As the world spins on, dramatic changes are occurring in the marketplace. Richard Love of Hewlett-Packard observes: ‘The pace of change is so rapid that the ability to change has now become a competitive advantage.’ As the marketplace changes, so must those who serve it.
In this section, we examine the major trends and forces that are changing the marketing landscape and challenging marketing strategy. We look at four major developments: the new digital age, rapid globalisation, the call for more ethics and social responsibility, and the growth in not-for-profit marketing.
The new digital age
The Internet has and is continuing to revolutionise how companies create value for cus- tomers and build and maintain customer relationships. The digital age has fundamentally changed customers’ notions of convenience, speed, price, product information and service.
Thus, today’s marketing requires new thinking and action. Companies need to retain most of the skills and practices that have worked in the past. But they will also need to add major new competencies and practices if they hope to grow and prosper in the changing digital environment. Now, more than ever before, we are all connected to each other and to things near and far in the world around us. The Orient-Express took three days to travel between Paris and Istanbul. An air passenger could fly round the world twice or more in that time.
Where it once took days or weeks to receive news about important world events, we now see them as they are occurring through live satellite broadcasts. Where it once took weeks to correspond with others in distant places, they are now only moments away by phone or email.
The technology boom has created exciting new ways to learn about and track customers, and to create products and services tailored to individual customer needs. Technology is also helping companies to distribute products more efficiently and effectively. And it’s helping them to communicate with customers in large groups or one to one.
Through video conferencing, marketing researchers at a company’s headquarters in Paris can look in on focus groups in Prague without ever stepping onto an aeroplane. With only a few clicks of a mouse button, a direct marketer can tap into online data services to learn anything from what car you drive, to what you read, to what flavour of ice cream you prefer.
Or, using today’s powerful computers, marketers can create their own detailed customer databases and use them to target individual customers with offers designed to meet their specific needs.
Technology has also brought a new wave of communication and advertising tools – on mobile phones, podcasts and even in virtual online worlds like Second Life. Marketers can
MAKING CONNECTIONS Linking the concepts
We’ve covered a lot of territory. Again, slow down for a moment and develop your own thoughts about marketing.
● In your own words, what is marketing and what does it seek to accomplish?
● How well does Ford manage its relationships with customers? What CRM strategy does it use? Compare the relationship management strategies of Tesco and Asda.
● Think of a company for which you are a ‘true friend’. What strategy does this company use to manage its relationship with you?
use these tools to zero-in on selected customers with carefully targeted messages. Through e-commerce, customers can learn about, design, order and pay for products and services, without ever leaving home. For products like music, films and games, delivery can be almost instantaneous. From virtual reality displays that test new products to online virtual stores that sell them, the technology boom is affecting every aspect of marketing.
The Internet
Today, the Internet links individuals and businesses of all types to each other and to informa- tion all around the world. It allows anytime, anywhere connections to information, enter- tainment and communication. Companies are using the Internet to build closer relationships with customers and marketing partners. Beyond competing in traditional marketplaces, they now have access to exciting new marketspaces.
These days, it is hard to find a company that does not use the Web in a significant way – or one that does not have new opportunities and challenges for marketers. We will explore the impact of the new digital age in more detail later (see Chapter 14).
Rapid globalisation
As they are redefining their relationships with customers and partners, marketers are also taking a fresh look at the ways in which they connect with the broader world around them.
In a rapidly shrinking world, many marketers are now connected globally with their custom- ers and marketing partners.
Today, almost every company, large or small, is touched in some way by global com- petition. Your local florist might buy its flowers from the Netherlands, while BMW and Mercedes compete in their home market of Germany with giant Japanese rivals like Toyota and Nissan. A fledgling Internet retailer finds itself receiving orders from all over the world at the same time as an Italian consumer goods producer introduces new products into emerging markets abroad.
Coca-Cola offers a mind-boggling 400 different brands in more than 200 countries. MTV has joined the elite of global brands, delivering localised versions of its music channels in 30 languages to 161 countries.34
Today, companies are not only trying to sell more of their locally produced goods in international markets, but also buying more supplies and components abroad. For example, Isaac Mizrahi, one of the top US fashion designers, may choose cloth woven from Australian wool with designs printed in Italy. He will design a dress and email the drawing to a Hong Kong agent, who will place the order with a Chinese factory. Finished dresses will be flown to New York, where they will be redistributed to department and speciality stores around the country.
Thus, managers in countries around the world are increasingly taking a global, not just local, view of the company’s industry, competitors and opportunities. They are asking:
What is global marketing? How does it differ from domestic marketing? How do global competitors and forces affect our business? To what extent should we ‘go global’? We will discuss the global marketplace in more detail later (see Chapter 15).
The call for more ethics and social responsibility
Marketers are re-examining their relationships with social values and responsibilities and with the very Earth that sustains us. As the worldwide consumerism and environmentalism movements mature, today’s marketers are being called on to take greater responsibility for the social and environmental impact of their actions – whether it be the place of manufac- ture, the packaging surrounding the product or how far the finished item travels before being sold. Corporate ethics and social responsibility have become hot topics for almost every
business and few companies can ignore the renewed and very demanding environmental movement.
The social responsibility and environmental movements will place even stricter demands on companies in the future. Some companies resist these movements, responding only when forced by legislation or organised consumer outcries. More forward-looking companies, however, readily accept their responsibilities to the world around them. They view socially responsible actions as an opportunity to do well by doing good. They seek ways to profit by serving the best long-term interests of their customers and communities.
