Last week we looked at the evolution of the 4P’s at shifting from the 4P’s to the 4C’s Today we are going to look at how we integrate Traditional & Digital Marketing.

Prior to purchase, consumers are treated as targets. Once they decide to buy, they are considered queens in a traditional customer-service perspective. Shifting to the consumer-care approach, companies view consumer as equals. Instead of serving consumer, a company demonstrates its genuine concern for the consumer by listening, responding, and consistently following through on terms dictated by both the company and the consumer.

In traditional customer-service, personnel are responsible for performing specific roles and processes according to strict guidelines and standard operating procedures. This situation often puts service personnel in a dilemma over conflicting objectives. In a connected world, collaboration is the key to consumer-care success. Collaboration happens when companies invite consumers to participate in the process by using self-service facilities.

Digital marketing is not meant to replace traditional marketing. Instead, the two should coexist with interchanging roles across the consumer path. In the early stage of interaction between companies and consumers, traditional marketing plays a major role in building awareness and interest. As the interaction progresses and consumers demand closer relationships with companies, digital marketing rises in importance. The most important role of digital marketing is to drive action and advocacy. Since digital marketing is more accountable than traditional marketing, its focus is to drive results whereas traditional marketing’s focus is on initiating consumer interaction.

The essence of Marketing 4.0 is to recognize the shifting roles of traditional and digital marketing in building consumer engagement and advocacy.

Marketing 4.0 is an approach that combines online and offline interaction between companies and consumers, blends style with substance in building brands, and ultimately complements machine-to-machine connectivity with human-to-human touch to strengthen consumer engagement. It helps marketers to transition into the digital economy, which has redefined the key concepts of marketing. Digital marketing and traditional marketing are meant to coexist in Marketing 4.0 with the ultimate goal of winning consumer advocacy.

What is important is not to be seduced by the lure of digital. George Westerman from MIT notes that “as sexy as it is to speculate about new technologies such AI, robots, and the Internet of things, the focus on technology can steer the conversation in a dangerous direction”. That direction is one in which the technology itself becomes the focus and not the broader implications of what the technology does to the existing corporate approach. “In a digital world,” Westerman concludes, “a strategic focus on digital sends the wrong message. Creating a digital strategy can focus the organisation in ways that don’t capture the true value of digital transformation. You don’t need a digital strategy. You need a better strategy, enabled by digital.” If Westerman is right, and I believe he is, then the whole focus on digital stuff will soon fade away as the new normal takes hold and we return to a focus on just strategy and just marketing – minus the silly and unnecessary digital appendage. Nicholas Negroponte, another MIT all-star, predicted all this 20 years ago. “Like air and drinking water,” he told a sceptical Wired magazine in 1998, “being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence”.

Moving forward as Mark Ritson states in think tv is dead “there wont be traditional and digital marketing…just MARKETING.” L’Oréal CMO Stéphane Bérubé proclaimed in a digital prefix will stunt your career “we need to stop talking about digital – it’s all part of marketing”. However there is still a transition where the distinction is still important for all to understand the nuances.

What is clear is that the glory days of TV simply taking the biggest, easiest share of big branding budgets in this country is officially over. One contemporary urban poet described this era as a time when the TV stations earned their “money for nothing” and their media “cheques for free”. He was spot on.

A tougher decade awaits. That does not mean that TV advertising is dead or that its manifest advantages are now at an end. But it prompts a huge strategic question.

Given the digital duopoly of Facebook and Google made such huge inroads into TV’s share of marketing budgets during the last 10 years – a decade in which TV held most of the reach and effectiveness advantages – imagine what they will achieve in the years ahead as those advantages start to diminish. Just remember though: Marketing is three things: it’s working out what is going on in the market; it’s coming up with a clear strategy; and it’s then selecting and executing tactics to deliver that strategy successfully. Not just the latter

CMO Perspective – Keith Weed: Unilever

Dove incorporated the characters from Cartoon Network’s popular show Steven Universe into their new series of body confidence and self-esteem videos. The videos offer language to both process and respond to the often complicated and troubling world of adolescence. Dove’s products aren’t featured in the series, and the brand is only mentioned in the title of the project (“Dove Self-Esteem Project), all of which reinforces the legitimacy of Dove’s efforts to truly support kids in the development of healthy self-esteem. In fact, the campaign offers more than witty videos—the project’s homepage provides kids and their parents a database of useful guides that can help them cope with common issues surrounding confidence and body positivity.

The Takeaway: You can build goodwill with your brand’s consumer base by offering content that will truly add value to their lives. With Dove’s self-esteem project, the company lets its product take a back seat to an important message—a message that fits well with their core brand values. In doing so, Dove is able to engage their audience and build relationships built on substance, not profit.