Unless you read magazines from back-to-front, you’ll have noticed we’ve been casting a nostalgic eye back into the past; looking at the 10 years since this publication launched.
A decade sounds like a long time. And, in many ways, it is. A great deal has happened since 2004; the year George W Bush secured his second stint in the Whitehouse, Greece bamboozled football experts by winning the European Championships, and Facebook made its first tentative steps into the big wide web.
But it’s also noticeable that the more things change the more they stay the same. This is particularly true when it comes to marketing and communications.
The advent of social media, the decline of print, and the effects of the recession have all served to move the goalposts over the last decade. But it’s possible to strip away the hyperbole and see a reality that may not be as intimidating and ‘new’ as some might have you believe.
While the methods of delivery and principles of engagement have undoubtedly changed over the last decade, it doesn’t require too much leftfield thinking to recognise the best marketers are still using customer insight and creative intelligence to create brand experiences and stories in the ways they always did.
Even ‘data’ – arguably the defining feature of modern marketing – has always been around. It’s true to say that we can garner more insight than ever before from prospect digital body language these days, but we have been utilising data to craft targeted campaigns in a similar way for a very long time.
Where we will go in the next 10 years is anybody’s guess. Even when the next wave of technological advancement change the rules again, it’s likely there’ll still be a few solid marketing basics we can all rely on. And that’s a comforting thought.
