Epiphanies about Ecommerce...or, Remember the Way We Were? We're all watching the stuffings getting kicked out of ecommerce and online marketing stocks lately. Many are below $1 and fear being delisted from the NASDAQ. Some are doing the reverse wussy stock split so as to get above a dollar and prevent such a fate. Before it's all over, many big brand names we've seen marketing online and off will go the way of the proverbial buffalo. Remember, there used to be a few hundred car companies a hundred years ago too. Nevertheless, with all the carnage we're witnessing, no one can imagine we're going to revert back to how we were a few short years ago. Try to remember what business was like at the speed of fax, or when getting/sending documents overnight was considered super-fast. Our time expectations have been enormously compressed, and they're not likely to expand out again, even with the freefall of online stock prices. You no longer need a Bloomberg terminal to watch your investments plummet in real time. Now that's progress. The "paper tiger" syndrome will probably be with us the rest of our days, whereby companies burst onto the scene like a house of fire, and then shrivel up and disappear as though they never existed. Dot com jobs carry a risk factor for which people should be compensated, and by that I don't mean with underwater stock options. Online jobs make advertising jobs look as stable as banking. Perhaps people will have multiple jobs or entrepreneurial side gigs, so as to diversify their "job portfolios and risks. Marketing guru Mac Ross and I call these people "BOHO's". SoHO's we know are small office/home office segments in b2b marketing. BOHO's (Big Office/Home Office) are people with daytime jobs with an online entrepreneurial venture on the side. It's not a bad strategy. But it doesn't leave much left for having some semblance of a personal life. Unlike time, personal relationships aren't as easily compressed. It's folly to expect that the online revolution would travel in a straight upward line. It got ahead of itself, or rather people's upside fantasy got ahead of reality. Then too, there really could be a recession around the corner...and what if there were, where people then tend to be extremely parsimonious and value-oriented in the b2b and b2c buying. Where do you suppose people will turn in such an environment in order to more keenly extract value out of every dollar, Euro, or what have you? Why they'll turn to the internet, of course. No, we're not going backwards anytime soon. We're just in the process of catching up to ourselves. |
 |
79 Pine Street, #102 | New York, NY 10005 U.S. | ph: (646) 535-8160 | Contact Larry
© Chase Online Marketing Strategies, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved.