Are we living In A Post-Marketing World?

Greg’s P.O.V.: (Greg Hoyos is an award-winning copywriter and former agency owner). Today, customer comments are more influential than any ad campaigns. What have we come to? Welcome to the post-marketing brave new world.

Why? Well, the bigger the markets became, the further we moved away from our consumers. That means we couldn’t serve them as well, so we created products and services which we hoped suited them – we weren’t sure.

Add poor customer data – because companies won’t invest in good research – and companies wedded to old ways of doing business, plus outdated consumer knowledge, and the game is up. I feel that Marketing, as we knew it, is dead - and it died of self-inflicted wounds.

Rawdon’s P.O.V: (Rawdon Adams is CEO of Bitt Inc. and a Senator in Barbados.) I don’t believe we are living in a post marketing world. One of the aspects of marketing that always made me uncomfortable was how tough it was to measure its impact. Yet I could still admire the messaging and the research behind it.

What the digital world offers is the ability to quantify the impact of that art and fine tune it: stick with what works and dump what does not fast! That’s all possible because it’s so easy to collect data in near real time in the digital world. So now we're asking not only did awareness go up but how much did, for example, sales rise by?

The challenge for marketers is merging the old and new. Brands still need protection, nurturing and building – and that job does not belong to a Facebook posse.

Marla’s P.O.V (Marla Dukharan is a noted Economist and commentator) Perhaps we don’t live in a post-marketing world, but one in which ‘marketing’ has morphed into a much more sophisticated and analytics driven discipline. Social media must have also changed the way ‘marketing’ is conducted, in a significant yet evolving way. And because we love drama - amplified by social media - it’s all the negative sentiment and not the love for your product or service that gets attention, and there goes your share of wallet. 

(A longer version of this article appeared previously in another online publication.)