Download or read book Ethical Marketing and The New Consumer written by Chris Arnold and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was once just the desire of a few has now become a mass movement. The everyday shopper may still be searching out the value items but now they are also questioning the ethics of products and brands. Ethical products are increasing in sales year on year and those brands that have ignored it as a value are paying in reduced sales. Empowered, the new consumer is using the pound in their pocket to make a point not just a purchase. But ethical marketing isn’t just about environmentalism, it’s far bigger than that. This book challenges a lot of conventional thinking and introduces you to a wider range of ethics and the many types of ethical consumers. As a brand manager or producer, it’ll give you useful tools to help you understand your Key Ethical Values. How to market and sell them. It’ll blow away a few myths and probably surprise you with a few new facts and statistics. It looks at the positive and negative sides of big brands. And how to avoid greenwash, ethicalwash and becoming a victim of Brand Terrorism. A must for anyone in the eco-ethical market or who wants to enter it. An essential guide to understanding the new consumer and why they buy, what they buy and what they don’t. The book comes with a support website –www.ecoethicalmarketing.info – to allow comment, feedback, links and brands to publish their own case studies.

Download or read book New Consumer Marketing written by Susan Baker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-11-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of the Internet and globalization, the fast moving consumer goods market has been turned on its head and made more competitive than ever. This book synthesizes emerging marketing thinking in the consumer domain with practical advice on how to profit from changes. It illustrates the key issues facing the fast moving consumer goods industry and provides an analysis of cutting-edge management research and academic insight.

Download or read book Boomer Consumer written by Matt Thornhill and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 40 years, companies and organizations have focused their marketing efforts on young adults 18-49 years old. But today's Boomer Consumer, those 78 million Americans born between 1946-64, are either 50 years old or will be soon. And marketers are confused. They don't know how to treat today's older Boomers, who aren't seniors and never will be, but are no longer young adults. Over the past few years, Matt Thornhill and John Martin of the Boomer Project have extensively researched and studied Boomers. They have uncovered key psychological, sociological, and anthropological aspects of this generation. Their research-inspired consumer insights have appeared in stories about Boomers on NBC, CBS, CNBC, MSNBC, and PBS, as well as BusinessWeek, Time, and US News & World Report, and newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. For the first time, the Boomer Project's insights have been packaged into this powerful marketing resource: Boomer Consumer. You'll learn how to connect with and influence this large-and-in-charge generation by using techniques like emotionally compelling messages, the power of story, and life stage instead of age. Plus, you'll come away with ten new rules for marketing to today's Boomer Consumer that can be applied across hundreds of categories. Boomers are far from over the hill as consumers. Companies and organizations that can tap into today's Boomer Consumer will be poised for success for years to come.

Download or read book Marketing to the New Super Consumer written by Timothy J. Coffey and published by Paramount Market Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The New Advertising written by Valerie K. Jones and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 845 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The era of "big data" has revolutionized many industries—including advertising. This is a valuable resource that supplies current, authoritative, and inspiring information about—and examples of—current and forward-looking theories and practices in advertising. The New Advertising: Branding, Content, and Consumer Relationships in the Data-Driven Social Media Era supplies a breadth of information on the theories and practices of new advertising, from its origins nearly a quarter of a century ago, through its evolution, to current uses with an eye to the future. Unlike most other books that focus on one niche topic, this two-volume set investigates the overall discipline of advertising in the modern context. It sheds light on significant areas of change against the backdrop of digital data collection and use. The key topics of branding, content, interaction, engagement, big data, and measurement are addressed from multiple perspectives. With contributions from experts in academia as well as the advertising and marketing industries, this unique set is an indispensable resource that is focused specifically on new approaches to and forms of advertising. Readers will gain an understanding of the distinct shifts that have taken place in advertising. They will be able to build their knowledge on frameworks for navigating and capitalizing on today's fragmented, consumer-focused, digital media landscape, and they will be prepared for what the future of advertising will likely bring.

Download or read book The 1 Page Marketing Plan written by Allan Dib and published by Page Two. This book was released on 2021-01-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WARNING: Do Not Read This Book If You Hate Money To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It's literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it, you'll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth. In this groundbreaking new book you'll discover: - How to get new customers, clients or patients and how to make more profit from existing ones. - Why "big business" style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses. - How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money. - A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan. - How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice. - How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing. - How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.

