The Three Phases of Marketing Evolution

There are businesses who have been into a rapid growth from no growth and there are others who have been into slow growth to no growth. In the early days of industrialization of 19's businesses were focused on pushing their technological capabilities to an extreme to develop an innovative products or taking an existing product to the market. Executives relayed on the product itself for it to market itself. But as the business were maturing, they were having trouble making sense of a rapidly changing industry, and creating a demand for their product. As products and innovations failed to communicate for themselves, the businesses started to feel for the demand of Marketing function to find out the grounded demands in customers, finding the market trends and expanding the innovation in these areas. Then in around 1950s Marketing focuses largely on creating TV and print advertising to sell products to consumers until the arrival of Digital Marketing revolution in 2000s. In this article we are going to sum-up three broad revolution of Marketing evolution in three phases.

Pre-Digital Era: In 1950s Marketers were largely focused on one-to-many approach. marketers would prepare a TV/radio or the paper ad and push them to market with their communication messages. In this phase, people designated as Marketers were assigned to sales support (lead generation and trade shows, for example) or communications (advertising and promotional materials). The marketing function lacked the research and customer insights data and wasn't considered as an integrated corporate function. In 1960s however, Marketing changed from mere aggressive campaigns and exaggerated claims toward inventing creative and memorable approaches. The ad campaign was still a king.

Digital Era: With the start of data analysis, forming of Key matrices and measurement tools, analytical tools, segmented and segregated marketing, the Marketing function became matured. The era roughly started from 1970s. The price, place, distribution, promotion and product solely fell under the province of Marketing department. The is called the data driven marketing era with a one-to-one personalization marketing model. The advent of emotional branding and various concepts began to evolve. The ad campaigns and marketing approach changed to being personalized, awareness generating and educating the market segment.

Post-Digital Era: After the maturity of information and technologies, the concept and practice in Marketing changed. The shift in customers choice and the influence of information over decision making got matured. Marketers could not more rely on the aggressive campaigns. As social media platforms take off, people rely more on one another for information about products. Marketers must manage omnichannel communications and both negative and positive messages about their brands. They begin focusing on building meaningful relationships with customers. The arrival of machine learning and involvement of Big data and artificial intelligence swamp marketers with information. The focus shifts from telling and selling to customer engagement and dialogues and personalized communications and products.

This era is also called one-to-moment marketing, where CMOs need to urge brands to think of mobile marketing as an opportunity to create content that matters to consumers based on the context of their moment. Google then rolled out a large body of research around micro-moments, or times when consumers use their mobile devices to decide on things to buy, things to do and places to go.

The race is on to acquire the attention of customer by deploying big data and AIs. As business are creating different go-to platforms, it is yet to decide for customers as to which strategy and platform they will prefer and make it win.