Digital Marketing In A Recession? Just Do It (Part 1 of 4)

Welcome to ‘The Digital Reality’, a discussion forum in partnership with Microsoft Advertising. Over a series of 4 parts, we look at how marketers can overcome their fears of the digital frontier, which they can capitalize on to create competitive advantages for the brands they manage as well as for their own marketing careers.

It’s official. Singapore is now the most wired nation on earth, with the household broadband penetration rate hitting 99.9 per cent last December. This figure, given by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), puts Singapore ahead of countries traditionally thought as powerhouses in the wired world: South Korea (at 92 per cent), Hong Kong (at 83.8 per cent) and Taiwan (at 76.8 per cent), based on figures from research firm Frost & Sullivan's 2007 study.

At the inaugural Mindshare Singapore’s M-Networking session in partnership with Microsoft Advertising recently, it was highlighted to an audience of key Mindshare clients, that despite the internet’s high penetration in Singapore, the reality is only 5% of advertising budgets in Singapore are invested online. It's already a so-called mass medium in Singapore, but it's hardly taken seriously by most marketers.

The M-Networking Session, titled ‘The Digital Reality’, was organised as an industry outreach programme for marketers and media partners to facilitate the exchanges of best practices, ideas and even collaborative opportunities.

In the context of this story, marketers include our clients as well as our own people.

The current economic crisis has already changed the environment in which marketers operate in, but many of us are still struggling to devise digital strategies to capitalise on the new consumer mindsets, let alone deal with the current recession.

It seems that if a marketer’s natural reflex is to automatically avoid tapping into new media during the good economic times, then doing so during the slump would be deemed as taking too much risk.

Yet some marketers expect different results by doing the same things, slump or not. Einstein once said insanity is doing the same things over and over again, but expecting different results.

The reality is the consumer climate had already changed way before the current slump. The internet had become our new environment, where it has more and more influence over consumer purchasing behaviours and daily routines.

But another reality is consumers have led when a lot of marketers have lagged. While consumers have already discarded their fears for the digital era, as demonstrated by the popularity of online commerce and social networking in Singapore, it’s surprising to find that there are still marketers who are fearful of it.

After all, these marketers are consumers themselves outside of their work, using the internet like everyone else, yet behaving like they haven’t seen the internet once they reach their offices.

The point is not about abandoning traditional marketing, but integrating digital into an overall marketing strategy.

There are lessons that can be learned from the US market and brands like Nike, in terms of harnessing the power of the digital media to create new competitive advantages in the current recession.

In US market, it literally took years after the majority of American consumers had adopted the internet for mainstream marketers to start putting any real money into online advertising. We can learn a lot from Nike as a shining beacon to many marketers who are still fearful of new media. Nike is still a very successful brand today because it was an early internet adopter as it foresaw the internet’s immense influence over consumer behaviours.

Next week, we look at how Nike went from cool brand to cool digital brand.

Contributed by :
Jimmy Lim
Mindshare Singapore
jimmy.lim@mindshareworld.com