Download or read book New Consumer Marketing written by Susan Baker and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society written by Elaine L Ritch and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital communication has altered the flow of global information,evolved consumer values and changed consumption practices worldwide.New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society provides an illuminating, challenging and thought-provoking guide for all upper-level students of marketing,branding and consumer behaviour.

Download or read book Win New Customers written by Jean Ginzburg and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-20 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You don't know where to begin. You are frustrated because you don't know all the strategies and tactics to grow your business. You are all over the place-starting one thing, finding that at first sight it might not be working and giving up. Then jumping to the next shiny thing and only to find that, it too has failed. This is known in the community as "shiny object syndrome." You love your idea or product but you don't know how to use digital marketing as a channel for your business. You also feel overwhelmed at all the steps needed to take to get to the final destination and it makes you uneasy. And on top of all that, you are getting customers haphazardly. One month you might have a ton of customers, the next months it's crickets. You have an amazing business and a solid product. And I know you want to get there! I know you want to feel successful. You want to get to the point where you know what you need to do to create a strategy for your business. You understand how to execute on next steps. You don't feel like digital marketing makes your head hurt or is too complex and complicated. You understand all the main components of digital marketing and you know how to use each of the components and at which time. You see your business growing and are excited you've created a successful venture. With this book, I can take you there! I can get you to where you WANT to be. You have probably tried from one to dozens of books, courses and paid programs targeted to entrepreneurs. These courses typically lure entrepreneurs in with amazing results and stretched stories of how someone, somewhere has made thousands of dollars utilizing this one method that will make you rich. This book is different. And do you know why? Because this framework has been refined and perfected over five years. This isn't just a quick system that I set up. This is a framework that worked for my business AND my clients' businesses. This book goes through all the aspects of customer acquisition. You don't need to buy multiple books for how to create funnels or how to run Facebook ads. This book contains the ultimate guide to how to find new customers. This framework is a long-term investment in your business. This isn't about making a quick buck. If you want to invest in your business to have as your own for your revenue stream or to eventually sell, this formula I used to grow my clients' businesses from several thousand dollars per month to 7 figures per year can help you do that.

Download or read book Connecting With Consumers written by Allan J. Kimmel and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are exciting times for business managers and marketing professionals, yet the challenges imposed by ongoing social and technological developments are daunting. In an age in which marketers can reach their audiences with greater facility than ever before, firms have never been less in control of their customer targets. This increasing connectedness of consumers provides a range of unique and promising opportunities for product and brand managers. Connecting With Consumers describes the various strategies and techniques that can be utilized to harness consumer influence. The book traces evolving developments in the consumer marketplace, considers their impact on the potential reshaping of the marketing profession, and describes the emerging set of tools that can enable marketers to respond to new marketplace realities. It provides, clear, up-to-date coverage of a number of topics currently on the minds of many: Web 2.0, word of mouth, buzz, the social web, social media metrics, customer engagement, viral and guerrilla marketing. The book critically assesses emerging marketing strategies and tools within the context of research and theory, and provides numerous applied examples to illustrate marketing successes and common pitfalls to avoid. It argues throughout for a more collaborative relationship between companies and consumers towards their mutual benefit. Although the balance of power has shifted to the consumer for each of the various aspects of the marketing process, collaboration is what the future of marketing likely will be all about. Marketers can avoid irrelevance in the face of change, but this will require a clear commitment to connecting with consumers rather than searching for ways to regain control over them. The book challenges marketers to make a choice: embrace the ongoing changes as opportunities for reshaping relationships with consumers, or cling to the past at the risk of becoming irrelevant. This is the book for those who choose the first alternative.

Download or read book Quantum Marketing written by Raja Rajamannar and published by HarperCollins Leadership. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing Officer of Mastercard, shares breakthrough, frontier strategies to navigate the challenges that result from today’s unprecedented disruption. As technology has continually evolved in the last several decades, marketing has had to change with it, evolving through four significant stages that build on the strategies and tools of the previous era. What happens next in the fifth stage, or Fifth Paradigm, will not be an evolution, but a revolution. Almost everything about how marketing is done today, including the very notion of a brand itself, will require a complete re-imagination. As Chief Marketing Officer of Mastercard, one of the world’s most recognizable and decorated brands, Raja Rajamannar shares the forward-thinking ways all businesses must rethink their entire marketing landscape to remain relevant and be successful. In Quantum Marketing, readers will: Understand the evolution of marketing and how to be at the forefront of future change. Get clarity on the right marketing strategies and tactics to pursue amidst an ever-evolving industry. Achieve breakthroughs in innovative thinking to compete in modern business. Gain perspective from top marketers across industries. Quantum Marketing is for all business people who seek to understand how rapidly marketing is evolving, what marketers are doing to get ready for this shift, and what the new world will look like for companies, consumers, and society as the race to develop revolutionary marketing strategies reaches a whole new level.

