The Web Marketing Dimension

Marketing surrounding the ‘e-world’ should be easy – everyone will utilise ‘e’ to directing prospects and clients to the suitable website, and to your email address, and carry on. Why bother about internet marketing the methodology? Why not stick to marketing your products? ‘Business as usual – just faster and a lot more responsive’,should be the cry. No problem there for the marketing manager? Perhaps – and maybe not.The trouble with our new ‘e’- communicating society is that it provides us new tools offering immense power to the user. Why is that a difficulty? Because of the phrase ‘user’,which is not to be confused with all the phrase ‘owner’. This is a whole new idea and it has not been fully understood even by those that claim to be ‘experts’, due to the fact they may be ‘IT specialists’ and this is (or ought to be) a senior management rather than a technical concern.Except we take appropriate measures anyone can become the ‘user’, with out the ‘owner’ knowing. Most of us have computers. We experience that we ‘own’ our PC – even if our organisations actually paid for them – but except correct measures are taken we may possibly well be sharing‘usership’ with others. Either they know everything that we do, or they use part of ‘our’ computer’s energy for their purposes; or they come in and alter our information, or are totally destructive, or act ‘merely’ as vandals.Suddenly the marketing supervisor is looking somewhat susceptible, because his/her organisation is vulnerable, and also the fallout will probably be lack of trust and reputation, which leads to brand problems. Everybody knows that excellent brand name status is difficult to develop, easy to harm, and much much more difficult to repair once it’s broken.

And today, injury is far easier to produce. Why? In the ‘old days’ when we obtained a whole new technology, a ‘new tool to aid our business’, it was ours to play with – we made the decision about when, if and how to use it. There was no imagined that it could bite the hand that bought it. We owned it, we utilized it, we created the choices. There was nothing else to say. Equally, in the ‘old days’ (and remember, many organisations are nonetheless in these ‘old days’) we believed that ‘an Englishman’s home (business) is his castle’. So we guarded our perimeter like mad – we had locks, bolts, fences, guards, alarm systems, and so on – and as long as the perimeter was not breached we felt ‘safe’. Okay, there was always the challenge of the odd rogue member of employees, as well as the ‘temp’ (or the cleaner, or whoever) who was not exactly what they had been supposed to be, but, by and large, we felt safe from exterior attack, and an insider nevertheless acquired to take the information out of the premises physically, and was therefore vulnerable. And if by likelihood we did find someone ‘up to something’, it was great and clear and they could be sacked, whether or not we pressed charges. Of course security was essential, however it was bodily security that worried us – and the police had been usually there to back us up if our actual physical perimeter was breached. So what acquired this to do with marketing? In those days, nearly nothing – security was seldom employed as a differentiator. If you had been handling cash, or high-value objects, or drugs or anything with a higher ‘street value’, then it was presumed that you had put in the necessary security. ‘Safe as the Bank of England’ was a saying from the past – and more recently there has been advertising campaigns that talk about getting the safety of certain groups of firms ‘around you’. Bodily security plus financial safety – something you might kick and feel and see – providing a pleasant warm feeling.

You had been fairly clear about whether or not or not your organisation was a ‘target’. You could identify your actual physical defences and contrast them with all the worth that an attacker may steal (this kind of as cash, valuables and easily disposable objects), or you may choose you were just not worth attacking! In retrospect, a nice, easy life. So marketing in common took protection for granted, and certainly didn’t get directly involved. And please note that ‘security’ meant one thing only: protection from real bodily loss. Therefore, the objects have been being protected from being stolen, copied or destroyed. But who believed of protecting things from being altered? Or from being kept out of your own reach for a crucial period of time? Also, most items were ‘physical’. Yes of course documents were often involved, specifically if they experienced intrinsic worth, but the protection of information was rarely discussed because information was not this kind of a readily available commodity. Today, the ‘e-revolution’ has broken through our parameters. A modern organisation that communicates by email and by way of the web has inserted the equivalent of the M25 straight into itself – and anything can drive along it, unless you’ve got taken the required administration selections followed by the necessary technical responses. It’s in no way the opposite way round: you’ve got to take the information risk management selections at board level, after which inform the IT department of the criteria against which to work. It is madness to anticipate the IT folks to comprehend the relative value of every type of information within your organisation and its relative importance in terms of confidentiality, integrity and availability. So what does all this mean for today’s marketing administration?

You are responsible (on behalf of your board) for the safety and enhancement of your brand. Virtually everything stems from that duty, due to the fact if you enable your model tobe broken then everything else suffers, and the spiral is downwards, fast! Pre-‘e’ your brand name was similarly affected by your reputation. Nothing new there then;except that today someone can affect your popularity (and your brand) from one other sideof the world, with out actually caring one jot about what they are doing, and at nearly zerocost to themselves both in time, resources or actual financial outlay.What is worse, they often don’t realise what they may be doing to you – they do not understand the consequences of their actions. It’s nearly as if a baby has been given the controlsto a guided-weapons program – it has no notion of what it is doing when it presses the buttons, but the result is as catastrophic as it will be if ‘an expert’ did it deliberately.It’s too easy to do injury electronically, and it really is made too easy by the very truth thatwe rely on communicating by a system that was in no way created to be secure. The Internet was originally constructed to allow communication amongst academic teams, known for their preference for sharing information. It was not supposed to be the world’s ‘trusted business backbone’.The other reason why it is too easy to create ‘electronic damage’ is that too numerous organisations and individuals usually do not understand why they should take actions to safeguard their ‘e’-base. They think (if they think about it at all) that it’s ‘someone else’s responsibility’. It is seen as a technological issue – even by managers who should know better.Therefore, we now have a new problem: the owners of information do not control access to it,whereas the entry controllers (the IT administration) don’t know the relative worth and vulnerability of the different kinds of information flowing round their networks.

Still, there is one overriding problem that is apparent: our most valuable asset today is information. With it we will continue our businesses whatever disasters may possibly occur, whereas without it we’re floundering like fish out of water. Therefore it is our information that we must shield, remembering that ‘information’ includes particulars of each aspect of our organisation, from what we generate, how we produce it (and what we purchase to produce it) to why we produce it, particulars of to whom we sell it and by means of what channels, at what prices, and using which employees – everything. It really is our human assets information, it’s our future plans, our patents pending, our next acquisition, our commercial documentation, our sites, our manufacturing settings, our high quality controls, our marketing databases… and it’s all ‘online’, unless we have made extremely careful choices about how we manage it. So we can have the equivalent of our Crown Jewels being unprotected on the equivalent of the M25 in our organisation, and yet we will have ‘virtual armed guards’ protecting something that is in the public domain anyway. It’s easy for this to take place, especially if there may be a lack of understanding and conversation in between IT and also the rest of the organisation (specifically marketing). Shouldn’t marketing be responsible for this kind of conversation? Are we not responsible for everything that can have an effect on the brand name? The answer has to be yes; so yet another marketing aspect of the new ‘e-world’ is that marketing itself need to take responsibility for all of these communications (read more useful marketing articles here). Trust and confidence affect brands, and marketing has responsibility for the brand. Therefore marketing has direct obligation for ensuring that your organisation promotes and ensures ‘e-trust’ and ‘e-confidence’. Furthermore, marketing must also take obligation for all internal and external communications on this problem, otherwise they will happen in a piecemeal fashion, undertaken by individuals who are not trained in communications abilities.

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Tags: marketing