The Byline: PR and Marketing Insights from Eiler Communications

What is the fifth era of marketing – The Wired Era – going to look like when we get well into it in the next couple of years?

This illustration depicts what a bunch of clients, friends, colleagues, students told me when asked how social media fit in business. It is like a bunch of clouds to many. All social media are emerging and not many are yet proficient at using the right forms to bolster their businesses.

Hardwired phones will be gone. Cell phones will abound even more than today.

Go back 5-10 years ago when home phones were dominant over cell phones. Then, home phone bills were expensive and you had to pay for long distance calls. Now, many people only have a cell phone or a PDA and the home phone is becoming extinct. Cell phone bills are expensive with all of the different features such as being able to access the Internet or text messaging.

Services to customers will broaden and enhance as companies try for an edge in reaching and serving customers.

There will be more research and development so that companies have services and products that people want and can get them to market very rapidly.

Brick and mortar stores will turn into warehouses to ship goods that people buy online.

If stores are to maintain customers, they will have to provide ever-better service and deals for people who visit and do not do their comparative shopping online.

Global markets will abound as Internet users will learn of products from far-off nations that they can easily get.

Many new online businesses will be founded because the cost to begin does not involve machines, factories, shipping and all else associated with traditional ways of reaching customers. Some will founder and fail and many will take off and soar.

Soon all DVD’s and games will be bought online and held in mass databases. Material goods will begin to vanish and hard drives will take over. Think about it, what takes up less space, an iPod with 20,000 songs or 2,000 CDs with 10 songs on each? An iPod can be stored in your pocket while the CDs take up an entire wall space. In the next few years this will happen with DVDs and video games.

The reduction in amount of material goods will be environmentally friendly with reduced amounts of waste.

What’s your take on what The Wired Era of marketing will bring forth?

The first four areas of marketing over the past century (per Boone & Kurtz Contemporary Marketing 2009) are:
Production Era – 90-100 years ago when companies believed “a good product will sell itself.”
Sales Era – 1940s-50s new technologies improved production and companies needed sales people to call on their market channels and end buyers.
Marketing Era – 1950s-60s saw the shift to making what people wanted, not what a company thought they wanted. Sellers had to adopt a consumer orientation and provide what people wanted.
Relationship Era – 1990s-now companies got into strategic partnerships so they could provide their products through new channels covered by their partners, or provide new products their partners made and they did not.

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