Download or read book The New Rules of Marketing and PR written by David Meerman Scott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The international bestseller—now in a new edition When it comes to marketing, anything goes in the Digital Age, right? Well, not quite. While marketing and public relations tactics do seem to change overnight, every smart businessperson knows that it takes a lot more than the 'next big thing.' The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an international bestseller with more than 375,000 copies sold in twenty-nine languages. In the latest edition of this pioneering guide to the future of marketing, you'll get a step-by-step action plan for leveraging the power of the latest approaches to generating attention for your idea or your business. You'll learn how get the right information to the right people at the right time—at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. The Internet continues to change the way people communicate and interact with each other, and if you're struggling to keep up with what's trending in social media, online videos, apps, blogs, or more, your product or service is bound to get lost in the ether. In The New Rules of Marketing & PR, you'll get access to the tried-and-true rules that will keep you ahead of the curve when using the latest and greatest digital spaces to their fullest PR, marketing, and customer-communications potential. Keeping in mind that your audience is savvy and crunched for time, this essential guide shows you how to cut through the online clutter to ensure that your message gets seen and heard. Serves as the ideal resource for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, PR professionals, and non-profit managers Offers a wealth of compelling case studies and real-world examples Includes information on new platforms including Facebook Live and Snapchat Shows both small and large organizations how to best use Web-based communication Finally, everything you need to speak directly to your audience and establish a personal link with those who make your business work is in one place.

Download or read book The Future of Marketing written by Nicholas Johnson and published by FT Press. This book was released on 2015-05-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinvent marketing for your radically new environment: smarter, faster, more agile, more customer-driven! In this "by marketers, for marketers" primer, Nicholas Johnson offers evidence-based guidance for transforming what you do, and how you do it. The Future of Marketing shows how to anticipate and respond to relentless change in channels, media options, organizational relationships, technologies, markets, products, services – and most important of all, customers. Johnson investigates each key emerging trend marketers are facing, from shifting customer expectations and fragmenting media landscapes to the challenge of synthesizing vast troves of data into actionable knowledge. He explains how these trends are eradicating ‘marketing’ as we know it, and helps you respond by refashioning organizational structures, marketing campaigns, marketer roles, and much more. You’ll learn how to: ¿ Move from "campaigning" to storytelling and authentic conversations ¿ Achieve true ‘real-time marketing" and greater agility throughout the marketing function ¿ Migrate from big TV buys to a pervasive multi-channel/omni-channel approach ¿ Accelerate marketing processes, eliminate bureaucracy, and optimize agility ¿ Mitigate risk when everything’s moving at lightspeed ¿ And much more Johnson supports his recommendations by taking you behind the scenes with some of the world’s top marketing teams, at companies including L’Oreal, Old Navy, Time Warner, Adidas, HP, McDonalds, Wells Fargo, and Universal. These highly-successful marketers have recognized that they too must change to flourish in a radically new environment. Johnson shows how they’re planning and executing those changes – and how you can, too. Whether you’re a marketing executive, strategist, or manager, The Future of Marketing offers what your organization needs most: a clear path forward.

Download or read book Digital and Social Media Marketing written by Nripendra P. Rana and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines issues and implications of digital and social media marketing for emerging markets. These markets necessitate substantial adaptations of developed theories and approaches employed in the Western world. The book investigates problems specific to emerging markets, while identifying new theoretical constructs and practical applications of digital marketing. It addresses topics such as electronic word of mouth (eWOM), demographic differences in digital marketing, mobile marketing, search engine advertising, among others. A radical increase in both temporal and geographical reach is empowering consumers to exert influence on brands, products, and services. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital media are having a significant impact on the way people communicate and fulfil their socio-economic, emotional and material needs. These technologies are also being harnessed by businesses for various purposes including distribution and selling of goods, retailing of consumer services, customer relationship management, and influencing consumer behaviour by employing digital marketing practices. This book considers this, as it examines the practice and research related to digital and social media marketing.

