The consumer's kingdom

One of the most exciting topics to be analyzed in the last 30 years is the change that happened in the marketing behavior of companies, and even in the general public perception of the concept of marketing. In this article, I will share with readers how I see this evolution and leave a list of questions for companies planning. First, the so called wild view of marketing, that dominated the 70's, 80's and in some markets even the 90's. Then we had incredible macro-environmental changes and a new era of consumer sovereignty emerged. Finally, I address the messages and opportunities for companies that want to satisfy this very sophisticated consumer, full of choices and with very close competing companies wanting to supply.

The era of the wild view of marketing finished in most industries, although in some of them even today these "dinosaurs" are still present. This "wild view" used to see marketing as the architect of pushing consumption, full of advertising, sales and aggressive selling. New products were designed for sales, mass consumption and profit, with short term goals. Marketing was seen as manipulative and companies had a narrow consumer orientation, with lack of measurement and spreading problematic relationships. Most companies did not listen at all to consumers. All organizational structure was designed for selling, short term results and spot relationships.
At the end of the 80's and beginning of 90's, several environmental changes happened in most of the countries and markets. I consider the most important as the widening of markets and internationalization, the fast rate of technology change and progress, markets deregulation, increase in global competition, with some markets having more offer than demand.

Another bundle of important changes came from the information and communication process, with technology, internet and World Wide Web, increasing the speed of socio-cultural changes of consumers. We can also point the consumerist movement, growth of ethics in citizens' behavior and emergence of societal marketing movement (inclusion) as important changes in the last 20 years.

These changes took us to an era of consumer sovereignty, or an era of the consumer taking over production chains, that were now redesigned towards the satisfaction of this new king with a professional purchase behavior, new and growing expectations. This new era made companies understand that consumers values his time, wants well being, nice experiences and rewards and has the free choice in an individual way. For the bad behaving companies we had the emergence of consumer's ONG´s (bringing countervailing power) and large public attention to consumer rights. The risks for companies increased in an incredible basis with the fast communication process, discussion groups, Web based complains and new media.

The sovereignty of consumers led companies that want to conquer markets and win competition to a new strategic behavior. In essence, they need to be demand driven. This behavior is based on paying attention and collecting information about the consumers (1), competitors (2) and environment (3), to have a deep analysis and quick reaction of environmental changes (4).

Companies switched to a long range approach valuing satisfaction and well being of buyers (5). It is a new integrated network organization, dynamic and harmonic, decentralized with delegation (6) and now designed with a problem-solution based approach (7). This problem solution based approach considers "from trying to sell to helping to buy". There is a continuous search for new ways to solve existing needs, launching added value solutions (8) that considers and values corporate social responsibility (9), smooth and collaborative network with suppliers, distributors and service providers (10), with a strong focus on smart market segmentation (11), knowledge generation and dissemination (12) and measurement/accountable marketing (13).

With this behavior, there are several success cases of companies with performance contributing to growth of demand, democracy and inclusion. The target is to have very satisfied consumers with repeated purchases, what is called the "lock in" strategy (14). Companies build relationships and informal contracts with consumers that even can blind them towards competitors, increase their cost to change to another company, building a sustainable competitive advantage, with growth and profitability.

I always like to finish my articles with a working list. I have numbered here 14 points that could be transformed into questions (how to...?) that will make part of a planning debate of companies towards a list of ideas for improvement. Let's call them the "Consumer's Kingdom 14 Questions". Good work!