Twenty years ago, people would spend five minutes listening to the strident bing bong kshhhhh of their dial-up modem just to watch Hamster Dance. Now, they click the back button if your website takes longer than .7 seconds to load and buy from a competitor if you don’t have the stamina to follow them around the internet with some sort of constantly engaging, hyper-personalized experience.
Consumer behavior and marketing have indelibly changed.
Marketers didn’t have it easy in the ’90s, but things were a lot more straightforward. If you wanted to connect with prospects, you spent money to put your message in front of them in one of the few available channels: TV, newspaper, direct mail, or local display.
Now, marketers track an impossibly complicated customer journey across dozens of different channels and devices, struggling all the while to stay relevant and push the right value proposition at the right time. In the infographic below, we explore some of the ways marketing has changed by comparing top tactics and skillsets between 2017 and the good old 1990s (cue Saved By the Bell theme music).
