Marketing arbitrage: you heard it here first
October 4th, 2006 by Mike O'TooleI am feverishly preparing for next week’s presentation to 50+ B2B marketers in Japan. Prep includes a little Pimsleur (I’m aiming for competency at least around “good morning” and “excuse me, do you speak Japanese.” Its funny, but it seems like half the lessons involve apologizing for lack of skills. I figure my lack of skill in the Japanese language will speak for itself), and a lot of sharpening an argument around integrated marketing. Planning integrated programs is what I spend most of my time doing for clients, but there is nothing like a presentation like this to force some fresh research and thinking.
Here is the point I’m coming to. A lot of the research points to a mismatch between the information sources B2B decision-makers value when making purchase decisions and the channels companies invest in to get their message across. The most glaring example is in online…something like 40% of B2B decision-makers rate online channels (search, and vendor Web sites rate particularly high) as their first or most influential information source. Only 8-10% of media budgets are being spent online. Hence the marketing arbitrage. If you can do a better job than the market at large at synchronizing your message with the media your audience values, you can exploit a marketing arbitrage opportunity. The most obvious arbitrage opportunity: rebalance your media mix before your competitors do. Less obvious is investing more in what I’ll call consideration media: trade or industry Web sites–or increasingly blogs–that your audiences already trust. More on this later.