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Marketing 4.0 in the Digital Economy - a chapter review
When Online meets offline, Style meets substance, and Machine-to Machine Meets Human-to-Human.
Be on the lookout for the new kid on the block, Marketing 4.0 is a marketing approach that combines online and offline interaction between companies and customers. It was discussed in the chapter that customer community confirmation is the way to go.
Gone are the days on vertical integration where you focus on segmentation and targeting. The new focus is now on understanding the horizontal webs of communities. Customers are now more empowered in making decisions. With the help of the internet and social media, brands can no longer promote false claims as this can easily be verified. Companies must now focus on transparency.
From my MARKMA class I mainly focused on the four P’s : product, price, place and promotion. If done effectively, selling becomes less challenging as customers are attracted to the value propositions. Apparently, this is so different when it comes to digital marketing as customer participation is the main focus. I should change my mindset of the four P’s to the four C’s “ Co-creation, currency, communal activation and conversation. This is all new to me. After going through the explanations, it is more relevant in today’s society.
For product it is to customization, for price it is to dynamic pricing, for place it is to peer to peer distribution and for promotion it is to converting a one-sided affair to an interactive messenger service which drives conversations This is why having a connected Marketing Mix is very critical in surviving in the digital economy. Look how record bars have disappeared in the past 5 years with the advent of music streaming sites such as Spotify. It makes me question if we can still combine both ways of marketing – Traditional and Digital. Kotler explains that there should still be coexistence of the two.
In my opinion, there is less and less need for traditional marketing as everything is geared towards machine to machine connectivity. I do agree that there must be a combination of online and offline interaction but only to a certain extent.
For example, in our company, we make use of Enterprise systems such as SAP to simply our payment and procurement processes. The use of POS systems would also eliminate manual intervention. It also acts as a security feature between dealer and company as sales is transmitted electronically in our sales system. This eliminates the need for manual recording as all sales data is immediately transmitted to our SAP system.
Winning customer advocacy is the key strategy for both types of marketing. To me, traditional marketer should collaborate with the new kids as they have a wider reach then the traditional vertical approach. Instead of being glued on your TV screens, your customers are glued outside of their houses and are on the fly glued to their mobile devices.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS: • How can your brand develop a powerful differentiation based on human-to-human touch in the digital world? Our company developed a mobile app that not only provides you gasoline station locations but points system that is tied up to your rewards card. Our gasoline attendants can be more proactive by offering full service the Petron way. • How can your business transition from the traditional four P’s to the digital four C’s by adopting co-creation, taking advantage of currency-like pricing, engaging in communal activation, and driving conversations? With the use of our rewards card, this can track the buying patterns of our customers and sales history per station. By using this big data analytics, we can customize the needs of customers down to a per region or per station fuel promo. With the use of SMS messenging, we can inform our customers of the latest promotions as well. Instead of interviewing on a per station level, the POS system and rewards card is able to capture all of relevant information needed to drive conversations. Since, drivers are not allowed to text and drive at the same time, there is still some need of traditional marketing such as radio advertisements to sublimely remind our motorists to fuel at our stations for them to enjoy the best driving experience. • What are the fundamental changes required in your customer-service strategy to embrace collaborative customer care? Company can offer 2 way sms interactions whenever, they fuel up. The company can also incorporate digital satisfaction boards to measure the service of each gasoline attendant. Our facebook page must also be more interactive and not just act as message board for Petron news.