Does the world need digital strategists? » House of Naked
Noah pointed me to an interesting article over on the Naked blog from a few days ago about whether or not the world needs separate digital strategists.
I think it’s an interesting debate, and from the implciit perspective of where the author is coming from, I think he’s dead on - there’s a toolset to gain mastery of in digital, but from any other perspective, it’s not that different than planning.
Except.
Except.
The real problem here is that this is all from the point of view of brand planners and brand strategists. And a company’s internet communication is so much more than another platform on which to execute its brand strategy. it is customer service & CRM. It is PR. It is shareholder relations. And, most challengingly it is the coherent and synchronized execution of all of these things. There are whole divisions of a company someone needs to get to know to help a company with its digital strategy - IT. Sales. Fulfillment. Things that a traditional brand planner may only touch on.
In fact…. Maybe it’s worth flipping the whole thing on its head: brand planning is just one facet of a coherent digital strategy. After all, when looking at the myriad ways a customer interacts with a company, its marketing and branding message is really only a small subset. They order things. They complain. They shout their opinions on Twitter. They go to a competitor’s site because they didn’t want to use Verified By Visa in the online store. They perform online boycotts because the CEO wrote a dumb op-ed.
In the past, companies took balkanized approaches to digital - the planners and ad guys handled the brand, their pr people handled the press, and the IT guys maybe did the website and the store. What we all see now and aspire to are the brands that handle all of this seamlessly and with coordination - Apple. Zappos. Netflix. Perhaps over time a right-thinking company will start with an integrated digital strategy, and extend that to offline brand planning, so that their offline supports their tactics in social, or e-commerce, or PR. It’s not far-fetched to imagine Zappo’s running an offline campaign around “we listen. and we service,” which is a strategy that grew from their digital.
reblogged from rickwebb
