Digital Marketing. Annmarie Hanlon
critical to understand the tools available before embarking on a digital strategy.
Once you have comprehended the digital marketing tools, this is a good time to explore Part 3, Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning. This part investigates digital audit frameworks to ensure you are ready to develop the strategy and objectives, before building the digital marketing plan. Newer issues, including social media management, managing resources, digital marketing metrics, analytics and reporting, are included. The part concludes with methods of integrating, improving and transforming digital marketing, enabling you to apply the knowledge and tools gained though the chapters.
Enjoy the journey and let's start the campaign to create more digital navigators!
Online Resources
Head online to access a wealth of online resources that will aid study and support teaching, available at: https://study.sagepub.in/hanlon_DM. Digital Marketing: Strategic Planning & Integration is accompanied by:
For Lecturers
Editable PowerPoint slides will allow you to easily integrate each chapter into your lessons and provide access to figures from the book
Discussion questions will help you test students’ knowledge and understanding of the materials
Instructor manuals for each chapter will provide further support when teaching each chapter and encourage discussion in sessions
A digital marketing strategy and plan template can be used to help students get their project off the ground
Downloadable templates can be added to course resources or printed out for use in class
For Students
Follow the links to SAGE journal articles selected by the authors to help you supplement your reading and deepen your understanding of the key topics outlined in each chapter
Access links to helpful websites with lots of extra information to reference in your assignments
1 The Digital Marketing Landscape
Learning Outcomes
When you have read this chapter, you will be able to:
Understand key issues in the digital landscape
Apply communications theories to a digital environment
Analyse technology change
Evaluate blockchain potential
Create a plan to become an opinion leader
Professional Skills
When you have worked through this chapter, you should be able to:
Manage online reputation using third-party tools
Apply the search engines’ EU privacy removal process for unwanted content
1.1 Introduction
The fast-changing digital landscape provides many opportunities for marketers. It is important to understand key concepts such as ubiquitous computing and how the pace of technology has changed. This chapter explains how traditional marketing models like Diffusion of Innovation are still valid and apply to online opinion leaders, as well as differences between generations.
We explore the meaning and impact of ‘digital disruption’ and ‘the Internet of Things’, with new business models emerging to understand how this applies to consumers. In a world where your personal information has value, you can discover more about ‘big data’ and privacy issues that affect marketing plans. The last part of this chapter considers bitcoin and blockchain and how this might influence the future of data management.
1.2 A New Era
The growth of digital marketing has changed the relationship between businesses and customers. Scholars and practitioners agree that organisations are keen to use digital marketing to engage with their customers and we have moved into a new era where things look different.
Key Term Ubiquitous Computing
The term ‘ubiquitous computing’ was originally coined by Mark Weiser, who was head of the Computer Science Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) when writing in Scientific American in 1991 (Weiser, 1991). At that time Weiser commented that in the future there would be computers everywhere and we would not notice their presence; they would just be there.
Some decades later, we have computers at home and with us at university; they are embedded in our mobiles, wearables, in cars, in outdoor billboards – everywhere. We have reached Weiser's vision that computers are integrated ‘seamlessly into the world at large’ (p. 94).
One of the reasons for these trends and the change in the digital landscape is due to the acceleration in the adoption of new technologies. It took more than 50 years for over 50% of US households to adopt telephones (imagine life with no phone!), nearly 20 years to adopt home computers, yet it took less than 10 years for the same group to adopt smartphones.
In a pre-digital age, you booked a holiday by visiting the travel agents on the high street. It was only on arrival at your holiday destination that you saw what the hotel really looked like. Today you will go online, read reviews, see ‘traveller photos’ or holiday snaps others have shared and ask questions of people who have actually visited the destination ‘IRL’ (= in real life).
1.2.1 The Pace of Technology Substitution
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor (2016) explored the pace of technology substitution and suggested that the speed of replacement was based on ecosystems. Old technology ecosystems may find product extension opportunities whereas the new technology ecosystems need to counter these challenges. Within their framework there are four quadrants, as shown in Figure 1.1, which can be described as:
Creative destruction, where there are few challenges to the new tech and few opportunities for the old tech, resulting in fast substitution.
Robust coexistence, where the old tech fights back and brings out alternatives and a gradual substitution takes place.
Illusion of resilience, where the new tech moves in with few challenges.
Robust resilience, where old tech fights back and new tech challenges, bringing about a gradual substitution.
It could be argued that there are limitations to this framework as the research was based on a five-year study in the semiconductor manufacturing industry and adoption of new products is not always based on product desire, but also availability. In some countries it is harder to get a landline phone than a mobile. The landline requires wires and major investment whereas a mobile network is simpler to deploy. At the same time, growth in landline telephone ownership is declining sharply, especially in the G12 industrially advanced nations. Explore the latest statistics on the Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D, 2017).
Figure 1.1 A framework for analysing the pace of technology substitution
Source: Adner and Kapoor, 2016, p. 66
Activity 1.1 Analyse Technology Change
1 Working in groups, use Figure