Rediscovery

I've been disappointed by some of my recent readings in Internet marketing. The trade books are often bad, and the blogs are even worse. That's not to say that what I'm reading is fundamentally wrong, but that it is shallow and often misguided, based on a handful of anecdotes and the personal experiences of an author-practitioner, utterly lacking a consistent theoretical base.

Case in point, in reading about online brand relationship management, the practitioners seem to have a pioneer attitude - as if, before the Internet, no-one put much thought into these issues, and the "old ways" are shortsighted and bad, in favor of the "new way" they have discovered. And yet, their discoveries are merely a haphazard rehash of the traditional approaches they are castigating ... they don't know the "old ways" and assume that what they are suggesting is an entirely new approach.

I've noticed this about relationship marketing and e-commerce in particular. Much of the "new" knowledge is not new at all, but hearkens back to the basics of retail and B2B marketing, in which the shop owner or sales representative deals with customers in a face-to-face manner - which, in terms of age, is an even older practice than mass-marketing. Anyone who has ever provided (or to some degree, received) face-to-face customer service recognizes the value of customer relationships and brand experience to satisfaction and retention, and there is a substantial amount of theory that can be adapted to the new media.

And while much of this has been brushed-aside during the era of mass-marketing, it's not been entirely forgotten. There are still books and courses on retail and B2B marketing, though they've been largely marginalized in favor of the efficiency of dealing with customers as a faceless mass.

So in the end, my sense is that what we are experiencing is not the end of traditional marketing, but a return to traditional marketing - before the era of mass-marketing and the amalgamation of consumers into large groups who were assumed to be homogeneous - and that rather than experimenting haphazardly to "discover" or "invent" effective methods for treating them as individuals, what's needed is to blow the dust off the old textbooks and re-discover what was known before the profession took a turn.