How technology is shaping modern marketing
Marketing has never been an easy discipline. But marketers in today’s world face a particular set of challenges their counterparts in earlier times could not have imagined. First, there’s the pace of technological change, which seems to offer a new way to engage with customers on a
weekly basis. (Facebook Live launched the day this story went to print.) Fewer and fewer people watch broadcast television in favor of streaming shows via the web, marginalizing one of the most reliable ways to reach a mass audience. The use of ad blockers and email filters can narrow a consumer’s internet experience into an inaccessible niche. As a result, reaching consumers with a message is more complicated than it has ever been.
At the same time, both consumers and B2B customers are more demanding, more pressed for time, and increasingly impatient with any message that doesn’t meet their immediate specific needs. This is why expectation economy is a new term marketers are using these days, according to Rebecca Brooks, founder of Alter Agents, a market research firm in Los Angeles, California. Customers who know they can have a pizza delivered simply by tweeting or texting a pizza emoji to Domino’s are looking for that kind of convenience and insight for all their purchases, Brooks explains. “Consumer expectations are going up very fast across the board.”
But if technological innovation has created a challenging environment for marketers, it’s also helping them to reach out to customers in ever more effective ways. Here’s a look at how some of those innovations are powering new campaigns that have made even today’s impatient, overwhelmed, high-expectation customers sit up and take notice.
