One of the oldest adages in marketing is that word of mouth is the most effective way of communicating with your customers. Everyone can recall asking a good friend or a family member for a recommendation on a product or service they’re thinking of buying: a car; a washing machine; a holiday; a pair of shoes; someone to do your tax. A study by Nielsen earlier this decade found 92 per cent of people believed in word-of-mouth recommendations above all other forms of advertising.

Marketers have long tried to find ways to have these advocates tell more of their friends about their brand. Social media offered a new weapon to do this. Suddenly there were brand advocates on social media with thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of consumers following them. And the consumers had chosen to follow them because they liked the images and comments they were posting. They were interested in what they had to say and almost two-thirds of them believed what they were saying about brands.

For almost two decades, marketers have been trying to win the online search battle on a daily basis. That’s search in terms of consumers typing a request into Google, Safari or Bing, with marketers pouncing on that search to head them towards their product or service, instead of towards their competitors. The aim has been to have your brand on the first page of search results served up to a consumer, or even better still to be in the top three.

But with 25 per cent of Australian searches now being done via voice — through Google, Siri, Cortana and Alexa, et al — the search battlefield is shifting from typing to talking.

There were six fundamental lessons for marketers and business leaders coming out of the political parties’ advertising campaigns for last month’s federal election.

The first was a reminder that memorable headlines and taglines work. None of the major parties’ ad campaigns in 2010, 2013 and 2016 had resonated with voters like “Kevin 07” had. But “the Bill you can’t afford” did. It had arisen as a standout line in a Liberal Party ad 11 months before the election. And when the Liberal strategists continued to hear voters discuss the line without being prompted, they quickly shifted their advertising emphasis to it rather than the more straightforward and less memorable “Building our economy. Securing our future”.

Andrew Baxter was interviewed on the University of Sydney Business School’s weekly podcast, The Future This Week, joining hosts Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group).

In this episode, the discussion was around Apple’s privacy push that cuts out marketers, marketing to the algorithm, and robot furniture.

There has been a strong swing toward social media as the primary marketing channel for many tourism and travel brands over the last decade. Not just for those with larger budgets such as the airlines, hotels and tourism bodies, but particularly for smaller destinations and operators including many of Australia’s local indigenous tourism businesses whose marketing budgets can’t compete with the bigger players. This has been because social media in its earliest incarnation required a comparatively smaller investment in marketing.

The question now for many boards and CEOs is whether this heavy reliance on social media is the optimal use of their marketing budgets, particularly now that many of these social media channels are being strongly commercialised and are coming under increasing scrutiny around how they are managing the data they hold.