Some companies – such as Ben & Jerry’s, The Body Shop, the Co-op and others – are practising ‘caring capitalism’, setting themselves apart by being civic-minded and responsible. They are building social responsibility and action into their company value and mission statements. For example, the financial services division of the Co-op – the Co-operative Bank – is a leader in respect of investing the money of its clients. Armaments manufacturers, industries which pollute heavily and companies that provide poor condi- tions for their staff are all on the Co-op’s investment blacklist. In turn, the supermarket portion of the business has been a pioneer on many consumer rights issues – genetically modified foods, sourcing from sustainable resources and clear labelling on all foods. We will revisit the relationship between marketing and social responsibility in greater detail later (see Chapter 16).
The growth of not-for-profit sector marketing
In the past, marketing has been most widely applied in the for-profit business sector. In recent years, however, marketing also has become a major part of the strategies of many not-for-profit organisations, such as universities, hospitals, museums, orchestras and even churches. Many performing arts groups – even Russia’s famous Mariinsky Company, which performs opera and ballet to packed houses – face huge operating deficits that they must cover by more aggressive donor marketing from businesses like Gazprom, BP and Total, for example.35 Finally, many long-standing not-for-profit organisations – the YMCA, the Salvation Army and the Scouts are now modernising their missions and ‘products’ to attract more members, visitors or donors.36
Government agencies have also shown an increased interest in marketing. For example, the national defence forces of most European countries – who rely on volunteers rather than conscripts – have a marketing plan to attract recruits, and various government agencies across the Continent are now designing social marketing campaigns to encourage energy conservation and concern for the environment or to discourage smoking, excessive drinking and drug use.
The Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia, uses marketing to raise money from sponsors
Sources: Alamy Images/ITAR- TASS Photo Agency (left); RIA Novsoti (right).
Metaphors are very important in everyday life, and they are very important in marketing too. In everyday life we might send a Facebook message to our friends telling them that we ‘killed’ a 10 km run, or that our football team ‘destroyed’ the opposition in an important match.
Of course, everyone concerned understands that we are talking metaphorically. A 10 km run is not the sort of thing that can be killed; and it is to be hoped that when your football team destroyed the opposition this was only a figure of speech and the opponents were all perfectly healthy and able to walk home at the end of it. Much of the time metaphor becomes so much a part of our every- day language that we do not even notice that we are using it. Probably one of the most amusing developments in the use of the English language in recent years, particularly popular among young people, is to say that something is ‘literally’ the case when, in fact, what is meant is that it is metaphorically the case, as in ‘I dropped a book on my foot and now my foot is literally killing me’. This is literally using the word literally to mean ‘not literally’, but we have to accept that the same word is now used with two exactly opposite meanings; yes, literally does mean both ‘literally’ and ‘not literally’ (so, metaphorically or figuratively). Language is that sort of thing. Meanings are fluid. Words with perfectly respectable meanings can be reinvented simply because people choose to use them in a different way. Literally means ‘not literally’. Get over it!
Metaphors in particular, and the fluidity of the lan- guage more generally, greatly interest marketers. As an exercise, you could usefully spend a few minutes try- ing to think of some of the more prominent metaphors commonly used in marketing. Metaphors combine two different ideas or concepts to create a symbolic bridge between them that expresses something meaningful.
Rather than hearing that Red Bull is a drink containing substances that may make you feel more alert, what we hear is that Red Bull gives you wings. Rather than hearing that Budweiser tastes great, we are told that ‘Budweiser is the King of Beers’. The metaphor can even be the name of the product, as in the Ford Fiesta motorcar, or the name of the brand, like Jaguar cars.
One famous marketing theorist, Gerald Zaltman, has even argued that there are seven ‘deep metaphors’ that work across countries and cultures:
1 Balance: how justice, equilibrium and the interplay of elements affect consumer thinking.
2 Transformation: how changes in substance and cir- cumstances affect consumer thinking.
3 Journey: how the meeting of past, present and future affect consumer thinking.
4 Container: how inclusion, exclusion and other bound- aries affect consumer thinking.
5 Connection: how the need to relate to oneself and others affects consumer thinking.
6 Resource: how acquisitions and their consequences affect consumer thinking.
7 Control: how the sense of mastery, vulnerability and well-being affects consumer thinking.
Zaltman is famous for his Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), a patented interview process based on a metaphor for carrying out deep research into the way that consumers go about making their decisions that has been used to help develop the marketing strategies of many well-known companies.
So, metaphors are widely used both in marketing research and in marketing practice. But can the use of metaphor help you to get a new or different perspective on marketing itself? We like to think it can. If you’ve never really thought about it much before then the first meta- phor for marketing that may come to mind is the warfare or battleground metaphor: ‘marketing is like warfare’ (actually that’s a simile, which is much the same as a metaphor but not quite so strongly phrased – if I say that my friend plays football like a gorilla, that’s a simile, but if I say that when playing football my friend is a gorilla, that’s a metaphor).
The companies that own the products and the brands go into the marketplace to try to defeat or destroy the enemy, and they use all of the tools of the marketing mix as their weapons. You can even take the metaphor further if you feel like it. A big TV advertising campaign is like firing your artillery at the enemy, while a clever behind-the-scenes social media campaign is like guerrilla warfare (if you do a Google search for ‘guerrilla marketing’ you will find that this particular metaphor is very popular indeed). The owner of the biggest brand controls the most territory and rival brands have to consider whether they are going to engage in a frontal assault on the brand, or look for possible flank- ing manoeuvres to attack from an unexpected angle.
However, it has been argued that the warfare meta- phor, although heavily used, is inappropriate for mar- keting. In warfare, much is permissible that would be considered unethical in any other aspect of life. For exam- ple, lying, deception and providing misinformation are all usually considered to be an acceptable part of warfare.
Marketing professionals, on the other hand, know that
Metaphors in marketing MARKETING