TA global brand is bleached with the culture of the
respective country”
Dr Michael Dorsch spoke to Manoj Khatri and Dr R K Srivastava
about evolution of marketing, role of technology
in marketing, global branding and the
made-in-India label. Excerpts of the interview:
Dr Michael Dorsch is the associate professor of Department of Marketing,
College of Business and Behavioural Science, Clemson University, USA.
Dr. Dorsch’s work has appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Business Research,
Journal of Financial Planning, Journal of Professional Service
Marketing, and various other publications.
How has marketing evolved over the last decade and how is it different from the marketing that was practised in the 1980s and 1990s?
Marketing has experienced quite a bit of change over the past two decades. During the 1980s, marketing witnessed increasing and vigorous interest in several areas including services marketing, relationship marketing, brand equity, and pricing. Prior to this time, marketing efforts focused primarily on physical goods and on marketing transactions. In addition, during the 1990s and 2000s, marketing experienced a renewed interest in the use of technology for strategic marketing decision-making; thus the notion of marketing engineering was born. Furthermore, the introduction and growth of the Internet has fuelled marketing interest in employing technology in reaching and serving customers. The past two decades have also witnessed increased attention on marketing in a global context. Technological advancements along with social and political changes have resulted in an enhanced interest in appealing to a global marketplace. More recently, the marketing discipline is beginning to place a renewed emphasis on the customer with the notion of customer relationship managemen and customer equity.
Can you emphasise the role of technology in shaping marketing thought in the 21st century?
Technology will continue to play an important role in shaping marketing practices during the 21st century. Technology refers to both expertise/knowledge and the tools (e.g., equipment and machinery) needed to accomplish marketing activities. Consequently, reliance on the role of technology will extend beyond the machinery to include attention to how the technology may be employed by both customers and businesses to make more informed decisions. I expect that businesses will use some technology to further develop their organisational learning systems. For instance, some technology is likely to be used to help businesses learn more about the market (e.g., customers, competition, and other environmental factors) in order to make more informed and timely marketing decisions (e.g., web blogs, discussion groups, customer loyalty programs, decision support systems and so on). Other technology will be used to deliver the marketing plan (e.g., e-commerce, tracking tools for monitoring the distribution of products, the use of web cookies to store information about customer preferences) and regulate the marketing plan (e.g., customer relationship programmes). Still other technologies will be used by customers — they are likely to increasingly rely on the Internet to search product information, make purchases, track their expenditures, and so on. It is also likely that consumers will increasingly rely on technology to communicate with others and to become informed of local, regional, national, and global events.
Both businesses and consumers are likely to place great importance on learning the benefits of certain types of marketing transactions, their ease of usability, and their security and privacy characteristics. Moreover, an increasing reliance on technology will require both businesses and consumers to change their marketing-related behaviours. In some instances, the behavioural changes will be minor and easily adapted. In other instances, businesses and consumers will be required to make more significant changes in their shopping/purchasing behaviours, which is likely to slow the acceptance of technology.
TO
READ FURTHER... SUBSCRIBE
TO YOUR COPY TODAY!!!
Magazines