Marketing Concepts and Techniques Challenged
Boyan Yordanof
In order to appraise the new ideas in marketing and particularly in the areas of consumer behaviour and marketing communications, one should initially outline some challenges faced by a number of fundamental marketing concepts as well as by the marketing as a discipline. Micro-marketing, maxi-marketing, database marketing, new marketing, wrap-around marketing, value-added marketing, relationship marketing and neo-marketing are but a few variations of today's marketing. The very fact that there are so many offshoots, is explanative of the eventual disintegration of the science marketing as we know it from the Kotler's books.
The major marketing concept of customer orientation still seems to be a valid reference point. In the contemporary over-informed, over-stressed and hedonistic consumer society the customer is the one who decides to purchase a product, to be loyal to a brand or to switch to a competitor.
The exchange value concept, however, might have been rendered obsolete by the postmodernism. Let us assume that value may be created during consumption, and not during exchange. The emphasis then would be on the customer's personal experience.
According to the traditional theory, consumers are identified, targeted and acquired through a set of strategic tools such as segmentation, targeting and positioning. Different techniques and approaches based on statistical, psychological and sociological principles have been employed in service of these concepts. While these techniques are still in use, a number of processes and mainly the fragmentation of markets will gradually render the traditional bases of segmentation (demographics and psychographics) questionable.
As a result, in today's fragmented markets reality the conventional tools of sociological analysis become outdated. While quantitative research is still widely in use, an array of qualitative techniques are been preferred to "fill the gap" in the knowledge about the postmodern consumer. Among the most frequently mentioned are ethnography, fiction, discourse analysis, personal introspection, and in-depth interviewing.
Since purchases, branding and communications are all moving online, scholars have begun defining the Internet Marketing Segmentation (IMS). Definitions of that sort, alluring as they may look, are simply old concepts in new clothes and some make-up. More important is that new approaches like online ethnography, or netnography are being increasingly used as appropriate research methods. Companies would need to resort to guerrilla tactics and employ people proficient in areas such as online community engineering. Phenomena like brand hijack and decisions on how much power should be given to consumers will eventually speed up the trends that shape contemporary research.
The marketing communication concepts of mass marketing and mass advertising have also been a subject to considerable revision. The so-called mass customisation has been boosted by the use of email marketing, database marketing, RSS and others. The processes of fragmentation and post-consolidation have given birth to new concepts like tribal marketing. Mass advertising and the one-to-many, one-way linear communications have given way to one-to-one, many-to-many, two-way, non-linear communication flow. The Internet has brought also the idea of suck as opposed to the traditional push and pull.
Based on the above, reference points for future research might be the following:
- Postmodern condition;
- Experiential marketing;
- Internet as a new branding tool;
- Customer-based brand equity.