The fundamental reason why David C. Edelman, Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman and Gaurav Bhalla explore deep changes in modern marketing is the ascent of digital media, most notably, social media. On the one hand, they establish perfect opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to track customers’ preferences. On the other, people tend to use digital media to choose the product they want to purchase. Customers are eager to report their positive or negative experience with the product, so that companies’ accent on marketing in digital media could not only illuminate negative effects, but turn out to be leverage in promoting sales through advocating. Altogether, the development of new media has transformed the one way communication between the manufacturers and the customer into a two way one. These changes require manufacturers’ response to meet new demands. That is what “Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places” and “Rethinking Marketing” were about.
I am deeply concerned about ecological issues. But I also like drinking Coca-Cola. When I discovered that Coca-Cola identifies itself as genuinely environmentally company and hold regular initiative dedicated to raise public awareness about packaging and recycling (En.coca-colahellenic.cz, 2015), it established a long-term emotional bond between me and the product. The ideas, laid down in the article “Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places”, are now manifested by chief executives of global companies. For instance, Muhtar Kent, Coca-Cola, said “Consumers no longer vote for a product or buy a product because it tastes good. That is not enough anymore. They want to essentially believe in the character of the company (wrap.org.uk, 2015).”
Also, another example of customer oriented performance is Google. I generally use Google as a search engine because it provides better services, compared to other search engines, but I am deeply fascinated by the amount of Google’s initiatives to popularize programming among youth as well as to provide free opportunity to learn programming. For instance, in 2014 Google spent $ 50 million on initiative to engage New York area high school girls in learning coding (della Cava, 2014). Such initiatives create positive image of the brand, so that I can not only advocate Google’s product to my friend because of their quality, but because my support to Google’s philosophy and background.
When it comes to fundamental shift in marketing, described in the article “Rethinking Marketing”, I think we can witness them both in term of how customers choose what to purchase and how marketers present their good. Nowadays, when customers decide to establish a long-term relation with the brand, they spend efforts to examine the performance of a certain product and a company’s activity, including its social initiatives. When a customer is satisfied with all these factors, he may become a proponent of a brand, advocating it to his friends and colleagues.
The other feature of modern marketing is abundance of brands and appropriate information about them. This means if a customer is not ready to conduct a deep research before buying some product, he or she will buy the product either advocated by friends, or that, which is easier and cheaper to find. The latter case was described in the article, when married men with children were offered discounts on beer, while buying diapers (Rust, Moorman & Bhalla, 2010). The latter case together with digital capabilities to analyze big data, deriving from customers’ purchasing information, enables companies to develop a more personal attitude to clients and thus increase selling in short-term context.
References:
della Cava, M. (2014). $50 million Google coding initiative targets girls. USA TODAY. Retrieved 17 July 2015, from http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/19/google-coding-initiative-targets-girls/10785475/
En.coca-colahellenic.cz,. (2015). Coca-Cola Hellenic CZ and SK - Packaging and recycling. Retrieved 17 July 2015, from http://www.en.coca-colahellenic.cz/Towardssustainabilit/Environment/Packagingandrecyclin/
Rust, R., Moorman, C., & Bhalla, G. (2010). Rethinking Marketing. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 17 July 2015, from https://hbr.org/2010/01/rethinking-marketing
wrap.org.uk,. (2015). London 2012 Legacy Transfer Report: Recycling Communications. Retrieved 17 July 2015, from http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/WRAP%20London%202012%20Legacy%20Transfer%20Report%20-%20Recycling%20Communications%20Coca%20Cola.pdf
Google Developers,. (2015). Google Summer of Code. Retrieved 17 July 2015, from https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/
