marketing essay example

marketing essay example

The Impact of Digital Marketing on Consumer Behavior

1. Introduction to Digital Marketing

Marketing is changing in a number of ways. As markets develop, new customer needs arise, producing a demand for innovative and technically driven products, services, and technologies. Major advances in engineering, in joining technologies, particularly in the CAT and CIM technologies, are now helping organizations to develop high-value, high-added value goods and services to satisfy the needs of the marketplace. These demands are becoming more focused and specific due to globalization and the worldwide communication infrastructure. Markets in general are continuously adapting and changing with respect to new purchasing patterns. These changes represent a challenge to manufacturers – they have to find a better and more profitable way to fill the entire customer, market, and segment demand. Marketing managers are searching for better tools to support their brand, growth, and reputation. Some tools are found using computer-generated simulations, segmentation analysis that models the marketing process, or the automatic paperwork that allows the marketing managers to concentrate on the real marketing problems. However, other tools are needed at all the stages of the development and creation of new products and their management, such as in testing pricing, in the communication process, and throughout the distribution process. The development of these generic tools helps to understand and promote marketing’s central theme, which is to create customer value. These tools provide the means to make marketing managers aware of their environment and of the internal and external factors involved. With this information, they can develop successful marketing strategies.

Marketing has been the central concept with respect to the organizational success and failure since the existence of organization and business. For a business to survive the competition, to provide, and to maintain a quality product or service, it is marketing that accomplishes this. Today’s paradoxical views of businesses can be summarized as “Customer is King.” Market orientation is the business and academic concept that has renewed the interest of the micro approach after the era of the 1960s. Market orientation is about identifying and getting the desired goals into the eyes of the customer. The customer is the center of the strategy. Satisfaction of the customer depends on organizational resources and actions, including market, competition, organizational, and personal interests. From a customer perspective, a variety of ways might be used to satisfy the customers directly, and systems analyses can be developed and monitored to identify and measure these ways.

2. Understanding Consumer Behavior

As digital marketing options emerged, their effect on consumer behavior has been studied using surveys, focus groups, and experimental techniques. Results have been found similar to those obtained when models solely based on traditional behaviors were used, but improvements in fit have been noted. When the large number of individual-level or demographic factors amenable to wide-scope digital marketing interventions were tested, differences in the response of gen-Y consumers compared with consumers in other studies were found across a wide range of factors. Clearly, the attributes and behaviors of these gen-Y consumers merit important consideration across a wide spectrum of product-consumer typologies.

Additional support was found for increases in the explanatory power of the model arising from advertising regulations enacted in a number of countries, based on the powerful effect of advertising type on consumer behavior. Private label brand response mechanisms to traditional utility theory were described, which helped to explain the behavior of consumers for different product classes within a single category.

Building on the work of behavioral scientists, a theory of consumer behavior in the market exchange system was set forth and tested on a global basis using qualitative methods for several years, followed by quantitative tests using structural equation modeling techniques. The main findings, when compared with results from other studies using the same technique, were that approximately 70% of the data fit the theory underlying the behavior of consumers in the typical gen-Y cohort.

Understanding consumer behavior remains the domain of the behavioral sciences, where the responses of individual consumers in the marketplace are observed to understand and predict future behavior. As the study of digital marketing has progressed using a wide variety of computational models, the behavioral sciences, empowered by improved observational techniques and data analytic tools, have flourished over the past few decades. Still, the heart of effective marketing remains the knowledge of consumer behavior enshrouded in a nexus of exchange relationships based on reciprocal trust.

3. Key Strategies in Digital Marketing

Brand ambassadorship can be used to increase the awareness and perception of a brand among consumers. It is widely accepted that companies should use social media to build a good relationship with customers, driving patterns, and brand ambassadorship. This company uses it to increase recruitment and strengthen the retention of current employees. It captures the psychology of social network behavior by carefully examining things, such as the labor of recognizing the sense of accomplishment through shared posts.

