The purpose
of marketing -- to communicate the value of a certain product, service, idea,
or brand in order to get consumers to buy it – has long remained unchanged, but
the method of delivery has evolved significantly since the introduction of
widespread web access to the general public. The most common and effective
method in the modern world is digital marketing, a modern practice which uses
many modern devices and tools such as smartphones and social media to achieve
its function. Marketers analyse markets; they choose their targets and attempt
to understand consumer behaviour. In our world these marketers can gather
information about the values and life style of their target market easily
through tools such as search histories and online purchase tracking. The strategies used to find answers have
changed but the questions have always been the same.
In a lot of ways, Marketing is as old as civilization itself. From
Ancient Greece to our modern days, culture has based its trading and selling
upon communication in order to move products faster than the man next to him.
I've always seen it as a concept much like Darwin's "survival of the
fittest" - or what we will call in this case - "the act of
persuasion." Man is undeniably always trying to outshine others, and when
it comes to selling, the concept is not far from it. (The Evolution of Marketing)
Before going
further, it is important to clear up a common misconception about marketing and
advertising. Marketers use advertisements as a tool to help sell goods but,
while linked, advertising and marketing are not synonymous. Advertising is a way businesses can
communicate directly to the market about their product. Marketing is a broader
initiative; it is about building a brand, creating positive public perception
and doing all the various things which make consumers want to buy something (up
to, and including, advertising).
Marketing
has been around almost as long as there have been products to sell and it has
been evolving all the while but the most significant changes have occurred
since the dawn of the industrial era. The industrial era and machine labour
gave way to the rise of factories which allowed for goods and products to be
produced at an unprecedented rate. When the rate of production began outpacing
the need for the products being made, the nature of marketing had to change.
Marketers didn’t just have to convince consumers that their product was
superior to other similar products; they now had to also convince consumers
that they needed more of the product, or an ever newer version of the product.
Over time marketers have found the value in personalization and interactivity,
this finding occurred throughout the following few stages:
The trade era: A limited amount of hand made goods
are being produced and traded.
The production orientation era: The development of industries and the
goods being produced are easily sold.
The sales orientation era: Industry develops further, factories
become more prevalent, the market becomes more competitive, and branding begins
to have importance in marketing.
The marketing orientation era: Organizations become more serious
about promoting their products and begin involving professionals in decision
making about products, distribution, and pricing.
The relationship marketing era: Marketers begin to discover the
value of customer loyalty and start putting energy into cultivating that
loyalty rather than focusing only on creating new business.
The social marketing era: Marketers begin using digital
marketing to create an interactive relationship between brands/products
and consumers; a process which relies on a heavy use of social media and other
online catalysts.
Today’s
consumers spend more time online than they do on other traditional media,
especially in such as highly wired countries as China, South Korea and United
States. According to “Integrated Marketing Communications”, even in Canada,
with a relatively small and spread-out population, 79% of people have access to
internet. The average Canadian spends around 45 hours a month on the internet
and most of this time is used interacting with social networks, watching
user-uploaded videos, and streaming movies and TV shows. Less and less people,
especially under the age of 35, use traditional media such as television,
newspapers, and magazines. These statistics show the driving force behind the
shift towards digital marketing; if a marketing firm wants to reach its target
market efficiently and effectively it needs to stop relying on older forms of
media and focus its efforts on web-based strategies.
Digital
marketing is defined by businessdictionary.com as
The promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. For example, advertising mediums that might be used as
part of the digital marketing strategy of a business could include
promotional efforts made via the Internet, social media, mobile phones and electronic billboards, as well as via digital
and television and radio channels.
Digital
marketing has numerous advantages over traditional marketing but the main
advantage is the ability to collect information, analyze it, and use it to accurately
and effectively access targets. Internet users visit specific websites voluntarily
to get what they want; in turn, web site administrators can track every visit
on the website and collect information about users and the actions they take.
Marketers can then analyze the data accumulated from a websites’ visitors and
maximize target accuracy of advertisements based on demographic and geographic variables as well as
time of visits of the day, of the week and of the month. Behaviour targeting
means sending advertisements to consumers based on their previous searches and clicks. This method, in conjunction with online stores and
the ease of online purchasing, means that gap between advertisement and
purchase is smaller than ever.
Another
advantage of digital marketing is that it is interactive; consumers not only
receive information, they can also reply to the messages or -- with the help of
chats, forums and social networks -- can post their review and opinions about
firm, product, or brand. This is important because consumers are used to being
sold to by companies and can be skeptical about what a business has to say
about its own product but are likely to trust what their friends and peers have
to say about it. All this can be done in
real time and requires a minimum amount of time from either side.
Digital
marketing is a powerful tool in modern marketing and firms that don’t employ it
risk losing market space to competitors who do.
Aside from convenience stores, if a business doesn’t have even a basic
website, they will have a very difficult time finding and accessing the customer
and the customer will have a difficult time accessing them. We live in a culture which expects to be able
to find information about a business and its products and services quickly,
easily, and online. The factors discussed today have driven marketing to new
heights and as our global society continues to move from the analogue to the
digital we can only expect to see this trend drive marketing even further to
become even more dynamic and integrated into consumer life.
Work cited:
The Evolution of Marketing. (n.d.). Retrieved
November 25, 2014, from http://morethanbranding.com/2012/04/30/the-evolution-of-marketing/
What is digital marketing? definition and
meaning. (n.d.). Retrieved November 25, 2014, from
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/digital-marketing.html
Tuckwell, K. (n.d.). Integrated marketing
communications: Strategic planning perspectives (Fourth ed.).
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