Humantech Marketing. marketing molecular e humano

The exponential technological evolution has been impacting marketing practices. Digital allows a new set of techniques and instruments, which are deeply changing marketing and customers´ relationships.

As ever, mostly in times of rapid and disruptive change, several forces still follow different paces and speed, according to the level of companies’ management sophistication, impacting the economic progress:

– Planning models of the past still exist, notwithstanding their lack of agility.

– Consumers have a higher sophisticated demand – in particular, Millennialls, Generation Z, and the future Alpha Generation – with a high capacity of intervention, concerning their interests and needs, but most companies are not responding accordingly, on a fancy and rapid mood.

– Companies – specially the bigger ones – are organized around multiple hierarchy levels, working under hardly adaptable silos. 

– The majority of companies and advertising agencies still have digital departments (online) separated from the traditional (offline) ones, hardly assuring a coherent strategic practice.

– Notwithstanding the Cloud and the gathering of huge amount of data, research reveals that around 80% of data collected is not duly analyzed.

– Agility, Innovation and continuous Experimentation, are not typical characteristics of labor and business processes.  

– There are many companies reactive towards the need of new production methods, which would be in line with sustainability.

– Beyond that, the pandemic crisis, although having contributed to the acceleration of the digital transformation, has created entropies and multiple trade-offs, concerning the development of the economy.

Meanwhile, we are living on the threshold of the 4^th Industrial Revolution, of Industry Intelligent Automation, Interconnectivity, Internet of Everything, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Machine Learning, Biotechnology, the integration of physical, digital and biologic systems, and faster and faster Network Communications, of the 4^th and the 5^th generation to come.

Concerning these impacts, a new marketing paradigm is needed, which may embody and be able to respond to all the challenges produced by the technology impacts, a “Post-digital marketing”, the Marketing Molecular and Human. 

And, why a post-digital era will emerge? (upcoming on the next decade)

The new marketing era – the Post-digital Marketing (Oliveira, Carlos Manuel, 2020) – is going to be the natural evolution of the present digital marketing, at an upstage phase, following the 4^th Industrial Revolution and the rapid evolution of digital communications, of the 5G and of the upcoming 6G.

Having all this in mind, which will be the forecasted characteristics of the Post-digital Marketing era, a human-centric and human-generated marketing era, in which digital will be not a factor of differentiation, but the minimum cost of entry into competition:

– A new Onlife environment, with online and offline integration. Total digital and analogical ecosystems integration, and of all the business value chain.

– Dynamic Planning, always validated accounting market consumer behavior changes, at every moment.

– A better Consumer Knowledge and a more sophisticated segmentation, integrating online and offline techniques, using Digital Anthropology, so as all the other research methods and procedures.

– Customer Relationship Management, based on following Social Media Listening and the Customer Journey, creating insights combining Big Data with Small Data analysis, in order to better anticipate customer needs and elaborate products and services, in real time, on a “1 to moment” procedure, to get a Wow effect of the customer. 

– The need of a new marketing-mix, from the prevalent 4P to the new 4E, Human-Centric and Human-Generated, built under four new ledgers: Experience, Exchange, Engagement and Everyplace.

– A brand humanized relationship with the clients (based on its strong Identity, Social Responsibility and Purpose), a H2H relationship, brand to human being, contrasting with brand to consumer, in order to conquer intimacy and trust. 

– A Molecular Marketing, focused on each customer, incorporating all the moments of contact and needs, in real time.

– Project-based Inter speciality and interdisciplinarity, in order to deal with company silos, allowing a better flexibility, agility and customer – almost obsessed – focusing.

– The need to change Business Mindsets, focused in different areas, such as: having a social and environment Purpose, and stakeholders’ satisfaction, in contrast with only concentration on company’ profits; cooperative networks instead of hard hierarchy; empowerment, instead of control; experimentation conditioning planning; transparency of processes and decisions; medium/long term management opposing to the straight short-term management.

New environments and new situations in business, mainly the most disruptive as the ones we are presently facing, need new solutions. Therefore, a new Post-Digital Marketing will have to emerge, in order to cope with the market needs and consumers’ preference and delight.

Carlos Manuel de Oliveira

November 2023