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Do Traditional Principles of Marketing Still Apply?

I must confess.  I felt that I already knew the principles of advertising pretty well.  So when I launched my internet marketing business, I figured it would just be more of the same - with a digital twist to it, so to say.  Although I had already received degrees - both at the university level and from the school of hard knocks, I lacked first hand experience with how to apply more traditional  principles of marketing to internet marketing.  Sure, I had received a classic liberal arts education, one which gave me the word power and critical thinking skills to be a good student of marketing and advertising. Nevertheless, I was a bit hazy on some of the finer details.

I had never taken any formal internet marketing classes, and was ignorant of some of the most important terms and concepts commonly used by today's most successful marketers - those often and somewhat generously referred to as "Internet Gurus".  So, after a bit of soul-searching, I decided to go back to school, but not in the traditional fashion of attending a brick and mortar campus.  Rather, I chose the process of searching out and reading every online marketing resource I could get my hands on.  Realizing the profit potential of successful internet marketing, and having made the decision to make a career of it, I decided to learn to apply these principles of marketing as well as I could.

It may not seem like it from an outsiders view, but marketing strategy, in my humble opinion, can be one of the most difficult and inexhaustible subjects to learn. You see, with the perfection of market research marketing, everything has gotten much more complicated. As our analytical tools get better (can you say Google?) and the public gets more jaded and cynical with respect to advertising, marketing has to wage an ever escalating war for the minds and desires of consumers. This may sound dystopian, but in reality it is still a simple principle of marketing.  Make no mistake about it - marketing and advertising professionals deal in mind persuasion.

Because of this, the principles of marketing encompass almost everything in the social sciences and humanities. We need to understand how people's fears, desires, and passions are created, how to influence them, and how to ultimately channel them towards the products that we sell. This is what makes marketing and advertising such a fascinating area. We can learn from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and statistics. Basically, anything that we learn about the way that humans live and interact can be helpful in mastering these principles of marketing.  Nothing lies outside of it.

The initial principles of marketing I learned back in school were pretty basic - but they still apply today.  However, the onset of the digital age has introduced a host of new twists and turns as to how we might apply these principles of marketing.  More than ever, marketing is an area where intelligence - both as a mental measurement, and in a more "covert" sense - may still be our most valuable asset.