MEDIAMORPHOSIS: THE CONSUMER IN CHARGE
Analyzing chapter ‘’The consumer in charge’’ I came to the decision that in recent years the role of consumer in the market has completely changed. During the “decade of mass media” the consumer personality didn’t play an important part in the market. The companies were selling mass products to mass audiences via mass media. Actually this approach made the work of marketers more easy, but the discretionary authority of the customer – more unconscious. The broadcasting industry was focused mostly on business priorities that on real interest of the consumer. The space of media was limited, so the consumer had no choice but to pay attention to it.
Now the movements and decisions of the consumer have major affect on all the marketers’ business, from how he develops a product to how he forms his timetable. It became necessary for marketers to listen to the opinion of consumer, and according to the received information, build the strategy of sales. David Ogilvy, the legend of advertising, wrote: “The consumer is not an idiot. She is your wife.” That means nowadays if you really want to achieve success in the market, you have to become related with your consumer, keeping a close watch on him. In my opinion, it is one of the keys to success for а marketer.
The ways to affect consumers were fully changed due to enlargement of media area in the past few years. A sphere of internet influence has increased incredibly on equal terms with a rich variety of electronic devices. Today you can connect with internet mostly everywhere, from the mobile phone up to iPod. All these factors have great influence on advertising and sales promotion methods. Due to extension of internet and computer technologies in the latest years, consumers became ‘’freed’’. Now consumers have lots of opportunities to get the content they want.
The professional researches show us that now people spend most of their time on mobile, internet and home video. And as a consequence of this, less of the time – on broadcast television, newspapers, magazines. The conclusion is that nowadays for a marketer it is not profitable to use only one medium, for example TV, to attract customers’ attention.
As a result that nowadays costumer has so many types of media on his hand, media multitasking became prevalent in everyday life. This fact shifts focus of the person from one source to another, what makes consumer more flexible in the world of media. So now consumers must be treated as individuals with an advanced measure of free will. They have more power in the marketing relationship now. An outward glance on consumers’ everyday life – behavior and preferences – is the perspective that became extremely important to the marketer. The researches about costumer can no longer be based on the old methods, such as age and the generic overviews. Now the successful marketer needs to maintain a dialogue with consumers about their needs and preferences. It helps to understand better what actually the costumer wants and therefore educe the target.
During the last few years research techniques and strategies have been improving rapidly. Marketers are making massive investments in the research technologies, customer relationship management, database marketing. The area of marketing is extending in a different ways during the last years. Digital media, in-store marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, experiential marketing are the tools that are extremely important nowadays for the costumer insight.
The evolution of digital world gives nowadays many opportunities for marketers to investigate their costumers’ preferences and needs. Search engines, social networks, blogs, video exchanges, commerce sites, content destinations, games - are the new sources of costumer insight for marketer. The main goal here is to understand which of these sources will work in a more effective way. Digital experience is extremely important due to the fact of media extension nowadays so the marketer has an extensive approach to everyday life of his costumer. Internet revolution reflects on the life of almost all the people in the world. The consumer’s online experience gives to the marketer an access to a rich consumer profile that can be used for every aspect of marketing.
The touchpoints for the marketers now are the media platforms where the consumers connect to brands. Marketers need to know how to build value of different usage occasions. The starting point is analyzing consumers’ media behavior: when and where the individuals come into contact with media, which media platforms, which brands are preferred, and also the occasions and frequency of each of these activities. Drawing maps of the target consumers’ media behavior gives an opportunity to create a brand connection that is relevant and affects costumer. It also enables marketers to determine what kind of advertising they should use, and to identify which media platforms can most effectively move consumers from awareness to purchase. I think for the marketers using media platforms is a very effective way to become partners with consumers. For the companies one of the most important goals nowadays is to learn how to build a dialogue with their consumer and how to listen the costumer in-depth. The marketer needs to be informed about true costumer needs and on this basis develop a product which fits them as much as possible.
Marketers now have to know what twenty-first-century consumer will want. For this matter, they are pursuing new research techniques and pushing their trade, agency, and media partners to provide the most compelling insights possible into their specific marketing targets. Some marketers are using private online communities, which help them connect more effectively with their consumer. Internet communities are becoming extremely popular now, but the main question for the marketer is how to really engage the costumers, make the community work in a more effective way. In the communities marketers can participate in costumers’ conversations, and it leads to a deeper marketing awareness that can be applied to product creation, concept testing, messaging development, or shelf and packaging design. Nowadays we can expect that marketers will develop ongoing dialogues with consumers that are rooted in everyday experience. “We don’t do market research. We spend time with people,” says Jean-Pierre Petit, who heads Nike’s soccer business in Europe. It characterizes what exactly successful marketers should do now.
For the time being people already have an extensible approach to almost any kind of information, music, news, and entertainment for almost free and in unlimited variety. It means that marketers so far need to use more and more sophisticated techniques to reach this group of people given the fact that peoples’ tastes don’t stay still very long. “By the time we recognize the wave, it’s already crashing,” says Venkatesh Kini, Coca-Cola India’s vice president of Marketing.
Nowadays marketing is becoming more and more realistic, it adapts to the needs of costumer, who is becoming the main person to be guided by. Marketers are becoming to pay more attention to the internet, as the main source of the information about costumer increasing their sophistication and precision. The companies now spend more big part of their budget on online media. Because, the final point is that the greater in-depth understanding of consumers marketers have, the more meaningful and relevant their advertising will be.
Personal opinions and tastes of the costumers can provide a much deeper understanding about who they are and what motivates them. Now is the time when costumers want to engage in advertising in a different ways, act, be a part of advertising experience. This fact also can be confirmed by the dramatic growth of user-generated media, expanding popularity of online multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Today more and more people maintain their own blogs, elaborate personal websites, read online periodicals, download music and films online. The popularity of the social networking websites is growing progressively every day. According to the marketing research company BIGresearch, almost 7 in 10 online users reported watching TV while they are online. This phenomenon makes consumers a moving, potentially elusive target. It also opens the way for a creative, compelling interplay between TV and online media. The television-to-Web connection may become the biggest source of added value for TV advertising, generating thousands of additional buyers for its regular production models.
The main conclusion from this chapter can be that the costumer nowadays is always on, so the more company pays attention to the personal opinions and tastes of the costumer, the more information it gets about the costumer - the more effective and successful marketing strategy the company can develop.
