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Technology is shaking up the foundations of marketing, reshaping a “creative art into a business discipline.” This assertion comes from Association of National Advertisers President and CEO Robert Liodice in a recent ANA blog posting. “I can’t recall a period in my career when so many aspects of our business changed – and changed so rapidly and fundamentally,” Liodice says, as technology has shaken the foundations of marketing in four profound ways.
India is a country of 1.1 billion people. With that many workers, it seems difficult to believe it can have labor shortages. However, a New York Times story reveals that a lack of skilled workers in that country could slow down the rapid growth of its outsourcing industry. There are huge demands on certain labor segments in India because many parts of the world are outsourcing customer support, software coding and other back-end office work to that country.
According to a study conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton, 51 percent of all new hires in the U.S. were sourced via the Internet. The study also showed that the majority of employers felt the Web contributed to an increase in quality of new hires in 2005 over previous years. Outside of jobs produced through the Internet, employee referrals were responsible for 19 percent, employment search firms for 10 percent and newspapers for 5 percent. The most employer satisfaction with new hire sources was from employee referrals followed closely by jobs filled through a company’s own Web site.
The study was sponsored by the DirectEmployers Association, a non-profit organization comprised of over 200 large U.S. employers.
In McLuhan for Managers (Viking Canada, 2003) Derrick de Kerkckhove and Mark Federman don’t provide “seven habits of successful companies” or a new strategy for business success. They offer four questions that were originally asked in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media.
This ultimately makes de Kerkckhove and Federman’s book a far more timeless work. It provides a mechanism to step outside the current mindset and ask, “What haven’t we noticed lately?” Granted, the questions address media; but modes of communication are fundamental forces in the businesses and marketing. In McLuhan’s words, the “medium is the message” that our customers and employees are responding to.
The movie and TV business is changing. Doc Searls adds some great additional thoughts to what I was blogging about here, here, and here.