The Changing Nature of Marketing

This idea of "real-time marketing" is one of the most recent ideas we've heard in recent years. And that could indicate a variety of things.

And some of the funniest instances of this concept that we've seen in recent years are events like the iPhone incident. When you placed it in your back pocket, it really bent a little. A few other companies, like my favorite, the chocolate bar Kit Kat, capitalized on this and created an ad that appeared online pretty quickly and said, "It's OK if ours bend," making fun of the idea that the iPhone's product might not work, but in the Kit Kat universe, everything is fine.

And that's historically the way that advertising communication works—it takes a lovely long time for something truly smart and creative to be introduced to the market in order to aid in the sale of a product or to accomplish something similar.

Real-time marketing, on the other hand, is the notion that, rather than having this lengthy time period, you may instead take advantage of events, occurrences, or other things that happen in the world around us and use them in your marketing campaign or communication campaign right away.

In other words, you develop your communication campaign quickly and easily within hours, as opposed to going through a drawn-out process.

My second illustration is based on the concept of the long tail. Although the long tail has been the subject of a well-known book, the idea behind it is as simple as this: For a long time, businesses who sold goods like books or albums remember, back in the day, records, tapes, and DVDs?

The most well-liked things would always need to be on hand. If you were to imagine how your store's merchandise was distributed, it may look somewhat like this. You would therefore always want to market the most well-liked. The top 100 tracks if you were selling music Since most people wanted to purchase that, you wouldn't carry anything else because no one would buy it at the tail of the product distribution chain.

The idea behind the long tail is that you can actually build a business based on the tail since technology, distribution, and the phrase "distribution" has evolved, making it easier to ship goods around the world and creating a market for those products that aren't among the top 100 most popular. Because your customers come from all over the world rather than simply those in your town or city, you can choose the rarer or more exotic "recordings," "videos," or books, and you can amass a sizable customer base.

The final example I wanted to present to you today revolves around the idea of dynamic pricing. What does "dynamic pricing" mean, also? Basically, it simply means that prices may fluctuate in real-time. Similar to the concept of real-time communication, the cost of a product is subject to sudden changes. The Coca-Cola Company's experiment serves as an excellent illustration of this. The Coca-Cola Company also designed a vending machine that could measure the ambient air temperature.

How is the day going? And what it would do is alter the cost of the Coke can so that, on a very hot day, if you really want it, that can of Coke would cost, oh, 2, 3, $4. However, the cost of that Coke can drop to 0.25, 0.30, or even 0.40 on a truly chilly day.

This is the idea behind dynamic pricing: as external factors, like those affecting Coke, change, presumably, the demand function for your product also does. And you can benefit from that in terms of pricing. Again, technology has made this possible. It's kind of interesting what transpired in that situation. Did customers like it or did they dislike it? What's your guess?

You are correct if you mentioned that consumers didn't like it. They were truly angry. How are you able to change the cost of Coca-Cola? Right? Consumers have what is known as a "reference price," according to which a can of Coke ought to cost around $2.

And even if, occasionally, when we fly, you ask the person next to you how much they paid for the ticket, it will be very different from person to person, charging more or less than that isn't appropriate. It's therefore intriguing that some marketplaces and particular types of product markets are more accepting of dynamic pricing than others.