Up Up and Away Sherwood AR

Posted by : Cass Brewer Marketinghed: Up up and awaydek: many online marketers have crashed and burned. new approaches have a better chance of taking flight.dek: personalized pages and other gimmicks won't impress customers as much as sound products and services.dek: if you can't be the best, be better-or at least distinctive.dek: thanks to the rapidly changing online landscape, good marketing is more difficult than ever.by Cass Brewer

Marketing in the information age is like Douglas Adams' description of flying: The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Both sound easy, but in practice are difficult and prone to producing wreckage. Still, if you can figure out the technique, your horizons broaden considerably.

Like early aviation, early online marketing efforts seem a little ridiculous in retrospect: clumsy efforts to imitate working examples in other media. In the case of the plane it was machines with flapping wings. In the case of online marketing it was, among other gaffes, the attempt to reproduce the offline shopping experience, under the premise that the average consumer wouldn't notice the difference. (Attention, Kmart shoppers! The Web is not a holodeck.)

Of course, marketers and marketing theory have come a long way over the last couple of years … sort of. New commercial opportunities exist, and new ways to tap them. Armed with experience and a fresh perspective, it's possible to survey the wreckage of failed f...

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