Two reasons why marketing strategy still mattersSTEFANO PUNTONI | 25 JANUARY, 2021

Marketing is probably the business discipline that is most fundamentally affected by new technological trends, like Big Data and artificial intelligence. Well-established marketing practices are being questioned. There are however, two reasons why marketing strategy still matters.

First, despite all the talk about old concepts being obsolete, the new ideas often look rather familiar. For example, many insights in the field of social media marketing, such as the importance of seeding, resemble insights from traditional PR and the fashionable concept of the “Customer Journey” appears to be an evolution of Hierarchy of Effects models that have been around for many decades. Insights about human psychology developed over decades of research and practice are unlikely to become useless any time soon. Announcing the death of marketing is to get readers to flock to learn what is about to replace it.

The new upstart marketers’ approach will often follow traditional patterns. For example, Tesla is building a great brand by making great products, by uniquely combining a status appeal with do-good and tech savvy credibility, and with Elon Musk’s genius for catching the attention of the public.

Second, a completely data-driven approach to decision making works very well for tactical decisions where experimentation can be done quickly and cheaply. Think about A/B testing in web design, pricing on e-commerce sites like Amazon or Alibaba, or the impressive search engine optimization of online intermediaries like Booking. It is unclear that the same approaches can be seamlessly deployed to decisions that entail more difficult learning processes, longer time lags, and larger upfront investments.

The current technological trends will change the field of marketing and brand management beyond recognition, but I bet that brilliant marketing strategies and brilliant brands will remain the bedrock of business success.

Stefano Puntoni is a Marketing Professor and Behavioural scientist, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Netherlands