Will we continue to see a shift in marketing spend to digital in 2011?

The answer is a definite ‘yes’. Budgets are shrinking, we’re increasingly accountable to management over the return on our investment and we’re trying to be cleverer than before: looking carefully at the message or the objective to select the medium that will be the most cost-effective way to engage with the customer.

We are going where the audience is. Facebook now has a bigger audience than Coronation Street or the biggest magazines. Our objective is to communicate and engage our customers in a place they feel comfortable, it may or may not be on our corporate website.
 

Digital offers engagement opportunities with the customer not available on other media, for example it is key for us to harness the power of user-generated reviews. It’s become more of a dialogue, to discover what customers want and what they think.
 

This is the way the customer wants to be talked to. There’s an increasing cynicism about brands trying to sell themselves. So what I’m trying to do within Panasonic is to bring advertising and PR closer together, so campaigns become not just a case of ‘this is Panasonic telling you...’, but to create more of a story and put the customer at the heart of the campaign. It’s a necessary shift. Digital, online, is the way to do that. It’s trackable, it’s accountable and it’s where the audience is.
 

The shift isn’t just about advertising, but is also in terms of investment to create a lot more online content. We are trying to reinvent ourselves and understand what the customer wants when they visit a manufacturer’s website in their research process. We will provide depth of information but also magazine reviews and awards and user-generated reviews on our website because they want to see it all in one place.We’re lucky in that we have very good products, so they get good reviews! We are working more and more towards making our site more social and interactive and have a lots of exciting projects in the pipeline.
 

We have also invested in product videos for the website. In the past, people were happy to read lines and lines of specification and description, but they don’t do that any more. Now you really feel the need to provide very good video content. And these videos help retailers’ conversions too at the point of purchase.
 

We are now working on a mobile platform, because this is another way people are consuming the information, when they are on the move. If we are not present on this platform there are more people we cannot communicate to.
 

The buying process of the customer is changing. We have to give them the information that they want, where they want it. and be consistent at every customer touch point.

 

 

 

Thank you to Experian for the use of their Whitepaper

 

 See the full Experian whitepaper here