Download or read book The Digital Marketing Landscape written by Jessica Rogers and published by Business Expert Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is geared towards both students and professionals looking to explore the interconnectedness of digital technologies for marketing and branding purposes. The field of marketing has seen an evolution in how brands communicate with consumers, how consumers communicate with brands, and how consumers communicate with one another. Digital technologies such as mobile phones, the internet, social media, and email contribute to what is known as the digital marketing landscape. Digital marketing offers unique ways to meet consumers where they are, engage with potential and existing consumers, capture the voice of the consumer; allow consumers to be part of a brand narrative. This book is geared towards both students and professionals looking to explore the interconnectedness of digital technologies for marketing and branding purposes. This book offers an overview of the digital marketing landscape and how the various elements of digital can work synergistically. When the power of an integrated digital strategy is optimized, both consumers and brands benefit. The Digital Marketing Landscape serves as a practical guide for both students and professionals in a variety of settings. Readers will become familiar with terminology, understand how the different areas of digital marketing connect and work together, and gain the knowledge needed to generate valuable and actionable managerial insights for more informed decision-making.

Download or read book Convergence Marketing written by Yoram Wind and published by Ft Press. This book was released on 2002-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface: Running with the Centaur "A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator." —Paul Valery, French Poet and Philosopher The Internet revolution didn't turn out to be anything like we thought it would be. At the end of the 1990s, the discussion of many observers, we among them, focused on the rise of the "cyberconsumer" and the emergence of "Internet marketing." At the extreme, the image of this cyberconsumer was humorously caricatured in a series of Sprint commercials introducing its wireless web, in which people hunched over their computers in dark rooms were invited at long last to step out into the sunlit world. The business model designed for the cyberconsumer was the "pure play" Internet firm, either a separate dot-com or a stand-alone division of a larger company. But the cyberconsumer was largely a myth. Consumers didn't behave anything like we thought they would. Today, we are entering the age of the centaur. Consumers act across multiple channels. They combine timeless human needs and behaviors with new online activities. They are like the centaur of Greek mythology--half human and half horse—running with the rapid feet of new technology, yet carrying the same ancient and unpredictable human heart. This consumer is a combination of traditional and cyber, rational and emotional, wired and physical. This consumer is not either/or, but both. The authors came to this center from opposite directions. Jerry Wind was an early champion of digital marketing, highlighting the revolutionary changes of the Internet on consumer behavior, marketing and business strategy. He urged executives to consider the potential of this new technology to transform their businesses. Vijay Mahajan pointed out that not everything had changed, and that many aspects of consumer behavior and marketing remained the same. He urged executives to consider the enduring human characteristics that would continue to shape marketing and business strategy. As we discussed the issue from these two viewpoints, working on a series of projects that led to this book, we came to the conclusion that we were both right: the reality was the hybrid consumer. This is not to suggest that there are three separate segments (traditional, cyberconsumer and centaur). The reality is convergence. The entire market is becoming centaurs, either directly or indirectly (even if someone is not online, their behavior will still be affected by new technologies, channels and products, and service offerings). This is why we focus so much on the centaur. The centaurs, in turn, are heterogeneous, so there will be many segments among these hybrid consumers. Even the most tech savvy of U.S. consumers—the 18 to 25 year olds of Generation Y—are not strictly cyberconsumers. A recent survey of more than 600 Gen-Y respondents (51 percent of whom had made online purchases in the past year) found that nearly 40 percent learned about the product online, but bought at a physical store, whereas only 9.3 percent began and ended their search online. When asked where they would prefer to shop, nearly three-quarters chose a store rather than online. Across the spectrum, consumers are combining various channels and approaches, searching online to buy offline, searching offline to buy online—and everything in between. Charles Schwab found that while about 90 percent of all trades are handled online, 60-70 percent of new accounts are set up in branch offices. People want to be able to see whom they are working with when they turn over their money. Benefits of Convergence The power of hybrid models can be seen in the success of Tesco, which raced past pioneers such as Peapod and Webvan to become the largest online grocer in the world. Tesco, using its century-old platform of retail stores in the U.K. as the launching pad for its online service, created a profitable online business that was handling 70,000 orders per week by mid 2001 and had racked up more than $400 million in sales the year before. Tesco could set up its online grocery business for a fraction of the investment of Webvan because it was able to build off its existing infrastructure. Tesco has moved into the U.S. market, purchasing