Marketing has made a clear and drastic change ever since the social media became a part of it. The idea of appealing and speaking to the masses is now possible in ways never imaginable before. Information travels so quickly that word of mouth techniques exponentially fired.
However companies are just very recently starting to take advantage of social media marketing benefits. There are still many corporations that resist jumping on this crazy digital mass marketing world.
“Consumers spend approximately 58 per cent of their time on digital globally, yet media spend within the [consumer packaged goods] industry is misaligned with how consumers spend their time (Mina Cass).”
Just four days after the Winter Olympics in Sochi 2014 began; 26 million tweets had already been posted about the Games. The opportunity for the marketers is obvious!
As the digital world rises, power and energy increase a long with it. The amount of electricity that the world is consuming has increased drastically as we depend on it more and more. We are in a point now were we use our cellphone instead of money bills and I am sure this will continue to escalate.
However, even thought the digital media requires an extensive amount of energy, is this worse than the old fashioned way of advertising with billboards and posters?
I believe social media is becoming a part of sustainability and social responsibility. We are able to market goods and services digitally without the need of extensive damages. More importantly, we are becoming fully aware of what is going in the world as citizens and it is becoming very hard for companies to not be transparent about their values, procedures and actions. Corporations are being forced by the media to comply to certain sustainable, ethical and socially responsible measures. Consumers are demanding more and more and marketers are willing to give customers greener and ethical solutions as demanded.
“That kind of organic activity is particularly important for brands because social media has given consumers a platform to make their voices heard on the kind of mass scale that used to be reserved for media outlets or companies with the budgets to advertise widely. Now, the goal is to create something for a brand that people will like enough to share themselves; like word of mouth, but louder. Much louder (MIna Cass) ”.
I really believe marketing is changing for the better. Today consumers have a voice louder than ever and it is up to them to speak up and point big corporations on the right track to sustainable marketing.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/fresh-baked-tweets-from-the-oven/article17012472/
Hi Maria,
You have some great points here, and I do agree with you that companies are more or less forced to adjust their operations or product materials to become more sustainable if they want to also cater to environmental customers. What I am worrying about is a different problem with heavy reliance and usage of social media: energy consumption. As the world becomes more digital, our consumption of energy will increase significantly. Clearly, we will need to find clean energy sourcing that can support the high demand. At that point, are we still able to meet the world’s need for clean electricity and energy? As we move towards the virtual world, we are dealing with big data and electronic analytics to understand each target segment. The obvious advantage is companies being able to target the specific segments they are looking for and with less waste in traditional marketing, such as billboards or mass advertising in many different magazines, which are all less sustainable than virtual advertising on the internet. Anyway, I did enjoy your post, interesting topic!
Jennifer
After reading your post I have come to realize that I have never put one plus one together. I knew and observed that people are spending more time socializing or surfing the web and using technology but I never realized that we are using more energy in the process. I thank you for sharing that with me and it is going to add to the reasons for why I should spend less time on my computer and more time outdoors. You do bring a valid point that perhaps it is more sustainable to advertise through technological mediums but for me I’m not so sure that it is… Yes it most likely is a more successful way to reach a specific and large group of individuals but each individual that is observing the advertisement through technology is using energy and creating pollution. On, the other hand print advertisement such as billboards and posters does have a material pollution involve with its existence, however each individual that is observing the ad is not using energy (other than calories) to observe it. So I agree that technology is a good way for consumers to keep tabs on large corporations but since the energy we create isn’t fully sustainable just yet I would still recommend individuals to spend time exercising their minds outdoors instead of in front of a screen. :p