spyware etc… while marketing can spend quantitative as well as quality time to study buying patterns (increase in buying when the stores are placed closer to the food stall – hum – appetite drives purchase of non-food items – hum – we are still driven by our hunger – hum – how about our sense of smell-hum- arrested evolution, at least when it comes to shopping.
So here we go. Google rules. Let the “bots” do the crawling. For the lack of a better word: pagerank. May the best car win. GM got the right tag line, but its cars might not be best sellers. It’s up to the consumers who Search for key words, and up to the smart Trio (Eric, Larry and Sergey) to auction their ads.
Until their Ivy league rival in the East put the faces and names of people we are most likely influenced by. Then on top of convenience, we got trust and recommendation. Not giving up just yet, the Trio comes back with Buzz. May the best search engine win. Just don’t let Tila Tequila be the sole judge.
Thang Nguyen 555 