a 35 percent investment in Safeway's online grocery service in June 2001, and announcing plans for expansion into South Korea. The power and profit of the hybrid model can also be seen in the success of Staples.com, which expected to grow online revenues to $1 billion in 2001, nearly 10 percent of company sales. Even more significant, Staples found that the addition of the new channel is not cannibalistic, but synergistic. Overall, customers who shop in the store and catalog spend twice as much as those who shop in the store alone, and customers that shop using the store, catalog, and online channels spend an average of $2,500, nearly four times as much as store shoppers. The results achieved by Staples and other firms offer a sense of the potential return on investment from meeting the centaur. Convergence strategies offer a variety of opportunities for generating new revenues, reducing costs and creating valuable options for the future. Changing Mind Sets There is emerging evidence of the immediate benefits of convergence strategies, if investments are made strategically, but these short-term gains are not the only opportunity. Our focus is to look at the opportunities, both short- and long-term, created by the emergence of the hybrid consumer and how companies can capitalize on these opportunities. The last category may be the most important: the options that convergence strategies create for the future. This book takes a broader view of the strategic impact of the centaur for marketing and business strategy, and the architecture of the organization. If you believe, as we do, that the centaur is the future of our markets, then the ability to succeed in the future depends on understanding and "running with" the centaur. Failure to understand these changes creates the risk of significant lost opportunities. What can the integration of the offline marketplace and the online marketspace do for consumers that neither can do alone? What business principles will guide the integration? How is marketing changing? How do these shifts affect short-term and long-term profitability and growth? What Is Converging Convergence, as we discuss it here, means more than the fusion of different technologies (television, computers, wireless, PDAs) or the combination of channels (such as Tesco's or Staple's bricks-and-clicks model). We focus on a more basic convergence within the consumer—the new possibilities created by the technology and the enduring behaviors of human beings. This convergence will shape how the Internet and other new technologies unfold, and the opportunities created for companies. What can consumers do with the technology that they could not do in the past? When will they continue to do things in the way they always have? Although most of the focus in this book is on business-to-consumer interactions, many of the insights apply equally to business-to-business strategy. The line between B2B and B2C is already blurring. In an environment in which Sun Microsystems is selling products on eBay, is this B2B or B2C? In an environment in which a customer may soon be able to click an order button for an automobile and set in motion a global supply chain to deliver that car, where does B2C end and B2B begin? Lessons from the Dot-Coms This book examines the practices of a variety of companies, but we must stress at the outset that these firms are not held up as ultimate models. They all have something to teach us, but many of the successful companies of a year or two ago are now fighting for their lives. And some companies that were all but written off are back in force. We suspect the same unpredictable dynamic will be seen in the future. This is a particularly dangerous time to engage in benchmarking or to search for excellence. It is not a time for simple recipes. Instead, it is far more important to gain a deeper understanding of how consumers are changing and how they are remaining the same. The actions of these hybrid consumers will shape the way technology is adopted and, ultimately, the future of your markets. We should take a balanced view of dot-com failures. Mark Twain once said, "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it." Twain gives the example of a cat who sits on a hot stove, and learns not to sit on a hot stove again—but also won't sit on a cold stove. The failures of the first wave of dot-coms offer many lessons about what to do, and what not to do, but we need to be careful in taking lessons from them. Although some of the companies that failed had weak business models, some actually had brilliant marketing strategies and business models. The failure of the business is not necessarily an indictment of the idea. Some may have arrived slightly ahead of their time. Some may have suffered from poor execution. It may be that the time is now right for these ideas to flourish. During the Internet bubble, we have engaged in one of the most extensive, investor-financed experiments in new business models and paradigms. There has been an explosion of experimentation. Although many of these experiments proved to be unprofitable, many new ideas were developed and tested. Incumbent companies and startups that are still alive can benefit greatly from the acceleration of knowledge from this dot-com "school of hard knocks." Pick through the wreckage and look carefully at what happened. Then take away the lessons that you can use. The Implications of the Centaur In this book, we offer insights to top executives and key organizational change agents on the characteristics and behavior of these hybrid centaurs and how we need to reshape our marketing and business strategy to meet them. The book explores different intersections between the consumer, technology and company and their implications for marketing and business strategy and organizational design. We examine the emergence of the centaur, and the marketing, business and organizational challenges and