Term Paper on "Market Research & Strategy the World"

Term Paper 5 pages (1588 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Market Research & Strategy

The world of marketing has changed. Today, we live in a much more global and technologically advanced social and business environment. Marketing executives can no longer go about in a 'business as usual' manner because the bar has been raised for both expectations and standards. Companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Motors, Unilever Group, American Express, and of course all of the others who wish to survive have moved away from mass marketing to enter into dominion of more personalized micro marketing. "For marketers, the evolution from mass to micromarketing is a fundamental change driven as much by necessity as opportunity. America today is a far more diverse and commercially self-indulgent society than it was in the heyday of the mass market. The country has atomized into countless market segments defined not only by demography, but by increasingly nuanced and insistent product preferences." (Bianco, Lowry, Berner, & Arndt, 2004) This report therefore, is about how and why this phenomenon is occurring as well as providing a possible blueprint of things to come. Shareholders in all of the before mentioned companies have will continue to have their normal expectations of continued steady growth and high returns on investment and if these organizations aim to meet those growth expectations they will have to continuously reinvent themselves so as not to miss out on new business opportunities.

Mass Marketing and Micromarketing

Marketers have begun to realize that they can no longer just sit back and wait for an anonymous consumer who may or may not be interested in their new product or service to be at home watching television on a certain channel at a certain time on a certain night. No, instead marketers have discovered that it simply makes more sense to email that potential customer directly with exactly the right message at exactly the right time. Sure, this may be an exaggeration, but the fact is that this may be truer of the inherent differences of mass marketing and micromarketing. "In the boom decades after World War II, it was more than any other company that put the mass in marketing, relying on TV commercials and print ads to flog its standardized wares from coast to coast. Along with Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Motors, Unilever Group, American Express, and many other consumer-products giants, now is standing mass marketing on its head by shifting emphasis from selling to the vast, anonymous crowd to selling to millions of particular consumers." (Bianco, Lowry, Berner, & Arndt, 2004)

Our world has shrunk because of advances within the world of technology. The internet is just one example of a technological advance that has presented new insights into the realm of marketing and advertising. These insights are that a more consumer friendly and personalized marketing approaches will end up being more cost effective than traditional mass marketing approaches. The key here is that the lines of communication have changed between consumers and the companies that offer goods and services.

Successful communication for business success now represents something new. Communication was always an instrumental part of traditional marketing and advertising strategies. The problem was that there was no practical or accurate way of assuring that these lines of communication were getting through to the end consumers. The communication efforts were based on the various media outlets such as direct mail marketing, radio, television, magazine and newspaper advertisements. All were good in the sense that they splashed the market but as noted, how sure were the companies that used these approaches that they were truly effective?

Consider the more modern and personalized approach of actually sending a customer a detailed message on his or her cell phone that is geared specially to that person. This type of marketing is reality today because companies have relational databases full of loyal customers' information. By sifting through a consumer's personal buying history at a company for example, companies now can ascertain what products were purchased in the past, how long that consumer goes between purchase, what related products or services can be tied to the past purchases, if there were complaints or complements to the company -- and of course thousands of other assumptions and objectives from the stored databases files.

Summarize the impact that the article suggests this trend may have on (a) the economy, and (b) media providers.

My friend has a TIVO and he says that he no longer watches any television commercials - that is, unless of course he wants to watch some like during the Super Bowl. This should be a big point for mass marketers to fully understand. As the article showed, mass marketing has already begun to lose its revenue base from the likes of companies like McDonald's and Proctor & Gamble. These revenues literally supported network television, the printing newspaper and magazine industries and even roadside billboard companies.

These revenue streams can no longer be taken for granted. The big networks, ABC, NBC and CBS for example are now competing with hundreds of new television channels and many of those channels are pay per view or subscription networks. "What's new is that the proliferation of digital and wireless communication channels is spreading the mass audience of yore ever-thinner across hundreds of narrowcast cable-TV and radio channels, thousands of specialized magazines, and millions of computer terminals, video-game consoles, personal digital assistants, and cell-phone screens." (Bianco, Lowry, Berner, & Arndt, 2004) This means that their revenue base is less affected by advertising revenues and they can go commercial free. Radio is finding that satellite radio has also begun to cut into their revenue profitability as well.

The overall economy will most likely not lose revenues, but the revenues will be redistributed in the future. In other words, just because ABC, NBC and CBS are going to need new sources of income, people will still watch television on pay channels. "McDonald's now devotes a third of its U.S. marketing budget to television, compared with two-thirds five years ago. Money that used to go for 30-second network spots now pays for closed-circuit sports programming piped into Hispanic bars and for ads in Upscale, a custom-published magazine distributed to black barber shops. To sharpen its appeal to young men, another of its prime target audiences, McDonald's advertises on Foot Locker Inc.'s in-store video network. The company zeroes in on mothers through ads in women's magazines such as O: The Oprah Magazine and Marie Claire and on Web sites like Yahoo! And iVillage Inc." (Bianco, Lowry, Berner, & Arndt, 2004) Thus, the money in television and mass marketing will still be there - just on different channels and locations

Marketing in the future believe that the future of marketing will be a combination of 'Buzz Marketing -- Word-of-Mouth' advertising and highly personalized direct marketing through the internet. The world has just now begun to grasp the power of organizationally created Word-of-Mouth advertising. "But buzz is no longer a hit-or-miss proposition used exclusively by fringe marketers. These days, plenty of big players are trying hard to systematize buzz techniques." (Khermouch & Green, 2001)

History has shown that almost all products and services are more influenced by Word-of-Mouth than by any other form of advertising including television and radio. Companies like Ford, Honda, Sony and more are already trying this new approach of customer recruitment through a saturation of specific markets with marketing materials, events, or unannounced or secret salespeople. "Word of mouth is the reality that intervenes between your communication and sales." (Silverman, 1997)

The Internet has obviously become the biggest marketing continuum in the history of man and has provided companies with a completely new outlet including email and chat. I believe that this ranks the internet up there with the printing press in regard to historical value. The internet is the ideal setting… READ MORE

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