Authors: Craig Dempster & John Lee
Publisher: Wiley
Reviewer: Claire Trévien, social media and marketing manager, Passle
Platform marketing is an evolution of customer relationship marketing (CRM), which takes into account the increased number of venues available for addressing customers, and the new set of tools required to do so.
The rise of the platform marketer gives a real sense of the growing complexity of the marketer’s job, particularly when so many of the platforms – Facebook, Google, etc. – are essentially walled gardens that currently don’t let data flow between them. At the heart of the book is the need to personalize the brand experience to each individual customer and understand the importance of uniqueness in an anonymous world.
One of the most engaging chapters is Patrick Collins and Kevin Walsh’s ‘Experience Design and Creation’. It sets out to prove the headline ‘Data-Driven Creative Equals Mediocre Creative’ wrong, by demonstrating how data-driven content can allow for increased creativity, and less waste. Their three main takeaways are: start with a creative brief, optimise constantly, and create customised content for different customer insights.
I particularly enjoyed their observation that ‘[m]any brands and agencies mistake compromise for collaboration’. Their suggestion? Try two radically different methods separately to identify the highest performing one,rather than creating a Frankenstein’s monster of an experience.
Another highlight of the book is Leah Van Zelm and Peter Kemp’s ‘Organising Success’ chapter, which gives very practical advice on how to achieve transformational change in an organisation to achieve success. It includes a very useful checklist that I know I will be returning to later.
The rise of the platform marketer is not exactly a light-read. While there are plenty of figures used throughout to illustrate the content, they are often more confusing than elucidating. However, it’s worth wading through the denser chapters to get to clear-sighted strategies for marketing today.
Star Rating: 4/5
