Thanks to Howard Kaplan at Grok.com for posting an audio link to a presentation by Jeffrey Eisenberg on the future of marketing.
Eisenberg has a lot of interesting things to say about how marketing is changing because of the web, and other new communication technologies. Here were a few of the things he said that made me sit up and take note:
"More and more money is coming online. More and more advertising is going online. And as more and more money gets spent on advertising it becomes more expensive. It's the simple law of supply and demand. And the people who can't convert high enough will not be able to afford that traffic. And when they can't afford that traffic they will either go bankrupt or get bought by somebody who can afford that traffic. "
"Brands don't work the way they used to ... Take a look at a company like Starbucks. Can anybody name a major brand, not a brand extension, but a major brand that in the last decade has been created primarily through advertising? Nobody. I've never met a crowd that could. If you think of companies like Yahoo and Google and Starbucks and Amazon, these companies have been built by experience and by word of mouth. Marketing doesn't work the way it used to."
"64% of people go out of their way to avoid companies that over-market to them"
Jeffrey Eisenberg is co-author of the bestselling book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?
