Moore's Law, which essentially states that the processing speed of an integrated circuit doubles every 18-24 months, will have a significant impact on marketing in the 21st century. However, for this impact to occur, marketers must make use of today's technology–and prepare for the technology of tomorrow.


Last week, I gave a speech at the MarketingProfs B2B Forumwhere I highlighted some research from Forrester. Through a survey of B2B marketing executives, Forrester discovered only half of the respondents were using technology to measure and manage marketing efforts and 57% admitted reporting systems "needed more work." I'll take "needing more work" as a euphemism for "what we have in place isn't cutting it."

In most instances, B2B marketing executives are a bit behind B2C marketers in the adoption and utilization of key technologies (data warehousing, analytics, interaction management etc). However I still found the results of the survey disturbing.

The information frontier is moving quickly. Robert D. St. Louis, a professor at Arizona State University notes:

* Storage space is doubling every 12 months
* Bandwidth speeds and capacities are doubling every 9 months
* The number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years (Moore's Law)

The implications of these trends? More storage space is needed to keep up with the deluge of data from ERP, point of sale, billing and other source systems. With bandwidth speeds doubling, data will be delivered to those who need it at rapid speeds. And faster computer chips mean that data will be processed at an accelerated pace.

Technology won't wait for marketing to catch up. Today's marketer needs to champion the technology of today, while preparing for the technology of tomorrow.

But wait, you're probably thinking that technology isn't the only panacea to marketing effectiveness. And you would be right. For if it were, to simply purchase a marketing automation suite (for example) would solve all our woes–and obviously that's not the case. The wise executive knows that it's a people, process, technology issue–in that order.

However–if, as marketer's, we're not using the technology available to us today, how are we ever going to be prepared to utilize and capitalize on the technology of tomorrow?

To be fair, there are companies (and marketers), especially in the B2C space utilizing the technology of today to drive better segmentation strategies, find hidden patterns for product/service affinities, create more relevant customer communications, and even price more effectively. That said, these companies are in the minority.

The information technology frontier isn't standing still–in fact it's moving at an exponential rate.

What do you think is the impact of Moore's Law on marketing–now and in the future?