The New World of Marketing:

Word-of-Mouth Campaigns Replace Traditional Tools

- (Wall Street Journal – February 7, 2006)

Today, people are overloaded with information and the tools of traditional marketing – print ads, catalogs, direct mail and television commercials – aren’t working. People are saying, “Don’t bother me with advertising. I’ll go talk to my friends.”

Twenty seven percent (27%) of all personal conversations include discussions of products or services. The new marketing builds on those relationships, by changing marketing campaigns into friendly, one-on-one encounters. Within an organization, the “friend” is called an evangelist and the tools of nontraditional marketing are Corporate Blogs, personalized e-mails or direct mail pieces about products you’ve said you were interested in (permission marketing) and personal or online conver- sations. What is new is the extension of targeted communications to huge databases of consumers who have indicated an interest in a product or service.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 646,000 people held jobs in advertising, marketing, promotions and public relations in 2004. Because the field is so new, there is no way to estimate how many of them use new marketing techniques.

The new world of marketing requires a different mentality than traditional marketing because it moves from a model of one-way communication to two.