How Innovation and Changes in Modern Information Technologies are Changing Corporate Marketing Strategies, and the way Consumers Purchase their Goods

What is Traditional Corporate Marketing?

• Advertising – using TV, Newspapers, Radio, Billboards etc. to display a message about a particular product
•    Public Relations- conscious attempts by a company to be seen by society as socially beneficial or as a good product
•  Branding-  “ a mechanism for growth (Barbara E. Kahn)”, identifiers that label and help distinguish a company and its products from their competition
•   Corporate Communications- the ability for a corporation to establish action plans amongst itself. “72% of CEO’s and decision makers are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and 77% have had it with talk about brand equity that can not be linked to actual firm equity  (Lee, Harvard Business Review)”

What is Changing in Marketing?

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•   Customers Reliance - People no longer rely solely on marketing and advertisement for product information
•   “O- Continuum” -  Other information sources such as user reviews, expert opinions, advice from people you know on social media, etc. (Simonson, Rosen- Stanford)
•  Absolute Value -  what the product actually does and what benefits it will provide to it’s consumer is growing increasingly important, eliminating quality proxies such as brand loyalty
•  Continuous Consumer Needs Changes - Acknowledging this allows for lean research models, and flexible marketing techniques.

 Why Technology is Changing the Consumer Behavior Status Quo in the Digital Age

           

Consumers are the lifeblood of all business. If no one buys a product, it does not matter how well or cheaply the company can make it, the corporation will have no revenue and certainly no profit. Since this is the case, the means of understanding the way a customer acts is the business of all marketers.

When innovations such as the Internet, social media, smartphones, tablets and recordable cable come out,  the job of marketers becomes even more challenging. By using the Internet, consumers now have access to enormous amounts of information about almost every product available to them. Combine the tool of the Internet with the increasing functionality  of mobile devices and a recipe of instant information is created.

In the book Absolute Value, by Stanford University Professor of Marketing, Itamar Simonson, and Emanuel Rosen, the author of the national bestseller The Anatomy of Buzz, the concept of how customers are increasingly searching for products of the highest value to them is reviewed. This means that a customer with the ability to rapidly find mass quantities of reviews and forums discussing what they are interested in purchasing, is at a very real advantage. This ensures a more customer-centered experience in every way.

Customers have become a very intimate part of the marketing experience with expanding web usage and other technologies involved in e-commerce. During a segment of my interview with Dr. Mark Wellman, of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, he mentions how this process has impacted business and consumer expenditure. Through increased mass media and communication technologies such as: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp, and widely used forum sites, the Internet and world population are more collaborative than ever before. While the consensus of consumers currently is that this type of interface is very beneficial, it was not an overnight process or one that marketing firms could easily predict.

In a study of 10,000 people, a global media company named Universal McCann did research on whether consumers were in need of a universal and convergent product. This was around the time of the first iPhone, so the topic was one of much debate.  The strange results concluded that countries such as Mexico and India were interested in such a product, while more affluent counties, such as the US,  were not as much.

As stated in the Universal McCann study, “There is no real need for a convergent product in the U.S, Germany and Japan, places where, one researcher later theorized, users would not be motivated to replace their existing digital cameras, cellphones and MP3 players with one device that did everything.”

At the time this study was conducted this may have been the case; however,   one does not need to be a researcher to understand how wildly off this statement has become in 2015 and beyond. The iPhone, as well as other smart devices which blend camera, cellphone, and an Mp3 player with much more, is now sold all over the Unites States. Estimated sales of these smart devices go well beyond the 31% of Americans who say they would have need of such a device in the study.

 This study highlights the idea that the consumer is an ever-evolving force, and that marketers must be ready to adjust their means of approaching this customer to whatever the current demand is. In today’s digital age, that approach has been focused in information technologies and targeting customers based on known patterns and searches on their favorite Internet sites.

How Marketers are Adjusting to new Innovations and the new Consumer Behavior Status Quo

          In my interview with Dr. Wellman, a specialist in business and innovation, he pointed out how the “pervasiveness of technology” was influencing the changes we see in modern marketing. The fact that mobile devices are now such an integral part of our lives, people are always connected to the Internet and social media allowing access to information at an absurdly faster pace than ever before in history. This also means that the marketing firms trying to sell their products have constant access to their consumers; and that those looking to capitalize on their own business ideas have a much faster way of spreading the word about their own projects.

            In the “Rethinking Marketing” article, by the Harvard Business Review, the authors discuss the concept of Consumer Managers. This title is to be used instead of titles like Marketing Manager and Director of Sales when describing a new age marketer.  The concept relies on the idea that in order to sell products these days, marketers need to behave more like behavioral scientists and less like brand managers.

According to the article, “We’d expect the most effective customer managers to have broad training in the social sciences—psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics—in addition to an understanding of marketing. They’d approach the customer as behavioral scientists rather than as marketing specialists, observing and collecting information about them, interacting with and learning from them, and synthesizing and disseminating what they learned. For business schools to stay relevant in training customer managers, the curriculum needs to shift its emphasis from marketing products to cultivating customers.”

            This pulling away from formal branding to a more customer-based economy is something also cited by Barbara Kahn of Wharton in her book, “Global Brand Power: How Branding Has Changed.” She, too, acknowledges that marketers must start to make this change or the brands they have worked so hard to build will not be able to compete with those making a better, more positively reviewed product.

Why these Changes to a More Consumer Driven Economy Mean a More Positive and Productive Future

            Dr. Wellman,  an expert in innovation, has predicted that these innovations are only going to keep happening and become more disruptive each time. This gives even more leeway for hopeful entrepreneurs to become competitive in the global marketplace versus the large established brands.

            The world will benefit from this, because now instead of focusing on just how they sell a product, businesses will need to be hyper focused on what they are selling and who is purchasing the item.  This will result in a better standard of living for all, and increased opportunity for those looking to pursue such business.

Consumer Interviews: