Digital Marketing. Annmarie Hanlon

one non-law module and she opted for ‘entrepreneurship’ and for her assessment started the Eltoria UK fashion and lifestyle blog based on her interests. At the time she was working at the organic skincare firm Lush. She enjoyed the module, which was evidenced in her results – a first-class grade. After university she pursued a career in law and her first job was in a big commercial firm, which she didn't enjoy, so she tried a smaller legal firm. However, in both firms she discovered that law was not a career in which she felt she could work for the rest of her life. Having continued with the blog and subsequently winning many awards, Simone realised that it could be a career option. The awards allowed Simone to take some time off and focus on the blog to see if it could work.

      Today Simone has generated an impressive following on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. She is not the average fashion blogger: she's intelligent, her content is well written, with great depth and analysis. Having been at university, she has had typical student jobs in retail stores and understands the challenges faced by those who are working and studying. This may be one of the reasons that she is popular with university students – she understands their situation.

      In terms of a typical week, Simone records five to six videos and sometimes works for 12 hours a day to complete the content for a brand contract. There is a lot of work that takes place behind the scenes.

      Having created the brand, her website showcases the social media services provided:

       Social media support

       Sponsored blog posts

       YouTube partnerships

       Ambassador campaigns

      See more at www.eltoria.com

      Case Questions

       What do you think about micro-influencers like Eltoria?

       Did you realise serious lifestyle bloggers could be working 50 or 60 hours a week?

      1.2.3 The Move from Traditional to Digital Marketing Tools

      How did we make the move from traditional to digital marketing tools?

      As technology has decreased in price, and with the development of the internet, digital marketing has offered easier, but not always cheaper, solutions. Plus, new technology has heralded changes in behaviour (see Chapter 2, The Digital Consumer), resulting in the decline of traditional marketing tools, as shown in Table 1.2.

      The challenge is that not all generations have made that move, as we will explore in the next part.

Table 1.2

      1.3 Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

      If you're a student at university now, there's a good chance that you're a digital native. You've been born into a time when mobile phones, tablets and wearables are the norm. The research says that you rarely watch TV in real time, you'd rather view YouTube. You don't send letters, you use WhatsApp. You don't use Yellow Pages, you ask Siri. As you're using a range of digital tools to talk, shop and share, some of the older generation of digital immigrants are seeking your help to plan and organise their digital marketing.

      The words ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’ weren't invented by me; they are part of a range of generational cohorts, which are shown in Table 1.3 with selected reference sources for you to explore further.

      Some cohorts cross into another generation. This is because there is no official agreement on the terms, nor are they formally defined by government, but mainly by researchers and consultants working in advertising who see the different behaviours developing.

      The terms ‘digital native’ and digital immigrant’ are considered by some as being controversial and by others as divisive. The phrases are largely credited to Marc Prensky, who was teaching groups of students and realised there was a marked difference between the students who had always used technology and teachers who were new to this. He described the situation as similar to learning a new language, where immigrants move into a new country and learn the language but it is never their mother tongue, so they might always retain an accent. In the same way he thought that those who had to learn about technology would retain this ‘accent’.

      The work has been criticised due to the phraseology and as some people objected to the labels. I'm a digital immigrant but love technology and as an early adopter I could see how it would make life easier. Equally, I sometimes witness students who are digital natives, struggling with newer technologies.

      Looking at the most recent group, Generation C, Jessica Dye said this stood for content but commented in her website that it could stand for creativity, consumption or connected. Roman Friedrich and his colleagues at the international management consultancy Strategy& (previously known as Booz & Company) stated that the ‘C’ represented connect, communicate and change. The key factor is that this demonstrated the lack of consensus with these terms.

Table 1.3

      1.4 Digital Disruption

      Every era sees disruption from newer technologies that replace outmoded methods of delivery, service, production or communication. The introduction of the internet removed the need for the telex machine and soon replaced fax machines as methods of urgent and business communication.

      Although the phrase ‘digital disruption’ probably came about following the creation of the law of disruption, named by journalist Larry Downes (Downes, 2009), we don't have an official definition, so we could describe digital disruption as ‘major marketplace changes or sector transformation, following the application of technology’.

      Bain & Company, one of the world's leading management consultancy firms, has explored the application of digital disruption across industry sectors, as shown in Figure 1.2.

      Digital disruption started with the introduction of the internet and initially we had ‘brochureware sites’ or what Fareena Sultan and Andrew Rohm described as ‘the communication of basic Web-site content’ (Sultan and Rohm, 2004, p. 8). We gradually moved into online shopping, and today Amazon has extended the disruptive shopping experience with the ultimate disrupter – the Amazon Dash Button, where shoppers simply press a button to re-order specific products (Amazon, 2017).

      The internet has evolved from super-slow dial-up to super-fast with data being retained and easy to access. The internet has only disrupted our lives in the last few years, with the rollout of broadband at consumer rather than business level, which enabled faster and easier access for mass markets (see Discover More on the Past and Future History of the Internet).

      Figure 1.2 Application of digital disruption across industry sectors

      Source: Bain & Company, 2015. www.bain.com/bainweb/media/interactive/disruption

      Discover More On the Past and Future History of the Internet

      Written by the who's who in internet development, ‘The past and future history of the Internet’, published in Communications of the ACM, provides great background information to the early impact of the internet and how it evolved (Leiner et al., 1997).

      All