The third strategy is the use of non-YouTube network-based trace data. This involves analyzing two kinds of tracking elements: cookies set by network entities to capture browsing information, and third-party elements to infer what applications users use on their personal systems.

Another of our strategies is mobile applications, which works by capturing applications used by various users on their handheld devices. This is done by creating a digital key that links the activity of marketing spenders installed within advertising mechanisms of popular mobile applications in the advertising ecosystem.

Facebook allows its advertisers to promote educational services by showing ads that are targeted towards people whose ages range from 13 to 19, based in the United States, and who have previously spent time researching financial aid for education and preparing for tests.

Affiliate marketing: In short, affiliate marketing means making money with other people’s products. Someone gives a product to someone else to market, and for every sale they make, they take a commission.

Targeted advertising: This is a practice of compiling information on one or more characteristics of a market or population. It involves collecting and analyzing information on the behavior of a group of people through some type of digital technology. Behavioral targeting can occur when a user views an advertisement and data is used to target the online backend that reflects the user’s characteristics. It can also occur based on a customer’s purchase history or interests.

4. Case Studies and Examples

A particular case is that of Guaraná Antarctica for the taste of original preparation campaign—taking a famous Brazilian funkeiro—Alok—to a scientific laboratory to prove the existence of Antarctica. Even those who were at home without internet access felt obliged to access the social networks to understand what the others were talking about. And they found the secret of the promotion: Alok took photographs of the formulas of original guarana, and for four weeks those who were able to decipher the code would win cash prizes and vouchers for cash-back at Selfridges stores. The success of the 080address by consumers was huge. The product had been for sale only for a week, but its launching had been so planned and documented on the product’s social networks that the consumers went in and confirmed the purchase of their unit.

The last phase of this chapter contains case studies and examples of campaigns that have placed brands in more visible and efficient spots. Attention will not be diverted to the size of campaigns but the fact that they are case studies with many activities, social media commitments, product developments, data capture, and targeted communication. If at the beginning of the marketing era it was about monologic communication as we moved on on the spectrum of dialogic communication, it is now, in the digital era, about the polylogic communication, that is, the consumer discussing with the marketer and the marketer discussing with the consumer. Therefore, social media communication has a solid impact, being the place where brands and consumers discuss. Digital communication agencies are interested in creating campaigns which unite a stronger online presence. Brands that have succeeded in exploiting the potential of social media are indeed on higher peaks.

5. The Future of Digital Marketing

It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of digital marketing involves mobile. Global growth in mobile services will undoubtedly continue into 2020. In recent years, the use of mobile applications has grown significantly in the world and also in Slovenia. It is positive, especially considering that in the future more users will access the internet using mobile devices than through desktops. Social networks have also begun to pay attention to the usefulness of mobile applications, thus tailoring our experience better. With the technological development, the boundaries between different forms of digital marketing will fade even more in the future. It can be expected that digital TV, outdoor digital media, and digital signage will increasingly use interactivity and become even more similar to those currently used in online marketing, such as email and social networks. This is certainly good news for marketers who can use this technology not only for advertising but also use them to improve consumer engagement throughout the buying process.

Digital marketing is a fast-changing field, and for this reason, the future of digital marketing involves innovation and creativity. We can expect to see new forms of digital media ranging from interactive digital television, video blogs, the adaptation of PDA for digital marketing, location-based digital advertising combined with augmented reality, and more. For instance, Google already has an application called Google Goggles that uses the camera of a mobile phone to search for information about products by taking a picture of the product. The boundaries of digital marketing and information from digital marketing are slowly starting to deteriorate. Smart consumers do not only search the internet for advisement but question it, recommend it, review it, and create it. It is nevertheless certain that the only constant in digital marketing is change. Marketers will need to adapt to new channels and new technologies to keep up with digital customers and to anticipate tomorrow’s digital needs.