John Kennedy: Marketing... From Mad Men to Twitter Memes ;..
As we all know, the hit series Mad Men portrays an ad industry and set of clients that are as dated as businessmen in fedoras, which makes the show so fascinating.
Yet, the twist is that the kind of marketing the show depicts -- one where advertisers crafted brand messages to capture the imagination of a mass market and then broadcast those messages via one-way media channels -- didn't disappear gradually over the past 50 years. It has happened only in the last decade.
Consumers began challenging conventional marketing strategies with the advent of social media, which became a virtual testing ground for whether marketers could keep their promises.
Now, people turn to their Facebook friends, price-scanning apps and video uploads to create their own channels. They voice opinions about brands within their own groups and to the world at large. In essence, social media has become a new channel between brands and their customers -- but one where the customers are broadcasting and the marketers are listening.
Social media has emerged as a kind of "truth serum" for good and bad customer experiences. It enables consumers to keep companies honest and potentially elevate them to celebrity status -- or hurt them if they refuse to listen.
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