Renaissance Marketing

Marketers are known to pick up catchy phrases to represent what they do, and the latest one in this league is "Renaissance Marketing". If you are thinking that "Renaissance Marketing" falls in the domain of "Interactive Marketing", well, it does not, but it has some interesting implications to interactive marketing which is why we are discussing it here.

Lets review some of the basics before we try to understand this term better. Online retailing has been one of the most profitable and viable business that have been setup since internet came into being. One of the prime reasons for its success has been the fact that most of the retail sites have been championed by companies that have been in the retailing business for years, that have had huge success in doing the retailing business offline and that have looked at online retailing as an additional channel to sell their goods, not as a replacement for their existing channels **. What does this say about the vision these companies had of online retail ?

Well, one of the things that is readily apparent is the fact that anyone who has a history in offline retail would knows the importance of customer interaction. If they are planning to augment the retail channel with an online solution, wouldn't they want their online retail channel to have the same level of interactivity ? Wouldn't they want their online retail channel to act like a salesperson for them ? Wouldn't they want their online retail channel to provide their customers with the same freedom of movement and the same freedom of choice ?

Unfortunately, one of the areas where online retail has been very disappointing is in bringing this vision to reality. Primitive internet technologies have forced online retail to turn into a sequential process, often referred to as the "Retail Funnel". The user is shoved down the funnel where he is forced to select some options along the way in an attempt to take him to the holy grail. One wrong choice and there is no way to go back and fix it. The end result is a lot of frustrated and fuming users who abandon their quest midway in disillusionment.

"Renaissance Marketing" proposes a solution to this problem by providing users choice, control and customization of experience. "Renaisance Marketing" rejects the idea of purchase funnel as a sequential series of steps and proposes a more fluid environment where unconstricted consumers easily float from upper funnel marketing assets to lower funnel assets at their own whim. The basic idea is derived from thinking of online retail as any other marketplace - afterall, if a user is allowed to roam freely in a shopping mall, why not allow him to roam freely in the online marketplace ?

Now that you have understood the concept of "Renaissance Marketing" can you think of where "Interactive Marketing" fits in ? Hey, I'm not going to answer that today - maybe in another post a few days later.

**You might argue that there are/were retail sites built by companies that have had no prior experience in retailing whatsoever. I would argue that most of them have vanished today except for the ones that had a sound business model to back them. Amazon is a great example of the latter.