The Justice

Media Credit: Max Breitstein Matza Allen Adamson, director of the brand design and consulting firm Landor, speaks to students last Tuesday during a tour for his new book 'BrandDigital,' which talks about how companies can use the Internet to market their products.

Tuesday night, marketing consultant Allen Adamson spoke to a group of students in Golding Auditorium on the topic of online marketing. Director for the New York office of the brand design and consulting firm Landor, Adamson is currently touring New England in support of his most recent book, BrandDigital, a guide to building and sustaining a commercial brand in the digital age.

Aided by PowerPoint and video clips, Adamson described for the audience the current marketing landscape. Though the digital sector has not yet become the dominant one, it has become increasingly important. He described the current situation, in which economic conditions necessitate heavy budget cuts, forcing suffering marketing departments to develop new, more efficient ways of developing and pushing products.

Fortunately, the Internet has provided a venue in which there have been very efficient returns on marketing investments. The Internet, Adamson told the audience, has allowed for the development of a forum in which customers communicate their complaints and compliments on a given product in massive numbers. "One of the things digital allows you to do is be a fly on the wall," he said, describing the new consumer culture. Adamson called this phenomenon a "backyard fence mentality," in which products are marketed by word of mouth alone, almost free from any outside influence. "The Internet," Adamson added, "is a huge digital fence."

Adamson went on to describe the various effects the Internet has had throughout the marketing and branding industry. Though the Internet is a powerful new tool, it can also sink a product as fast as it promotes it. Whereas once companies performed surveys on their products as little as once a year, the current environment, one in which word of a defective product can spread ever faster, calls for round-the-clock vigilance to ensure that no complaints go unnoticed and untreated. In the digital age, he continued, it's more important for companies to listen to and learn from customers, said Adamson, adding that corporations have realized this and have begun to explore the vast possibilities of social networking tools modeled after phenomena like YouTube and Facebook.

Continued...

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