opportunities created. Part I offers a portrait of this centaur, what has changed and what remains the same. We also discuss how the focus on the customer has often been lost in the emphasis on technology. These centaurs are complex beings, with a love-hate relationship with the technology, buying books from Amazon.com one day and relaxing in an armchair sipping cappuccino at Barnes & Noble the next. Part II explores issues at the intersection between the consumer and technology. We consider five key issues at the core of addressing these new hybrid consumers—customerization, communities, channel options, new competitive value propositions, and choice tools. Although these issues have been discussed in the context of the cyberconsumer, they are quite different from the perspective of the centaur. Sometimes consumers want customerization (customized products and services as well as customized marketing), but other times they want to pull standard products off the shelf and receive mass marketing messages. Consumers are members of both physical and virtual communities. The hybrid consumers want to be able—in the words of Fidelity—to "call, click, or visit." They are redefining the traditional sources of value, buying products by auction or fixed price or name-your-own price depending on their mood and purchase situation, creating a new value equation. Finally, the Internet offers powerful tools to find information, make decisions, and manage one's life. These tools empower consumers, changing the way they interact with the company. How can you create convergence strategies to address these interrelated issues? Part III examines the impact of the centaur on marketing and business strategies. As the consumer connects much more directly to companies, marketing has a deeper role to play. Marketing creates new opportunities for growth and rethinking the company's offering, pricing and market boundaries. The centaur has also transformed the traditional 4 Ps of marketing, along with strategies for segmentation, positioning, customer relationships, branding, and marketing research. As these changes send shockwaves through the organization, another type of convergence is called for—in organizational design. Part IV explores some of the fundamental transformations established organizations need to undergo to meet the centaur. To navigate the whitewater rapids of convergence and change, organizations need new organizational architectures. They need to change their architectures, creating a broader "c-change" to facilitate convergence across the organization and its ecosystem. The overall objective is to suggest a new consumer-centric mental model through which to examine the entire business. The kind of shift we are talking about is what Bill Gates describes in the transformation of Microsoft's original mission of "a PC on every desk" to its current mission to "empower people through great software, any time, any place and on any device." The focus is on the convergence of technology and consumer needs. This book is designed to be an interactive experience. Each chapter begins with a dialogue representing different viewpoints on convergence. Callouts highlight key convergence questions that you can use to challenge yourself and to assess your company's progress. Finally, the close of every chapter offers an "action memo," a set of illustrative hands-on experiments for exploring and applying convergence strategies. We have found the only way to master these new technologies and strategies is to actually experience them and apply them to your own business. These "action memos" are not intended to be exhaustive or to summarize key themes of the chapter, but represent a starting point for your own experiments. We encourage you to share those experiments with us, and other readers, at the Convergence Marketing Forum (convergencemarketingforum.com). The Relentless March of the Centaur As Internet penetration increases—and new technologies emerge—we are seeing a relentless march of these new hybrid centaurs. We cannot judge the potential of the Internet and other technologies by their current primitive level of development. John Hagel, author of Net Gain and Net Worth, says if we compare the Internet to a ballgame, we are still waiting for the national anthem to finish. Michael Nelson, Director of Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM, estimated in 2000 that we were maybe 3 percent of the way into the Internet revolution. He also points out that increased speed of connection, which has been a central focus of attention in the evolution of the Internet, is only a small part of the power of the emerging online world. In addition to raw speed, the fact that the Internet will be always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted, will deepen the role of the Internet in our lives. Nelson compares the development of the Internet to the early days of the electric grid. "The Internet right now is at the light bulb stage," Nelson said. "The light bulb is very useful, but it is only one of thousands of uses of electricity. Similarly, when the next-generation Internet is fully deployed, we will use it in thousands of different ways, many of which we can't even imagine now. It will just be part of everyday life—like electricity or plumbing is today. We'll know we've achieved this when we stop talking about 'going on the Internet.' When you blow dry your hair, you don't talk about 'going on' the electric grid." There will be naysayers who will use the limitations of the current state of technology as a reason for inaction. Customization is often neither cheap nor simple. Early interfaces with online sites were clunky at best and many home connections remain slow. Throughout this book, we look at the current and future potential of technology and explore how the consumer will interact with it. We won't waste your time giving you a repair manual for a Model T, but instead