Interactive, Direct and Digital Marketing

Introduction

Globalization has already influenced almost every sphere of human activity bringing people and continents closer. Nowadays, customers are provided with a unique opportunity to buy goods online from the country that had manufactured the product. Everything is one click away. Technological development and significant improvement in the sphere of innovations influenced the way people run business, and thus, the marketing sphere has already changed and transformed as well. Digital marketing gains momentum. In order to get a deeper understanding of the issue, the article should be taken into consideration. The article under analysis goes under the title Interactive, direct, and digital marketing. A future that depends on better use of business intelligence and is written by Merlin David Stone and Neil David Woodcock. The primary purpose of the paper is to provide critical analysis of the stated above article.

The Main Purpose of the Work and Ideas

The fundamental purpose of the work is centered on the investigation of the relationship between business intelligence and customer insight and the role of these two components for interactive marketing. First and foremost, it is worth noting that the authors state that the image of a customer has already changed. The customers used to be passive public; however, nowadays with the development of digital technologies, they want to participate in the process of development, manufacturing, and promotion actively using digital sources and online platforms of social media. The Internet contributed to the establishment of the dialogue between clients and companies (Kotler & Keller, 2016). The authors point out that the working environment within the companies changed as well as the type of communication between the organization and client. The strategy “Bring Your Own Device” became the leading one for a number of companies (Kotler & Keller, 2016). The corporations nowadays know how the customers what to get information (online, email, telephone); however, the question is what information do they need? What are their preferences? The fundamental problem is that the companies should not only collect the information, but also analyze, interpret, and figure out what knowledge will improve their business and help clients.

Customer Intelligence and Social Media

According to the ideas presented in the article, the conclusion can be drawn that the researchers are sure that business intelligence is the guiding force of modern marketing and is a future. However, this term is not the only one that became central to a number of corporations. Customer intelligence is another notion that is commonly used (Stone & Woodcock, 2014). This term has already replaced the old one, namely marketing intelligence. Due to social media, companies receive an opportunity to use real-time marketing; however, the environment of business intelligence has some challenges with dealing with customers’ insights and intelligence because of the flood of unstructured data (Kotler & Keller, 2016). Social media offer a wide spectrum of possibilities; however, challenges and difficulties arise as well because the flood of social media should be structured and organized in order to be beneficial for the business.

Critical Evaluation

In spite of the fact that the advantage of applying business intelligence in the working process of a modern business sphere is evident, it is worth highlighting that a number of experts argue this position. The researchers note that the pivotal disadvantage of the business intelligence implementation is considered to be high costs and an immense amount of wasted time and money in case the system was implemented with mistakes (Kotler & Keller, 2016). The costs incorporate many aspects, among them are the following ones, namely:

1. Hardware;
2. Software;
3. Personal;
4. Implementation;
5. Maintenance costs.

Although the usage of business intelligence may be beneficial, one should keep in mind that this approach is not suitable for small organizations as well as for medium-sized ones because of high expenses. The authors of the article under consideration are focused on the advantages of business intelligence for modern digital marketing. Although the benefits are indisputable, it is of paramount importance to make an accent on one more limitation of business intelligence that was not discussed in the article. The complexity of implementation and interpretation of data is believed to be another weak point of this system (Stone & Woodcock, 2014). Limited use of business intelligence can be explained by the fact that this innovative system was developed for large and successful companies to estimate their buying potential.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it should be noted that the article discusses the topic of current interest that is related to the implementation of business intelligence into the working process of the companies in order to enhance productivity and effectiveness. The researchers highlight that digital marketing and business intelligence should be considered as a future of interactive marketing. Although there are a lot of arguments provided by the authors that support this thesis, it should be stressed that there are a number of limitations of the system that should not be forgotten. It is doubtless that modern marketing is developing, and the usage of social media and digital technologies, as well as business intelligence, can be beneficial for companies. However, with the consideration of a current situation, the system should be improved in order to be applicable not only to large and successful corporations.

References

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. (2016). A framework for marketing management (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Publishing.

Stone, M., & Woodcock, N. (2014). Interactive, direct and digital marketing. A future that depends on better use of business intelligence. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 8(1), 4-17.