Marketing Technology

While direct mail and Yellow Pages ads have long been marketing staples, technology has completely revamped how kitchen and bath firms view marketing. Indeed, today’s most important marketing tools are just as likely to include interactive Web sites, blogs, YouTube, social networking sites, podcasts and more, as some of the more traditional favorites.

Changing demographics and attitudes, technological advances and a consumer mentality that demands instant access to information are key drivers of these changes. Yet marketing by technology is more than just a function of younger, tech-savvy consumers. A very old marketing concept – the importance of personalizing the message – has been essential to the evolution of technology as a marketing tool.

CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS

In the 2007 report “Foundations for Future Growth in the Remodeling Industry,” published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, researchers looked at the demographics of the “remodeling customer.”

They found that, by the year 2015, slightly more than 45% of our customers will have been born during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. While a slight majority may still wake up in 2015 with the morning paper and coffee, the up-and-coming generations of customers are turning to technology, rather than the traditional media, for their information.

Gen Xers and Echo Boomers (born in the 1970s-1990s) can attest to the fact that technology has shaped their world, their frame of reference and how they respond to messages – and therefore advertising. These people grew up in a world of hundreds of television channels, personal computers, the Internet, cell phones and other personal technologies. In addition, as these technologies became the norm, many of the Baby Boomers (born in the ’50s and ’60s) embraced them, creating a likely majority of kitchen and bath industry customers looking beyond traditional media for their news and information.

The 2007 book, “Connecting to the Net.Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know About Today’s Students,” by Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa, cited a survey of 7,705 U.S. college students, which found this relationship between Echo Boomers and technology:

• 97% own a computer.
  
• 97% have downloaded music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing.
  
• 94% own a cell phone.
  
• 76% use instant messaging (IM) and social networking sites.
  
• 66.6% of college students have a Facebook account.
  
• 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod.
  
• 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing.
  
• 44% read blogs.
  
• 34% use Web sites as their primary source of news.
  
• 28% author a blog.
  
• 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week.

These statistics illustrate a shift in the communication paradigm. The communication channels we rely upon to reach Baby Boomers won’t work to reach their kids and those older individuals who have adapted to the new paradigm.
Effective advertising was once about reaching people with a message over and over again so that they might act upon it if it were delivered often enough. We were complacent about being interrupted by “a word from our sponsor.”

We eventually got a bit more sophisticated and only wanted messages that pertained to our demographic group. It was okay to be delivered a message as a male, aged 35-54, while listening to a classic rock radio station. And advertisers delivered the same messages over and over until we believed them.

But now technology has changed the way we accept advertising. Today, effective advertising is about reaching the correct person at the correct time with the correct message delivered in the correct manner. We perform an online search, and expect immediate results. We decide to buy music or a movie; we can do so at our keyboards within a matter of minutes. Technology has changed the communication paradigm and our expectations. And no one understands this better than the generations that are growing up in the midst of it.