The role of the marketing manager starts with identifying the market and customer through segmentation, targeting and positioning, along with understanding their needs and wants. Here lies one major challenge for any marketer. Do customers always know what they really want?

Strategic innovation is possible only if we integrate the customer experience with the changing trends in technology, human behaviour, economic and social scenario to identify the customer’s latent needs.

Once the customer segment is clearly identified, it becomes easier to connect and communicate with them. With the proliferation of media, there is a multitude of channels such as print, TV, digital media — and a plethora of options within each of them. This brings us to another challenge. How do you select the right channel mix for a campaign? More importantly, how do you decide the ROI of a campaign in this complex media matrix?

Digital media provides us with tools to understand the customer profile, characteristics and behaviour using the numerous trails that one leaves all over the internet. No wonder, there is a rapid shift in demand from broad-based mass media such as print to focused ‘new media’ or digital — customers get to see or choose only those messages that are relevant to them, while the marketer gets a very focused audience for communication and engagement.

However, this could also lead to situations where the customer’s privacy is compromised, knowingly or unknowingly. Is your relationship marketing resulting in intimacy or intrusion? How much of your brand messages could be construed as unsolicited? How secure is the customer information lying with you? These are questions that will plague marketers in days to come.

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