Since the first lesson of this course I could not avoid thinking that here in US digital marketing is very powerful also because internet penetration is already very high and growing. Looking at small countries in Europe such as Italy, Austria and Portugal, not to talk about the majority of developing countries, we see a very different situation. Even if internet users and their average time online is growing, internet penetration is still low, and in the majority of developing countries the quality of the network is still very bad and the computer penetration is very low. How will digital marketing approach those countries? I guess the answer is mobile internet. Cell phone penetration is incredibly high almost everywhere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use) and many telecom providers are now heavily investing in this business. This will definitely give digital marketing the possibility to reach millions of people everywhere in the world. How the communication is going to change? Customization is going to become more and more important and highly dependent on the country’s language, culture and type of mobile devices available. Websites mobile optimization, word-limited advertising messages, smartphones applications are all going to be country specific? Mobile internet would probably become the most used marketing vehicle along the entire marketing funnel, more widespread then TV and newspapers. Mobile digital marketing will have to find ways to become more and more effective in creating awareness/building the brand and activating the demand, also considering the fact that the benefits of halo effects will be significantly reduced due to the low penetration of the other media vehicles. Will digital marketing be able to successfully exploit this multi-billion dollars opportunity!?
1 comment:
Very interesting considerations. I would like to answer to this blog in 2 points:
1)Very true that Italy and other European countries have a very high smartphone penetration (http://internet2go.net/news/data-and-forecasts/nielsen-italy-leads-28-smartphone-penetration). Observe that the penetration of smartphones in Italy (28%) is more than 10 percentage points higher than that in US (17%). These surprising data could be both due to the low penetration of high speed internet in many regions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_broadband_Internet_users) and, as Isabella has pointed out, to the fact that in these countries mobile phone penetration is very high and has historically peaked already early in the day. In this case the above argument that points out that digital marketing expenditure should concentrate on the mobile segments results to be particularly relevant.
2)I would like to follow up on another point. I have some data on the Italian market but I think that all the reasoning can also be related to other European countries like Spain or Portugal. I have recently come across the marketing plan for Italy of one of the top luxury watch brands (I cannot provide data or graphs due to confidentiality, but if someone is interested, we can further explore this). The marketing plan is targeted towards a wealthy segment of the population, literate and between ages 35-65. A study of the penetration of media to assess the most effective marketing mix shows that Internet has the 3rd highest penetration (42%) following only TV and billboards. Contrarily the power of newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines and special edition papers seems to be fading in recent years.
In conclusion, although broadband internet is not yet diffused across the whole population, we see that luxury brands have already started to invest in digital marketing, since their target population do have a higher than average access to high speed internet.
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