I thoroughly enjoyed participating in the Online Marketing Update held at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia yesterday. Corporate executives rubbed shoulders with MBA students and were treated to an array of guest speakers including Hugh McLeod and Avinash Kaushik. I gave the closing talk yesterday, on the ten things you should do now in Internet marketing.
One anecdote that struck me during the day was told by Michele Hughes, Director of Consumer Solutions for Procter & Gamble, on a campaign P&G ran in the Phillipines for its Pampers products. 
P&G is motivated to cultivate loyalty in diaper customers, rather than having them use multiple brands throughout the first three years of their child’s life. Through analysis of their target market, they realized that Filipino mothers are very concerned about the education of their children, and they highly value American education. So they decided to have a contest where US scholarships are regularly awarded to Pampers customers that entered by keying in a code found on each package. This program engendered loyalty among the target market as they eagerly entered the contest each time they bought a package. P&G had the moms use cell phones for entering the key codes rather than Web sites, because phone penetration is three times that of computer Internet access.
Michele’s story is a good example of how the “new marketing” is very much the same as the old marketing. You must understand your market, you must know what connects with them, and you must use that to get the buying behavior you want. New technology, whether it is the Internet or cell phones, just offers new ways to do that.
In fact, that message is how I started my wrap-up talk yesterday. Check out the slides for “Web Marketing is Marketing” to find those ten tips.
