It all comes to wither customers will find what they need or companies will search for what they need regardless of the different names: inbound or outbound marketing. My thought is, it is not either black or weight, for a start up company, they need good amount of outbound marketing for people to know that there are different providers for the thing they are looking for, once a given company has been know in the market, then I see that the outbound marketing get ineffective for various reasons. First, people are subjected to a huge amount of marketing materials that causes headache, and the best evidence is that people are willing now to pay for ad-free radio!
Another reason is that it is not environmentally friendly specially considering the amount of papers consumed in mail-in adds for example, it is huge, and soon there will be movement to stop such irritating behavior of sending unwanted add to people direct mail boxed.
Third, consumer’s behavior is greatly shifting, being able to make smarter purchasing decisions due to the availability of needed information through INTERNET. One can spend 10 minutes to evaluate all of a given product or a service by clicks, where hundreds of reviews are already in placed details other consumers’ experiences.
At the end, you cannot fool the consumers any more, all what you can do is that you really concentrate on providing what he/she needs, then, and only then, he/she can easily finds you.
Are you saying that any company -- large or small, any industry, any type of customer base -- can survive on inbound marketing these days?
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