The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

The term ‘marketing technology’ has two possible meanings. On one hand, it is the act of marketing technology products or services. The marketing of technology has some aspects that are quite different from the marketing of high volume consumer goods or of industrial commodities. For example, new technologies (a.k.a. hi-tech) require an extensive ‘market education’ (via specialised publications, infomercials, white papers, etc.) until they become part of the every day environment.

Marketing technology also means technology for marketing. Marketing has always used and needed the latest technologies to progress, from the rotating printing press to photography, from the simple telephone to automated call centres, from radio to television, from the Internet to e-business. On most occasions, marketing has advanced faster though the combination of such technologies. People who present ordering pizzas via the web as a cool innovation should look back to the 1920s when the “phone for food” slogan already was an example of innovative media combination (ads in newspapers with the telephone).

The interesting twist here is that the loop is closing for the marketers of products and services that use Internet and software technologies to support the marketing function itself. They have to show how to use the marketing technology they sell properly — the old shoemaker story.

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