The Death of Marketing as We Know It

Pelin Thorogood just posted a great article on the Cornell Enterprise blog titled ...

The Birth of “Customer 2.0”
and the Death of Marketing As We Know It:

Adapting Marketing to Changing Customer Behaviors and Demands

(click above to see the whole article).

The article is highly relevant (and recommended!).

When a newspaper once erroneously reported the death of Mark Twain, he immediately wired them with the message "the reports of my death are highly exaggerated."  The implied "death of marketing" is certainly exaggerated.  The death of "marketing as we know it" is spot on, though.  

Like any discipline, marketing is subject to Darwin's law of evolution:  adapt or die.  I'm sure that when radio came on the marketing scene there were those who said it was the death of marketing as we know it.  Ditto for television.  Ditto the internet.  In fact when Gutenberg invented movable type, I'm sure that there were monks huddled over their illuminated manuscripts lamenting the "death of publishing as we know it."  

While the conventional wisdom ... the things we "know" about marketing ... change constantly, the fundamental philosophy of marketing does not.  Marketing is about creating value for the customer and the brand by providing a benefit or solving a problem.  Movable type, radio, television and the internet changed the way we communicate, but not the basic idea of communication.  The exciting thing about marketing with the birth of "customer 2.0" is the power that the consumer now has ... and how that better enables the creation of value.

What is changing in a big way is the way we relate to the newly empowered customer.  These days, it is less about finding and connecting with the customer ... and more about enabling the customer to find and connect with us.  Marketers ignore this tectonic shift at their peril.  

Thorogood cites Marsall McLuhan's famous declaration the "the medium is the message."  That was true for movable type, radio, television, the internet and every advancement in technology.  The message about the rise of "customer 2.0" means that old assumptions about marketing tactics are, indeed, dead.  But the changes we're seeing give rise to an era when we can use marketing in a brand new way to do what it always set out to do:  create value for the customer by providing benefits or solving problems.