The discipline of marketing is at a crossroads
with a paradigm shift taking place in the business community.
This new orientation to business puts consumers
at the center of business activities – meaning that both front
and back office activities must be oriented
around the consumer. A number of newly-published books have this
focus: The Customer Century by Anders Gronstedt, Customers
Rule! by Roger Blackwell, The Customer Revolution by Patricia
Seybold,
The New Marketing Paradigm by Don E. Schultz, Stanley I.
Tannenbaum,
and Robert F. Lauterborn, and The Myth
of Excellence
by Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews. The
main thesis
of these books is that businesses need to
organize their businesses in way that allows them to provide products
and services when consumers want them, in
the format
they want, and for the price they want.
Front-end and back-end business activities all need to be structured to
make it easy for consumers to do business with a
company.
If businesses find themselves forced to changed
their organizational format and operating procedures to create efficient
supply chains, to learn how to understand
customer demand, to develop collaborative
business practices working as partners with suppliers or
competitors, and to communicate with consumers
on
a more personalized manner, then this business
environment has significant implications for
the
marketing discipline.
Talking about traditional marketing research
to the exclusion of datamining, continuing to discuss
promotions as a one-way message message from
manufacturers to consumers, doing adaptation only as necessary deviations
to a global strategy may not be relevant to the way companies will operate
in the future.
Conducting research to determine the nature
and extent
of company changes in the face of this paradigm
shift
could provide the opportunity for marketing
to become
the most critical discipline to those aspiring
to lead companies into the future.
It is often difficult to recognize a paradigm
shift while
it is happening, but the marketing discipline
may be presented with a unique opportunity. There are a
number of significant research issues given
this view
of the world:
How do companies reorganize to make front and
back
office activities consumer-centric? What does
the organizational chart look like? What is the role of marketing in this
reorganization?
How do companies create a learning environment
that encapsulates the global marketplace? What type of communication and/or
information systems
allow companies to develop truly global strategies
as opposed to domestic strategies that are modified for individual countries?
What research techniques are most appropriate
for identifying and understanding global consumers? Are the computer/internet
habits of high school students the same worldwide? If different, how are
they different? Do consumers in different countries use the same decision-making
framework for making purchases?
What resources do consumers around the world
use to
learn about products and services? If they
are different, when do the differences make a difference?
What is the difference in the nature of the
relationship between companies using EDI systems and companies
that share consumer data and companies that
have teams creating joint strategy? Does the nature of that
relationship change for global products and
services?
What does establishing a relationship with
a customer
mean in a business-to-business environment,
for consumer goods companies, for high tech products? Is this relationship
the same across all countries? Is it a
relationship if there is only some type of
electronic
exchange of information, is it a relationship
if a
consumer carries a frequency card for the
company, is
it a relationship if the consumer is recognized
by name
when calling the company for information,
is it a
relationship when the consumer stops reviewing
the competitors’ offerings?
Companies are developing partnerships to share
consumer information and create joint strategies. Companies are not
only selling products and services in more countries, but are also developing
strategic partnerships with companies in other countries. Consumers
all over the world are demanding higher quality products with lower prices
and expect to be able to shop when they want and have products available
where they want. Companies need to organize all their internal business
processes to make it easy for consumers to purchase from their company.
While companies are in the process of making
their way through this paradigm shift by focusing all their procedures,
processes, and activities on consumers, we in the marketing discipline
have an opportunity to conduct research that will put the marketing discipline
at the center of corporate activity. |
