Marketing is Dead was from the HBR Blog network on how traditional marketing is no longer effective. Bill Lee (the writer) suggests companies to consider peer influenced based and community oriented marketing to sustain long term relationship with customers. Another blog post showed how this new marketing method was applied to the well known Gangnam Style.
This article raised an important issue of buyers not paying much attention because they are “checking out product and service information in their own way”. However, I think that this only depends on the nature of the product and target audience. Peer and community oriented marketing base heavily on social media; teens would value peer influence more than sophisticated adults who are more experienced buyers. For example, in the smart phone markets, teens and adults decide on which phone to buy depending very different factors. Teens are more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth while adults like Carson Woo (Comm 101 speaker on InfoTech) personally said he chose a Samsung galaxy due to the technological features that benefits his business traveling purposes. In Carson’s case, just having influential celebrities would not be powerful enough to attract him towards a certain smart phone product.
Therefore, I believe that before companies utilize the social media to create community and peer influence on customers, they still need traditional marketing. This will help them position the brand, understand the customers to effectively sell a product either traditionally or socially.
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