Until this point, many of you may think that my purpose of writing this book is to introduce the idea of Internet Marketing and urge you to ignore the method of Traditional Marketing. Well, this is not entirely my message.
Yes, Traditional Marketing is losing its effectiveness, however it will not vanish totally. Mr. Huang pointed out that “It will not vanish but I believe that the ratios will be different. I believe that Internet Marketing and Traditional Marketing both have their own followers. People who use Internet will appeal to Internet Marketing but people who do not have access to the internet will most likely pay attention to Traditional Marketing.”
Looking at the advantages of Internet Marketing, it is more overwhelming than Traditional Marketing now days. It may be the opposite a decade ago, but not in the new era with freedom of thoughts and innovative technologies.
The 2009 Neilson Research presented a measure of the Taiwanese population’s trust on different forms of
advertisements.
Figure 2 shows that for a corporation/ business in Taiwan, managing your online reputation is more effective than Traditional Marketing advertisements. The most efficient form of advertisement is “Recommendations by Friends and Families”. This also relates to Internet marketing; this is because on the online world, it is easier to share experiences with your peers. The Word-of-Mouth phenomenon is established through the spread between friends and families.
The one running second is the official websites and internet platforms of the company. I believe that this is because when ever customers follow the company’s activities, they feel
Figure 2- Population's trust of different Ads in Taiwan
participated. As they believe the company and they are actively communicating with or about the company, then the relationships become stronger. It is always easier to talk and convince people who believe in you.
This is because many of their local target audience still pay attention to street billboards, TV advertisements and messages given out by the corporations. Taking the example of Pepsi in Thailand, the company advertises in the form of TV
advertisements, street billboards and even posters everywhere around the city. This is because the internet is not yet fully developed in Thailand, the dependence of it is not as high as countries such as Taiwan and the United States. Their target audience, which is the young and middle aged generations, still focuses on the advertisements from their Traditional Marketing strategies.
Additionally, having advertisements on every corner of the city generates “Brand Awareness”. What we can spot from those Pepsi advertisements in Bangkok is that it does not focus on the taste and the effect of their product but instead they focus on their brand. They tend to design advertisements which focus on the theme of the company and constantly promoting their brand to the audience. To further clarify this point, another example can be provided. One of the recent Pepsi advertisements I have noticed is the Pepsi Max 2010 African World Cup video. The video features six famous football stars visiting Africa and playing football with the local Africans. Through the costumes, setting and story of the video, we can understand the intention behind it. The short clip transfers the Pepsi’s theme of “Energetic”, “Creative”, “Young” and “Local” to the audiences. This advertisement does not only appear on TV, it is also presented in the form of posters and even exists on the BTS (Bangkok Mass Transit System) trains as a moving billboard. By constantly proposing their brand into their customers mind, a strong dependence and loyalty is built between the corporation and the customers.
Internet Marketing will not work on itself forever, not unless you’re an internet based company or your company is a B2B (Business to Business). If your company provides services that require human to human interaction, Internet Marketing will not be enough on its own when your company grows into a larger scale. Mr. Lin described that for Feeling 18C to grow into the scale it has today, neither Internet Marketing or Traditional Marketing can be left out.
The integration of traditional marketing and internet marketing is important for the growth of the company. In Taiwan, the company’s strategy to interlink between the two methods is present everywhere. At the very end of new TV advertisements, they say “Go on Yahoo and search for <product’s keyword> right now!”. This action of interlinking provides mutual recoveries of disadvantages for both methods of marketing. Traditional Marketing is less likely to provide enough information for their potential customers. However, Internet websites can do that. Internet Marketing strategies are less likely to attract potential customers who watches TV more frequently than using internet. Traditional Marketing can satisfy that. Therefore the interlinks between the two methods can achieve many benefits.
Customers from different countries have different dependence on the internet and therefore we cannot give a fixed statement on which of the two methods of Marketing are more effective than the others. However, it is certain that the development of the country is closely linked towards the usage of the internet and also the effectiveness of Internet Marketing.
To measure the “Development” we can look at the readiness of online media platforms within the country and the dominant age group which interacts on the online world. First of all, the online media platforms are mediums to operate Internet Marketing (These mediums will be discussed later inMarketing (These mediums will be discussed later in Going Viral on the Internet). Therefore before we kick start the Internet Marketing plan for the company, it is important to look at what sort of resources are available to us right now. Last of all, the target customers of your company should be compared against the type and age range of the internet users within the region (This will also be discussed in detail in Section 4- Goals determination). There will be no point marketing on the web if your target audience does not participate in the online world.
So, we may consider the following questions:1. Do the media platforms provide language support for my customers?
2. Are the media platforms blocked in the region due to filtering issues?
3. Who is/are your target audience/s? Who are the dominant internet users in the region? Are they the same?