MGEMA MUSA ZEPHANIA
BAPRM 42615
13 MAY 2016
TIME 23:41

Digitization and marketing.

Digitization has become part of our daily routines. We are increasingly spending time online and using social media (Forrester Research 2008; Nielsen 2012). They use online services for countless activities, browsing web pages, storing and playing music, sending e-mails, searching for information, and meeting other people. With the devices available such as Smart phones and tablets, they are even more connected. Digitization has brought about a social revolution is widely acknowledged by both practitioners and academics, especially of social media, has transformed consumer behavior with important consequences for firms, products, and brands. The changing marketing communication landscape naturally challenges companies to adapt to the requirements of digitization as well as to adopt new ways and tools to communicate with and reach, meet, and serve today’s customers. In a similar way to academic discussion, management consulting is also pushing companies forward by urging them to update their business ideology to suit the digital age. ‘To stay competitive, companies must stop experimenting with digital and

Commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses’ (Olanrewaju et al. 2014). This does not mean companies must physically transform their business into online form, but that they should intellectually accept digital developments and transform the company mindset to align with the digital age. Companies need to understand the value of digitization for their business as the CEO of McKinsey’s London office Paul Willmott (2014) has advised. However, transforming a business to exploit the digital age is easier said than done and many companies seem bemused by the demands made by today’s digital and social customers. Over the last 20 years, the amount of internet marketing research has increased dramatically and the influence of new technological solutions such as social media has clearly become visible in research. Despite the relatively short history of Internet marketing research, it would be false to claim that digital marketing is a new practice. Around ten years ago had already declared that internet marketing is “coming of age” supported this declaration and compared e-marketing with other contemporary marketing practices, noting that e-marketing had, to a large extent, become an integrated part of other marketing practices. The digital marketing research field, that specifically focuses on measuring the benefits of digital marketing utilization, highlights the importance of viewing it as an integrated function of marketing rather than a separate one or as ‘marketing communication plus’. However, digital marketing has also been described as a new approach to marketing rather than just traditional marketing boosted by digital elements even claimed the rise of social media has brought about a paradigm shift in marketing. These two perspectives focus on how marketing should reconcile with the rise of the digital communication landscape and may at first seem to be contradictory but in fact, these perspectives examine the influence of digitization on marketing at different levels. Those who see digital marketing as an extension of traditional marketing are actually examining digitization from a usage perspective and view digital marketing in terms of its tools and the environment, whereas another point of view focuses on strategic level aspects that require fundamental changes that the ‘cultural phenomenon’ of digitization has triggered. Hence this dissertation suggests that the changed communication landscape should be examined at two different levels as a cultural phenomenon with important consequences for marketing strategies and, at the same time as a phenomenon influencing usage levels by providing new tools and new environments to practice marketing.