Association of ideas

Since the Finals Season began for me this past week, I had my (hopefully) last Marketing exam on Thursday. As I was reading the documents related to Promotion, I came across a timeline that describes how marketing communication evolved through the twentieth century. Here’s a summary:

In the 1920s the focus was on maximum production, and the concept of customer-oriented research for designing products did not exist at all.
During the 1950s, customers were thought of as a huge bunch of people with no difference between them. Along with the rise of the media came the massive communication, with advertisements centered exclusively on the product.
The birth and development of Information Technologies in the 1970s made possible for the retailers to get to know their costumers: what they preferred; where, when and how often they consumed. The concept of brand loyalty began around those years.
By the beginning of this century there was an important shift in marketing communication: it started flowing both ways, going from a monologue where companies advertised and customers did nothing but listen, to a dialogue in which societies have started to rise their voices so that corporations can hear them.

So I thought of something that I started to hear a couple of years ago and keep listening over and over: companies are now seen as social actors, and in such role they are not only responsible for giving jobs, but also for taking care of the people that work for them and the communities they are part of (both socially and environmentally)… in a number of cases they are even asked to perform activities that actually correspond to the State. Moreover, in some countries people not only question companies’ operations, but their suppliers’ and distributors’ as well.

And then I remembered about something Philip Kotler said at a talk I had the chance to attend last year: if your company went under, who would notice? Who would care? Satisfaction is no longer measured only by how well a product adjusts to customer’s needs, but also by the impact it has on society in all sorts of ways.

So I thought of a couple of cases that I know of and that I’d love to share with you, in which companies faced challenges imposed by the demands of customers that expected them to play a positive role in society. I will tell you about these cases in my next posts, so I hope you enjoy them and let me know what you think!