Content area
Full Text
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"Nothing beside remains ("Ozymandias", Percy Bysshe Shelley).
There is a crisis in marketing circles, and while it has little to do with the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, it does have something to do with hubris and bathos, which as every literature student knows, the poem "Ozymandias" has in spades. When Web 2.0 first started to feel its way into marketing campaigns, it was seen as something of a panacea. As soon as people started to tune into Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites in numbers, the opportunities to engage consumers for companies were believed to be almost infinite. And what is more, that engagement would be direct at a speed and accuracy unimagined just a decade earlier.
Except it didn't quite turn out like that.
Marketing 101
While there were legions of stories and anecdotes of fantastic successes of developing relationships with consumers at deeper levels and, as a result, driving sales of products and services skywards, many practitioners simply threw the old marketing rule book out of the window and rushed headlong like lemmings into social media. However many of the old paradigms of marketing have stayed strong, and have even been strengthened by new channels of marketing, and this includes the customer engagement cycle (CEC).
In his article "Customer engagement, buyer-seller relationships and social media" (2012), C.M. Sashi refreshes our memory regarding this particular mode of engagement, and updates it for the social media generation. His research looks at placing the engagement cycle firstly in a modern marketing context, and secondly adapting it to new social media contexts that allow practitioners to frame...