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Become an expert on the future. Pick the one or two most important consumer trends to your business and stay up on them. Consumer trends provide another level of insight into consumer demand that can help you make smart decisions about whom to market to and what products your business should market.

In the twenty-first century, issues that face marketers as they struggle to shape up to challenges include:

Pan company marketing - for many of the roles we shall discuss it is increasingly necessary for marketers at all levels to engage all internal shareholders, to “buy-in” to activity, and recognise there is a marketing element in all departments’ roles,

Measurement metrics - how marketers should track and measure performance

E-commerce - understanding the language of the IT team to develop Websites and e-CRM

Knowledge management - what to, and how, to store information, who has access

Integrated Supply Chain Management - the Web marketer

Customer Relationship Management the web marketer

Multi-channel activity in the connected economy message and media selection.

The word marketing gives us clues as to what the discipline is all about. A market is a group of consumers who share similar characteristics. Therefore, marketing is the discipline of:

• Identifying your target market
• Discovering the needs and wants of your target market
• Developing and executing a plan to build a relevant and differentiated offering

In a complex world, it is much better to have a leader who tends to be indecisive until he or she has gathered sufficient information than to have a leader who is decisive but wrong. That problem is compounded when the leader is also resolute, because she or he refuses to change direction in response to changing conditions. The absolute worst leader is one who is decisive, inaccurate, resolute, and evasive. Evasive suggests that there is a lack of ownership in the problem and an unwillingness to confront the truth. You may want to use these criteria to evaluate leaders around the world over the past 100 years. You wiil find that the most-positive results came from DARING leaders, and the most DIRE results came from hubristic leaders who made quick (but wrong) decisions and then failed to own responsibility for the outcome.

The popularity of Google grew out of the fact that they developed an entirely new approach to search. Before Google, it was essential to locate any site whose content was related or contained a given search term. To this end, search engine builders constructed indexes of Web pages and often simply stored the respective URLs. As an answer to a query, a user would get back a list of URLs which he or she then had to work through. Google cofounder Larry Page came up with the idea that not all search results could be equally relevant to a given query, but unlike the information broker, who can exploit his or her expertise on a particular fi eld, an automated search engine needs additional ways to evaluate results. What Page suggested was to rank search results, and he developed a particular algorithm for doing so; the result of that algorithm applied to a given page is the PageRank, named after the inventor.

Since its inception in the early 1990s, the Web has revolutionized our lives and world more than many other technological developments in recent history. In this fi rst chapter, we tour the history of the Web, during which we will identify three major streams of development and impact

Architecture and web design are close cousins. Both vocations require focus in creatively designing tangible experiences and environments that facilitate movement. A good architect will study how people move from room to room and craft a layout that makes this as easy as possible. A good web designer will research how people navigate a website, where their eyes travel, and what visual cues they look for to get the information they need as easily as possible.

Old paradigm: the phone book. New paradigm: search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN have supplanted the slabs of dead trees thrown on our doorstep every six months, and their information is a hundred-fold deeper and updated every second of every day.
There is one critical differentiator between these models. Search engines are more than directories of names and addresses. They index every word of your website, offering a richer representation of your business, and then attach that data to a geographic location if one exists. Today, users can search by physical location or keywords.

Worldwide business is changing every day. Globalization is reaching full steam. The world’s economy is flattening, and the old economy giants of brand-name business are faltering beneath the growing power of the long tail. In just over a decade, the rulebook for marketing economics has been tossed aside. The Web has leveled the playing field, and any company can serve any customer with an Internet connection, at any time of day, and from any part of the world.