Marketing is dead.

Consumers are facing drastic changes in their behavior, markets are facing drastic changes in their functioning, companies are facing drastic changes in their environment…What about Marketing? Is marketing changing at the pace that the current situation demands? The answer is “no”. Marketing must once and for all make a huge effort if it wants to meet the challenge of modernization, or perpetuate its conventional guidelines at the risk of failing and cornering themselves in. The challenges of New Marketing can be summarized in eight steps:

1. Transforming Marketing into a more financial and accounting discipline. Marketing must put an end to being seen as public enemy number one by financial departments and in the most easily “cut” area. In order for that to happen, Marketing chiefs must put on their “CFO hat” and administrate rigorously, as well as defend the value of the client base as the most critical business ingredient of the company, managing its “Customer Equity” intelligently.
2. Optimizing the relationships between Marketing and Sales. The relationships between Marketing and Sales don’t have to be a drive toward prominence and a struggle to gain in competition and budget, but rather an authentic sum of synergetic forces.
3. Betting on “High-Tech Marketing”. It is time for science to impregnate Marketing to give it all the necessary rigor and reliability in order to stop being merely an intuitive field. Customer Intelligence, Marketing Intelligence,
   Dashboards, Data Mining, Analysis, Prevention, Prediction, Modeling... these are terms that should enter definitively into the world of Marketing.
4. Marketing must be present on the “noble floors” of the company. New
   competition such as Partner Relationship Management, Data Base Marketing,
   Telemarketing, Public Relations Marketing, Brand Building and Brand Asset
   Management, Experiential Marketing and Profitability Analysis must return to the hands of Marketing chiefs, who must assume relevant leadership positions.
5. Create new means of communication aimed toward the client. This involves having an intelligent public relations model that is more creative and aimed towards editorial content of added value, more than towards advertising. It means motivating product placement (Do you remember when BMW put one of their models in the latest James Bond film? Or the mystery novel “The Bulgari Affair”, financed by the jewelry and cosmetic firm Bulgari?). It means intelligent sponsoring and creating a real “Marketing buzz”, as Apple did with iPod.
6. Marketing must listen to the client in order to create new products and services. This means being aware of new market needs, not when they already exist and the competition has gotten ahead, but rather at the moment they appear…
   Do you know how Kellogg’s came up with the idea of launching their famous cereal bars? Simply by detecting that a large number of people ate cereal taken directly from the box outside of breakfast hours...
7. Create a New Client Marketing. We must adopt a three-dimensional and absolutely integral Marketing focus, far from its old reduction-based, unidirectional structures. On the path to a New Marketing, the product is no longer the central focus. All of the focus returns to one protagonist: the client.
8. Marketing must stop being a tactic and turn into a strategy. Marketing must be a strategic element and abandon its label of “merely a tactical tool”. The only way to achieve this is to aim each and every Marketing action according to the client value, the most important term in current Marketing.