In part A of this series and at the risk of upsetting some great and many not so great marketers, I discussed a number of internal factors contributing to what I see as poor marketing performance of many organizations around the world. Today I want to look at the external factors driving the poor return of marketing:

Too much noise, so many new products and brands were introduced during the fast economic growth prior to the current recession; as a result experts estimate that an average consumer in a developed economy is subjected to about 3000 marketing messages per day or a whopping one million messages a year. Marketers and their agencies understood that the human brains have finite amount of attention, no one can remember everything and that as the amount of marketing noise increases, the percentage of messages that get through inevitably decreases. Their solution was to make their messages louder, bigger, and more repetitive ultimately interrupting every minute of your life whether you are driving on the road, watching your favorite TV program, listening to the radio or browsing the internet. The point: too much noise means less impact per unit of noise! In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin suggests that permission marketing as an alternative to interruption marketing…worth reading.
No more space, whether you wanted a billboard on a highly frequented freeway, a prestigious conference venue to run a seminar, or a back cover of a respectable magazine, everything was fully booked, so many marketers were competing for these prime spaces but often unable to secure the best spots and eventually accepting less than perfect advertising spaces. Obviously this resulted in lower impact per unit of investment.
The rocketing cost of marketing, the two previous factors have forced marketers to demand more budgets in order for their messages to get noticed. Consider that the overall advertising expenditure in the United States of America alone rose from $140 billion to $200 billion between 1993 and 1998. It became increasingly difficult for marketers to sustain massive budget increases and many of them could no longer afford the best advertising spaces or TV spots for commercials. As a side point, the explosion in commutative marketing spend gave rise to many new publications which in turn created a need for more spend by marketers who want to achieve higher coverage.
The internet, up until the end of the 1990s marketing was confined mainly into print advertising, billboards, radio and TV commercials as well as direct mail but the internet changed everything and introduced so many new routes for innovative marketers, it enabled marketers to come up with new ways to reach their target audience, email, web banners, search engine related advertising, etc... But marketing via the internet is still evolving and proliferating as Sandy Carter explains in her book The New Language of Marketing 2.0, social networks, wikis, widgets, and serious gaming are some of the new internet based marketing ideas..again worth reading.
The demographics have changed; the younger generation watches less television, reads less newspapers but lives on the internet and their mobile phones. The allocation of marketing budgets have not yet really changed to reflect this change in consumer behavior. Whether you talk to marketing executives or to the agencies you will see the point, advertising, billboards and TV commercials still constitute the largest part of most marketing budgets. The demographics are changing faster than the marketing mix!

All in all, it is now much harder to market anything, but I will be back soon to share with you ideas and solutions to help you revitalize your marketing, improve your returns, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. In the mean time feel free to comment especially if you disagree with my views.

 Ayman Abouseif