Customer Targeted Marketing
Necessity of Change from Traditional to Customer Targeted Approach to Marketing
Rationale for Need to Change to Customer Targeted marketing
Change from a traditional marketing approach to customer targeted marketing
In every business in the modern day, change has become dominant. And one of the most sought after management skills is the ability to adapt and master and reap benefits from the changes. This fact is particularly true in the case of marketing where changes are happening fast and thick.
The dilemma for today's business leaders is to adjust between adapting to change the costs of changing along with estimating the potential benefits from the change. And even while changing strategy, the marketing efforts of accompanying need to reflect an internal constancy for the purpose of the change and an external consistency of the image of the company (Kashani & Jeannet, 2005).
It is here that there is a rising debate about which marketing strategy is best -- clinging on to the established traditional marketing strategies or to adopt a change and focus on targeted consumer marketing.
Traditional Marketing
The 4ps - Product, Promotion, Price, and Place make up the backbone or are the four cornerstone traditional marketing strategies. The focus of traditional marketing is on the identification of the correct audience segment, getting and understanding of the behavior of the audience and providing effective incentives for such audience to make a purchase of the product that is being marketed (Scott, 2007). In between one also has to consider the best available and cost effective channel or the medium through which the marketing message from the company would reach the customer.
Traditionally marketing was restricted to and often limited by the number of media available for broadcasting the marketing messages to the intended audience. The aim for traditional marketing efforts is to choose the best possible media and deliver the marketing message as many times as possible through the media. The aim is to try and convince as many people among the audience as possible into buying the product or service being marketed. However, with the advent of the information age and the proliferation of the internet and smartphones and social media platforms, there are numerous options and permutations and combinations available to the marketers. This is why in the most recent times experts tend to add another P to the four Ps of traditional marketing -- people, to the mix (Safko, 2013).
Advocates of traditional marketing still believe that it is most important to understand, know and identify the target audience. Often marketing techniques revolve around the segmentation and the identification of the target audience on the basis of age, place, preference etc. the segments could be created out of a number of components like audience composition, geographical location, buying behavior and events.
It is important to have the current and a very precise overview of the target audience to enable one to create an impression of the target audience and hence one would be able to tailor make relevant messages and content for them. This would also have to take into consideration the media preference of the audience throughout the entire lifecycle of the message and the product or service.
Since in traditional marketing, the effort, and the messages are sent from the organization to the customer with some knowledge about what the customer would want and how they want it, such type of traditional marketing is often referred to as push marketing.
While promotions and offers still remain important tin the content of marketing messages and the marketing mix, the new mantra is content that engages the targeted audience. Often customers value important and valuable information to coupons and price discounts.
Customer Targeted Marketing
This is the form of marketing that is being employed in recent times where the elements like the product, the place or the promotional methods take second fiddle and the customer becomes the most important aspect of marketing communications. This form is also known as targeted marketing where a company identifies a specific group of customers that they want to target for the sale of its products or services. Unlike in traditional marketing where the product the place for marketing, the price offers, and the promotional content were considered to have equal value, in customer centric or targeted marketing strategies, everything else revolves around the customer (Scott, 2007).
The company or the marketing team of...
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