The emergence and implications of Technologized Marketing

ABSTRACT

Technology is as old as human activity and marketing is as old as human economic activity. Accordingly, marketing technology has evolved. Drawing on evolutionary technology systems theory, this paper discusses the emergence and implications of Technologized Marketing, which will be the next evolutionary phase. The implications of Technologized Marketing focus on the question how excellence in marketing will look like. For each implication testable research hypotheses are developed.

KEYWORDS:

• Marketing
• technology
• evolution
• artificial intelligence
• MarTech

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of phases 0 and 1 readers are referred to Brock (2019).

2. Martech includes the related term Adtech. Generally, Martech is broader and more focused on targeting and engaging with known prospects/customers and Adtech is narrower in scope, advertising (marketer-publisher interface), and concerned with targeting anonymous audiences. For the purposes of this paper we assume that Martech includes Adtech.

3. We derive this task value chain from the logic of the value chain from Porter (1985), the typical marketing management tasks as originally proposed by Kotler (1973), and 20+ years of industry experience in B2C and B2B marketing management.

4. See Brock (2019), Figure 30.1: world wide web (1989), browser (1990), banner ad (1994).

5. Readers interested in blockchain technical details and implications are referred to the book Blockchain Revolution by Alex and Don Tapscott.

6. This section draws on 5G descriptions on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G) and the International Telecommunication Union ITU (https://www.itu-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/setting-the-scene-for-5g_pub/811d7a5f-00eedfa2-en).

7. First generation analytics refers to classical univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis that emerged around the end of the 20th century (e.g. Galton, 1890). Second generation analysis refers to the application of more modern techniques such as structural equation modeling or Bayesian statistics that were developed in the second half of the 21st century (e.g. Jeffreys, 1973; Jöreskog, 1973).

8. The term strategic creativity emerged during my marketing work at Apple. To the best of my knowledge this term is not used in the literature as such. For example, Besson and Mahieu (2011) use this term, but its meaning differs.

9. Outsourced services are sometimes seen as a fourth marketing budget classification.

10. We derived this view from the literature on organizational agility (e.g. Singh et al., 2013), which takes a broader, firm-wide perspective. Naturally, an agile marketing organization requires an agile firm.

11. By “referenceability” we mean the need for a common performance indicator to emerge. Very turbulent environments that still lack structure, a dominant design or a common set of customer preferences are by definition hard to predict. Martech excels at automating and augmenting marketing tasks and supporting marketing decisions that are derived from past data points that are assumed to be a good indicator of the future.