Marketers sick of social media (whatever that is!)
01/07/09 10:21 AM
The economy played a significant role in this year’s survey as more marketers expressed concern on how a recession would impact priorities moving forward. Half of executives believe their marketing budgets will decrease in 2009, but 56% indicated their staffing plans will either stay the same or increase.
The Top Five Trends:
#1. Insight and Innovation Key: Insight and innovation are viewed as keys to combat down economic and business cycles. Some 72% of respondents indicated that innovation efforts would stay the same or increase, while 39% say their use of market research will increase in the next year. This is significant given that most marketing experts agree it’s imperative to innovate and mine insights during a recession, Anderson Analytics said.
#2. Customers at Top of List: Basic customer satisfaction and customer retention remained the top two concepts of interest to marketers, followed by marketing ROI, brand loyalty and segmentation. Together, these represent a move back to the core principles of marketing, Anderson Analytics said. Interesting that they talk about customer retention while customer service and support people are being laid off.
#3. Green Marketing and Global Warming Lose Importance: The issue of global warming showed the largest decrease in importance (dropping 14 places in the rankings), while green marketing showed a statistically significant 5% drop.
#4. Marketers “Sick” of Web 2.0: Twice as many marketers are “sick” of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as “blogs” and “social networking” compared with last year’s survey.
However, marketers still admit they don’t know enough about it. This was evident in results from a November 2008 MENG social media study showing 67% of executive marketers consider themselves beginners when it comes to using social media for marketing purposes.
#5. Most Opportunity in China and among Boomers: China ranks as the #1 greatest area of opportunity (53%) for marketers with international responsibility, while India is a distant second with votes from 17% of respondents.
In terms of the best opportunity for customer targeting, marketing execs also still feel that Boomers hold the most promise. However, the perceived importance of Generation X and Generation Y grew significantly compared with 2008 survey results.