explore how motor vehicles (particularly newer, more reliable versions) create opportunities for activities such as commerce and family vacations by car. While we must be realistic, we cannot become too mired in the past when the future is so rapidly emerging. Children of Centaurs: In the Forests of the North It is clear that we are just getting started with the Internet, and we are even earlier on the learning curve for the new wireless consumers beginning to emerge. Even as businesses are scurrying to absorb the revolution of the Internet, teenagers in Europe and Asia are already shaping the next revolution in mobile communication and commerce. This revolution will play out differently in different parts of the world, and it will probably play out differently than we expect, unless we truly understand the new hybrid consumer. It poses new convergence challenges, but raises the same timeless questions: How will consumers interact with the technology? Again, this interaction between people and technology will not always be as businesses anticipated. Helsinki teenager Lauri Taehtinen, speaking on a panel of Finnish teenagers at the Wharton Fellows in e-Business Program, said that when he goes out on a Friday night, he doesn't make plans anymore. Instead the 19-year-old goes downtown and starts sending short messages on his mobile phone, pinging his friends to see who's out there. They connect by cell phone and then decide where they want to go for the evening. While companies are excited about developing mobile information services that might help customers identify night clubs or order fast food, Taehtinen and his peers are more interested in connection. In an environment in which virtually every teenager carries a mobile phone (Finnish market penetration of 78 percent means almost every citizen above the age of 10 carries at least one mobile phone), the mobile conversation is continuous and ubiquitous. Among U.K. teens, short messages outnumber phone conversations three to one, and the parallel phenomenon of instant messaging is one of the most popular applications of teenagers on the PC in the United States and other parts of the world. The very fact that short messages (SMS) are the top application of mobile phones in Finland is, at first, a surprising thing. The handsets, designed for voice, are not friendly to the process of messaging. Users tap out their 160-word messages on numeric keyboards through complex, rapid-fire keystrokes, smart systems, and creative workarounds. With users paying a charge to send each message on most systems, it would seem unlikely that SMS would be a central part of the mobile phone business. But these young centaurs want to communicate, and they don't let the technology get in their way. It was only in the interaction between consumers and technology that that power of short messages became apparent. Just as email has been the killer application of the Internet, mobile technology is being bent to the human desire to communicate and connect. "People don't want to be entertained," Taehtinen bluntly states. "They don't want information. If you go into Internet cafes, you see people are not reading the news; they are all sending email or chatting online. They are willing to pay for social interaction. People want to belong to something." Enduring Lessons While communications and information technology may be ephemeral and uncertain, there are at least two enduring lessons: The first is that the new technologies, as much as their proponents may want them to, do not replace the old. They live side by side, and they converge. The second is that people are complex, retaining the same enduring human needs even as they adapt to new technologies and behaviors. These may seem like fairly obvious, even simplistic, statements. But they have been overlooked more often than recognized in the mad rush to adopt new technology. These realities have fundamental implications for marketing and business strategy. What they mean is that there needs to be a convergence of the old technology and the new to create a portfolio of technologies and channels. The storefront and catalog don't go away when you add the Internet. And, even more important, there is an interaction between humans and technology that changes both. There is a convergence of old consumer behaviors and new behaviors that affects the trajectory of technology, the strategies for marketing and, ultimately, the design of the business. More Human The wonderful thing about our interactions with machines is not in the ways machines can be made to behave in more human ways, but in the way these interactions make it easier for us to see what distinguishes us as humans. The more we move to machine-mediated interactions, the more we see the fundamental and enduring behaviors that are at the core of marketing and business strategy. It is this interaction between man and machine that is changing us, transforming the practice of marketing and our organizations. In this book, we examine how we need to transform our thinking about the nature of these emerging consumers. We explore how to reach these centaurs and establish long-lasting relationships with them. We look at the ways that they remain the same and the ways that they are fundamentally different in their expectations and behaviors. And we consider how they have irrevocably changed—and continue to change—the theory and practice of marketing, and the design of our organizations.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society written by Elaine L. Ritch and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital communication has altered the flow of global information, evolved consumer values and changed consumption practices worldwide. New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society provides an illuminating, challenging and thought providing guide for all upper-level students of marketing, branding and consumer behaviour.