Marketing has existed for a long -long time. Be it Gillette giving out free razors, to make returning customers for its blades, or Coca-Cola making its bottles the shape of women, marketers have always come out with creative ideas to sell their products. Earlier, ad campaigns were considered as marketing but with changing times marketers need to learn customer experiences, data analytics, designing of products, and marketing creative. Institutes teaching marketing to its students, like CGC Jhanjheri have grown in numbers to impart marketing knowledge to its students. Nowadays, marketing goes beyond ad-campaigns. It’s an art in itself. Let’s take a look at how marketing works nowadays.

The Customer is The Ideator

Marketing isn’t just about targeting customers with your ad-campaigns. Nowadays, the ideating part is sometimes left to customers. They are not just the buyer, they help develop content ideas and share their insights about features they would like to have, which firms can develop upon to give better service to customers. This is also sometimes called customer co-creation. B-schools like CGC Jhanjheri should encourage students to find ways of doing such campaigns.

We can take the example of Lego. In 2004, the company introduced ‘Lego Ideas’. It is an open-source product development and has received suggestions from over 1 million people. If the idea is good and is used by the company, they also pay a percentage of sales to the ideator. 

These days you might even need to beg your customers to help you with suggestions. Some marketers have done so through social media. They have asked their customers for honest feedback and added a pleading emoji conveying that they are humbly asking for it.

The Complete Solution

A product is no more just the product itself. Customers want a complete solution and not just the product itself. The complete experience is the product plus the buying process, the after-market support, and the relationship with the customer. This not only requires creative thinking but also resources. If the fee isn’t too high for your B-school like CGC Jhanjheri fees, investing time and money to train yourself for providing the complete experience to customers should be your goal. 

Smartphone manufacturers nowadays don’t only focus on selling their phones, providing after-sales service and software updates is also very important to improve sales.

The Customer is The Advertiser

Nowadays, with so many media around, it is no longer feasible to reach the consumer through paid advertisements as the customer is more aware. Therefore, turning people into your advertisers is a really good idea. They spread the word among their peers and increase awareness. Apart from customers, employees and partners can be inspired to advocate for the product. 

An example of this can be salespersons asking the shoppers about their preferences, suggesting them better products, and providing discounts as a gesture of goodwill.

Dynamic Marketer

Knowing what is working and what is not, is now possible in real-time with the advancement of technology leading to a better count of digital engagement. In the past, people worked on the strategy they formulated, since its impact wasn’t measurable in real-time. Now marketers not only access the viability of their plan but they also make changes if the data suggests that reach isn’t as expected. 

Many large and small firms nowadays, CISCO, for example, create real-time dashboards that show the performance in real-time which is monitored and worked upon to get better results.

Entrepreneurship

Earlier, managers were considered marketers. They set goals at an earlier point of time of the product cycle and then worked to achieve those goals within the allocated budget. Now, marketers need to be creative and operate more like entrepreneurs, working continuously to find better ways to do the same work with minimum resources in the least possible time. Applying entrepreneurial ideas like agile development and lean startup can increase your efficiency multi-folds and the teaching is in-line with an MBA degree and can be learned in the CGC Jhanjheri fees paid to the institutes.

With the changing technology and consumer behavior, creativity in marketing is being redefined. Input needn’t be that high in monetary terms now but the output is required to be high. Marketers are no longer just advertisers. They need to offer a complete solution to the customer and work with them from ideation to the advertisement of the product. Now marketers need to be dynamic to work according to the changing horizons and have the entrepreneurial spirit within them to succeed in this field.