On the Forrester blog for product management and product marketing, Tom Grant examines the recent trends in marketing and concludes with the following paragraph:

The marketing acumen of yesterday...today!

Product marketers today should not be congratulating themselves on how much smarter they are than the Don Drapers of some mythic marketing past. Instead, we should take a humbler view of how the marketing discipline adapts to current exigencies. That perspective makes it easier to understand why some traditional elements of the marketing mix, such as direct mail, haven't withered in the light of social media.

It seems to shock some new marketers that the traditional channels like direct mail continue to be an important part of the marketing mix.

Perhaps this is due to the wide audience for products with some of the older generation not being the "on-line" connected kiddies that have taken social networking to heart.

I'm not sure that's it though. Different channels have ways of addressing an audience when they are in different moods and while the brand message is now open for discussion on the web the brand image does still need to be promoted with consistency and clarity.

Consumers identify with brands, certainly that brand identity is up for grabs on blogging sites today, but the initial seed still needs to be put out there.

Certain industries are not going to be able to use social computing in the same way and their on line activities may be limited to Google AdWords while still needing to talk to an audience whose first instinct is not to type a search string into Yahoo or the like.

In the rush for the new, we should ensure that we don't ignore other important ways of promoting our brands.