Surviving the Digital Future of Marketing

The future of marketing is about continuously or regularly being able to do new things within the digital spectrum and landscape that have not been done before. The reason is simple. The time it takes to emulate or duplicate the efforts of others online, to market one's products similarly, is ever decreasing. In fact, it is becoming instantaneous. Now, critical to marketing's success, is its ability to distinguish and differentiate, in order to capture attention, imagination and thought. Duplicity and replication take that away, to render your efforts redundant.

When in the audience’s view, there are a variety of options for a single type of product, pitched and presented in the same way, your product has no advantage, and the problem with that is, it may not sell. Cold and brutal, but, that is the whole point.

The web is fast becoming the primary source for any information, conversation or engagement, the world over. In most first world countries, as of 2016, it already is. So the landscape on which you are competing for audience attention and engagement, really is, in the digital space. And that space is a double edged sword. On one hand you have incredible and unlimited access, as well as options to customise and engage. On the other, there is speed and ease that allows anyone competing with you, to negate your efforts, too quickly.

Lets reiterate here. Fundamentally, for marketing to be effective, digital or not, the effort or campaign needs to stand out and apart, from that of the competitors’, so that the intended audience notices and identifies the product, that the marketer is marketing. Where the marketer's reach and access are off course obviously prerequisites in the game, what really then matters once the target audience is reached, is the creativity, with which the message reaches the audience and with which a conversation is sustained to and upon a transaction (you do want repeat transactions don't you?).

The challenge ahead therefore, for the marketer, is to constantly explore, experiment and tinker with new ways of doing things, that have not been done before. Here is the very first problem; that if something has been done before, it is known and therefore there is a confidence in a doer, that it can be done, but when something has not been done before, in contrast, the doer is faced with the daunting task of figuring out what it is at all, that needs to be done, whether it should be done and then whether it can be done, to begin with. Effectively, the marketer is moving into the domains of creation, invention and innovation. These require certain competencies.

Primarily, what you have now on hand moving forth, is the HR issue of acquiring and developing marketing talent with competencies in Innovation Thinking, Programming Skills (to be able to develop new apps and features for the digital marketing aims) and Creativity. To understand whether the talent or developmental options HR is looking at to satisfy the organisation's needs ahead, the HR folks need to understand marketing, marketing needs, the future business landscape and and the marketing needs in the online space ahead. This implies a need for competency in Marketing and Foresight at least, for the HR folk.

Then the buck comes back to the Marketing folks. They need to understand, human, team and organisational dynamics, and competency mapping, to work with HR, to ensure their department is adequately staffed and equipped to meet the challenges ahead. Basically, the Marketing folks need to be able to speak HR.

Going beyond both HR and Marketing, organisations in the business landscape ahead, will need folks with cross-functional competencies, and the challenge of surviving the Digital Future of Marketing certainly surfaces that necessity.

If an organisation for profit does not sell, it is pointless for it to exist. To sell, it needs to effectively market. It makes sense, then, that in the world ahead, one characterised by speed and innovation, everyone in the organisation is a marketer, in some sense, and part of the "marketing team". And because the future is about the non-linear rather than the linear, because what comes to fore more than anything else, is creativity, when it comes to selling, the role of Human Resource as the primary resource for an organisation is amplified, it makes sense that everyone in the organisation understand the fundamentals to Managing that resource. And because Marketing is Digital in the world ahead, and so too everything else, it makes sense that the Tech function fuses with all the other business functions. And because there is ease of replication, innovation is a necessity, it becomes part of everybody's job scope, including the Marketer's.

So what will it take to survive the Digital Future of Marketing? An overhaul of the organisational thinking. An overhaul, of the structure and design of the organisation as we know it. And examples of organisations that have already undergone those overhauls are all around us. Think of the most prominent brand names today or the companies making the biggest waves. I mention no names. You can join them, or envy them when they remain.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.