#mustread in #marketing I admire Mark Ritson's pen : "Marketers lost touch long ago with the world of the customer they are meant to understand. The eight hours a day of devoted, unobstructed, idealised focus they pay to their brand blinds them to its fundamental unimportance to even the most loyal of customers. And most miss the prime directive of marketing: that of market orientation. All truths derive from the market, not the marketer. Your brand might be your focus, your salary, your ambition, your path to greater things. But to the consumer it’s just vegetable spread. One of the several spreads they consider when they look for something to put on their toast. If they think about that at all. ... Rather than looking at customers, turn things around and see the brand from the customer’s perspective, in its tiny, partial, superficial form and how it is lost, almost as soon as it appears, as an ocean of more important things appears and submerges our target customer." And of course, "Digital/traditional: We bang, bang, bang on about this difference as if it exists. Look around you! Digital media is now traditional – Google is a quarter-century old and offers TV and outdoor as part of its offer. Traditional media is now digital – radio is two-thirds digital in this country and every ‘newspaper’ left in business makes more money from digital subs than selling paper." LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT! (link in comment) #brand #branding #digitalmarketing