Evolution of Marketing in this decade
The market is in your hands today! There is a lot to cheer about for consumers who have been empowered like never before with information, potential information that helps them make important decisions, most of which are buying decisions satisfying their materialistic ego.
There is another side to the story. The marketers have come closer to you than you think and they have invaded your privacy and your personal lives. The digital technology and mobile computing devices have made all this possible while you were busy buying the latest smart phones and gadgets for your loved ones and filling small customer response forms inside a swanky departmental store or a mall.
Market research firms, data analysis software, and analytical wizards have all dissected our behavior to the benefit of marketers who are constantly and consistently trying to update their CRM databases with an aim not to miss out on any link to a changing behavioral pattern and stimuli to a possible change in our response to certain parameter. With such close and virtually invisible interaction taking place between marketer and consumer, the message that marketers have been trying to convey has become more personalized than generalized, and is also more targeted at the focused audience through various points of contact with media. No wonder, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are some of the most exciting fields for the current breed of software enthusiasts.
The advantage of such evolved marketing and communications is further enhanced by the quality of content, thus, despite having so many more brands and products in market today, the message gets ensconced in consumer’s mind and brand recall thus gets easier because the message does not focus on the product attributes rather than how it makes our lives de-stressed and easy. Not that this was not the case earlier but now with visuals so easily being viewed with 4G connectivity, the consumer has the option to make informed decisions at his or her choice of time.
Increased competition has also helped, it has actually benefitted the average consumer in a sense that delivery of quality and prompt service has improved vastly. And there are companies who have improved their services and have been able to quickly collect and collate feedback data and response from customers and use it as a word-of-mouth publicity and marketing tool.
The share of internet marketing will further go up in India as companies and marketers ascertain that the impact of digital marketing is positive and it actually gives decent return of their investments.
This decade has seen some conventional media going obsolete with digital technology, e.g. yellow pages being substituted with “just dial” kind of services, sale of music CDs being substituted with freely downloadable audio, and with the advent of e-commerce platforms, the retail industry facing challenging times getting buyers inside their stores.
One sector that has witnessed exponential growth is the online gaming and entertainment industry. Not just kids, even the elders have hooked on to gaming to satisfy their thrill, adventure and romance buds. With the advent of Netflix and Amazon Prime and a plethora of other home entertainment channels have totally changed the face of home entertainment or rather mobile entertainment. Fresh ideas and concepts, complemented by excellent content, drive this industry, and it has taken the industry by storm. Such is the popularity that we find our favorite movie stars and celebrities featuring in some of the super hit series. The current Covid-19 driven crisis has even further fueled the acceptability of mobile entertainment industry.
The whole supply-chain dynamics and logistics have seen dramatic turnaround. E-mails didn’t make post-offices and courier & cargo shut shop because the physical traffic of buyers to retail stores got replaced with people shopping online and thus more valuable and pricey items started getting shipped.
It was much anticipated about 3 years ago that e-book reader and tablets can pull off people from buying fictions and non-fictions in paperback and hard-cover but jury is still undecided and divided largely because readers probably are loyal enough to retain some old world charm instead of falling prey to gadgets for something as naïve as reading. Some things, they say, are worth keeping in ‘black and white’ on their living room cupboards, rather than in e-files!!
Marketing 3.0 is largely driven by smartphones’ penetration with an aim to capture the buyer’s viewshare as and when data is consumed.
