Innovision Spring 2020

SPRING 2020 | 15 DR. VICTORMASSAD Business Administration MARKETING TRENDS Imagine that a resourceful inventor developed a system for catching mice in his house by luring them into traps with soothing music and the promise of cheese. The system functions well for over 50 years, but then one day, the inventor comes home and discovers thousands of mice scattering throughout his house. He tests his system and finds it functions just as designed, but the mice were no longer affected by it. This is the extent to which the digital revolution has upended marketing as a social science and as a functional specialty that is practiced in modern business organizations. Marketing began as a discipline that was taught in universities in the post-WW2 era. It arose out of the development of mass media (particularly television) and the need for companies to better understand how to utilize mass media to sell goods and services. The discipline borrowed heavily from two areas of study that had already developed long streams of related research: psychology and economics. The paradigms that came out of marketing generally focused on how consumer attitudes predict consumer buying behavior and what the monetary value of attitudinal change might be. For example, a study might demonstrate that a small percentage increase in consumer preference for a particular brand results in a predictable increase in sales for that brand. These paradigms were successful because the dominant medium of the post-war era was television: a medium that enabled marketers to change the attitudes of passive audiences fairly easily. The entire discipline was organized around questions such as: what consumers are most likely to be persuaded, what types of products and brands were most likely to have success using particular tactics of persuasion, which particular types of attitudes were easily changed and which were not. The “rules of thumb” that came out of marketing were imperfect, but worked reasonably well. With the onset of digital technology and interactivity, everything went topsy-turvy. Digital technology transformed both the consumer and the marketer. With the onset of the internet, and later social media, consumers had more information available to them than ever before, and they used this information to drive down prices, eliminate middle men and force efficiency into the buying process. Marketers discovered that attitudes were no longer predictive of buying behavior; but they, too, had more information, and they used the information they had about consumers – everything from search and browsing behaviors to social media preferences – to sell products in the marketplace. This new system, based on digital behaviors predicting buying behaviors, works much better than the traditional system, based on attitudes predicting behaviors. The problem with the new system is that it isn’t really marketing as we have taught it and practiced it for 70 years. Perhaps the most significant development that results from all of this is that students who choose marketing as a major because they like people are quickly losing out to people who understand numbers, a trend that is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.