The key lies in knowing how to combine the two successfully. Starbucks is an excellent example of an organization that pays attention to its marketing mix. In addition to having a strong presence in more traditional media outlets like print advertising, Starbucks has a Twitter page with more than 180,000 followers and a Facebook page with close to 2 million fans. In an effort to marry offline and online marketing techniques, Starbucks introduced a contest in which the first person to post an online photograph of one of the company’s newest marketing posters will win a prize. Contests such as these attract thousands of posts that help to reinforce the offline campaign.

More organizations are embracing the concept that a mix of traditional and modern marketing components—print, television, video, Internet, mobile phone—are key to customer outreach. As a matter of fact, a study of senior executives done by Heidrick and Struggles showed that when it comes to strategies designed to achieve their company’s growth objectives, optimizing the efficiency of the marketing mix across the business came out in front. Of course, understanding a concept and understanding how to put that concept into play so that your organizations emerges a winner are two separate things.

That’s right. Going forward there are going to be winners, and there are going to be losers. How is your organization going to fare? That depends upon your ability to successfully:

• Establish authority and a relationship with potential customers more effectively than the competition

• Offset the high cost of customer acquisitions by maximizing lifetime customer value

• Establish multiple sources of customer touch points for lead generation, customer service, and cross sell/upsell

• Leverage new technology to better understand your customer and competition

• Create an organization structure, and technology infrastructure, to take advantage of new, dynamic marketing capabilities in the distributed web

The key establishing a system to create new habits within your organization.  The sooner you start that process, the more likely it is your business ends up in the win column.

When I started my marketing career in 1981 at Y&R in nyc I remember what media planning was like.  In those days we had a “computer room” where we all had to go (b/c we did not have computers on our desks) and “run the numbers”.  That was, keep running reach and frequency reports till the cows came home and/or you finally discovered the optimal mix (theoretically) of media to maximize your reach, frequency and effective reach.

Remember effective reach?  How many times you clobbered your prospect over the head with your message till you thought it finally registered?  Well, 28 years later the customer somehow got control.  And they do not like getting interrupted very much. They like to learn about new products and services that might fit their needs, but they want those messages delivered to them when they are seeking answers…by people they trust and know.

As Seth Godin said in his blog recently, “Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity, technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity. It requires too much thinking and not enough going out for dinner with clients.” (I forgot to mention all the lunches and ski trips in between computer runs)

Marketing is transitioning to a new kind of profession that requires thinking, persistence, experimentation and interacting with customers.  You better get to know them and like them because you will need to spend lot’s of time with them.  It’s a new normal.

Here’s to our success in the new normal!