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In January 1993, the first graphic browser, Mosaic, was launched in the market. Soon afterward, the internet was adopted by mainstream business and consumer audiences and began to develop rapidly. The enthusiasm with the new channel released a group of professionals who defended that Internet marketing was more efficient than the traditional marketing, and as a consequence, would replace it. In the speech of the time, it was the new economy supplanting the old one. The rationale behind this thought was that all the interaction process of the brand with the consumer in the online channel happens without chances of discontinuity, while in traditional channels, due to the existence of independent contact points, the opposite occurs. For instance, awareness can be developed through television commercials, product demonstration in a promotional event, purchase at the store, and support from customer services. In that case, as it is impossible to accompany the consumer through all touch points, the chances of brand abandonment for dissatisfaction increase significantly. On the internet, however, all contact points occur in a single place, the cyberspace. Thus, any kind of dissatisfaction regarding the brand can be monitored and appropriate communications can be used quickly to revert the situation. The speech defended that all communication channels would be digitized. The conventional TV would turn into interactive TV, the radio into radio over IP, direct mail into e-mail, telemarketing into voice over IP and printed material into electronic content. And companies would only need the internet for interacting with their target public. The crash of the stock market, in 2000, showed that this vision was excessively unrealistic.

Almost one and a half decades after the launch of Mosaic, the internet is back to having prominence position in marketing and communications professionals’ diaries. It could not be different. Globally, there are already more than a billion individuals who access the net and spend more and more time connected. They are in virtual communities interacting with other people, in blogs reading and commenting news, in video sharing websites uploading and viewing video clips, in virtual stores buying and evaluating products, in on-line games having fun with their friends, in wiki portals participating in the creation and elaboration of new contents, in search sites seeking for information in the vast amount of the existing pages. The growth of broadband infrastructure, today already available in approximately 250 million households worldwide, promises to translate itself in more significant experiences for a larger portion of the planet population. If on the one hand this scenery creates a series of new opportunities for the brands to develop narrower relationships with their public, on the other hand, it attracts the enthusiasm of those who, again, defend the online channel supremacy over the traditional ways, foreseeing that in a short-term future, all individuals interaction with companies will happen in a digitized way.

This vision is as unsustainable as it was in the origins of the Internet. Several surveys show that simultaneously while online, individuals are involved in other offline activities such as watching television, reading letters, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and magazines. More than that, in a significant number of situations, they depend on the offline channels to complement their brand experience. As glorious as the Internet is, there are some things it can’t offer. For example, the alternative of allowing a person to take a car for test drive before deciding if it is the right option to buy. These and other similar facts suggest that in order to understand the real impact of Internet in the relationship between the brands and the consumers, marketing professionals should focus on the consumers and not in the channel itself. It is the new consumer’s attitude and behavior change due to the influence of the online channel in their lives, which ultimately, will be the most decisive issue for the development of relevant marketing strategies. And in the last 15 years, the main change has been the increase of the consumer’s control.

While the old consumer was limited to watch what was announced in the main communication vehicles, the new one selects what is more relevant among an extensive range of options available. While the old consumer passively watched the messages created by companies in their communication strategies, the new one participates actively in the elaboration of the content that relates to the companies. While the old consumer was the final receiver of the communication process, the new one is also an active participant of the messages distribution to the market. The consumer of the new millennium is much more informed, connected and participative than that of 15 years ago and the traditional marketing methods which worked in the pre-internet consumer’s era, no longer reach the expected results. For those brands, which intend to be attentive to this new scenery of changes, there are two main implications. Firstly, ignoring the Internet is not an option. The risks for those companies that do not accept it are enormous. Secondly, embracing the Internet means much more than merely bringing the consumers to the online channel. It also means adopting the new consumer’s vision in all marketing strategies through all the existing contact channels.

Ricardo Pomeranz
Global Chief Digital Officer Rapp
ricardo.pomeranz@rappdigital.com