Strategic Marketing for the Digital Age

Marketers have been quick to take up opportunities presented by digital communication and the social web. But, despite the pervasiveness and power of digital technologies, digital marketing is still in its infancy, and too often marketing initiatives are still framed in a way which fails to connect with target audiences in today’s digital context and culture.

From smart phones to AI-enabled fridges and driverless cars, technology is moving very fast. People on the other hand change very slowly, governed by the same wiring that they've had for millennia. The challenge for marketers is to adapt their marketing know-how, proven in pre-digital times, to this new context.

Shifting focus away from the message itself and on to the context involves understanding the powerful cultural and subconscious motivators that underpin the way people think and make their buying decisions today and in future.

As Michigan Ross Professor John Branch points out: “Marketers have treated customers as if they were rational decision makers and, especially in advertising, have focused so much on the message. Messages are written to appeal to the rational brain, but if indeed the behavioral economists are right, then the context becomes so much more important than the message itself because human beings are not rationally deconstructing the advertisement. They're reacting to things beyond the rational advertising copy. They're looking at the cultural nuances, the placement, and so on. So it makes it even more compelling for marketers to study the context rather than the message.”

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Join Michigan Ross’ Strategic Marketing in the Digital Age to turbocharge your organization’s marketing and propel your brand into the digital age.

Dates: 8-12 October 2018 and 25-29 March 2019

Format: In-class study │ Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

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Along with digital marketing consultant Eldad Sotnick-Yogev, Branch and award-winning marketer and Ross Lecturer Marcus Collins explore the continuing importance of context in a digital environment in a new book: Contemporary Issues in Digital Marketing: New Paradigms, Perspectives, and Practices.

In the book, they identify four conditions that together constitute context in the digital era, although there is some overlap among them:

• Defaults - The standard settings we experience in digital life, such as the selection of apps that are preloaded on the home screen of a new cell phone.
• Semiotics - The signs and signals that affect behavior, such as the standardized ‘on/off’ icon on many electronic devices.
• Placements - Where something appears within its actual surroundings.
• Cultural nuances - The backdrops, often hidden, that color and influence perceptions.

Branch and Collins, examine these issues in the Michigan Ross’ Executive Education program, Strategic Marketing in the Digital Age. Participants in the program will consider the real meaning of ‘digital marketing’, a term commonly used but whose meaning – scope, outline, boundary and limits – is far from concise. They will be energized to disrupt long-standing marketing practices, adding new, creative thinking and proven, actionable frameworks and metrics to propel their organization’s brand, elevating it above the day-to-day tactics of digital and social media. The program will help them develop campaign strategies that generate deep connections with clients and customers – in both B-to-B and B-to-C environments.