Update May 2023: The course is now ‘Marketing Strategy for the Digital World’ as that seems to reflect the world of practitioners better. The questions are still focused on the customer and guided by consumer psychology, but the discussions now focus much more on technology and martech, the impact on marketing strategy, and blending traditional marketing with newer forms of marketing. More details in an upcoming post.

May 2022: On ‘Marketing to the Digital Customer’

Elsewhere in this site, I have written about the need to focus digital marketing efforts of any business on the digital customer, and let digital marketing campaigns be driven by customer needs rather than by available digital marketing techniques. The latter is often the focus of many marketing managers and could result in inconsistent, ill-timed marketing efforts that are not driven by clear customer-based objectives. See my article Digital Customer or Digital Marketing? for more views on this topic.

This digital customer is different from the traditional customer for various reasons – the speed afforded by digital life, the constant consumption of short-life media, the product variety offered by ecommerce portals, and so on. The fast life of the digital customer has become so common that 10-minute grocery delivery seems a genuine need these days.

Marketing to the digital customer brings its opportunities and problems. Over the recent past, I designed from scratch and taught an elective course on the digital customer for MBA students. I also co-coordinated and partially taught a year-long executive program in digital marketing (due to complete its second innings soon). Several questions came up in discussions and observations, and these might be worth the attention of marketers, especially digital marketers:

1. How can digital marketers avoid the technique from overtaking the message? A funny ad catches attention but sometimes consumers forget what the ad was for.
2. Is it possible to understand the customer through digital means, as big data provides information on choices and not on psychological and contextual drivers of behavior? What could be the most effective ways to understand the customer?
3. Consumers enjoy different types of shopping, but the digital environment often deprives them of the enjoyment of actually visiting a store and touching products and choosing. How could marketers overcome this issue? Is virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) the answer?
4. How can marketers meaningfully attribute the various virtual touchpoints in the digital customer’s journey?

These questions, and many others, are even more important today as the virtual world has come to stay and the real world shifts to the metaverse.

If you are a marketing practitioner interested in joining this journey, I am eager to hear from you. My contact details are here.

This site will be updated with resources, viewpoints, and questions on the digital customer.