OPINION: Ups and Downs of Marketing

Marketing plays an important role in any entity’s success — or lack thereof. Marketing requires astute monitoring of trends across many domains: changes in socio-cultural values, emerging technologies that can be tapped (or ignored at one’s peril), new business models based on platforms and the sharing economy, to name a few.

When used to its best potential, marketing offers products and services that solve meaningful problems customers face, helps new technologies and solutions achieve their potential, and contributes to solving social and environmental challenges to create a better world.

On the flip side, I experience more than a little angst about the social and environmental problems to which marketing has contributed.

The clash of good and bad is inherent in marketing. Marketing can contribute to a better world. Conversely, marketing contributes to unhealthy, unsustainable behaviors.

As a new marketer one can often face challenges, a few of them are:

· Accessing Data Across Platforms: For marketers, this means they need to access data from multiple points to get a full picture of a customer. No longer will one single data set provide a complete understanding. A marketer may be missing key details if they don’t have information from the right channel.

· Identifying Customers Across Channels: Once a marketer obtains data from numerous channels, the primary hurdle is matching data from various data sources to a single customer to get a fuller understanding of that individual.

· Identifying New Potential Customers: Having fragmented customer data increases your chances of missing out on new potential customers. You may misidentify a customer, causing you to think they are not a strong potential lead. However, you may only believe this because you are missing essential data.