Marketing 3.0: What is and How Works

Marketing 3.0: What is and How Works

An Approach to Apple’s iPhone problem and KML pioneer Initiative

By Daniel Fernando Arévalo Espinel

There are facts that changed the way how the organizations are reaching their goals, Technologic Changes, Globalization, Deregulation, Privatization, Empowerment, Personalization, More Competition, Sectorial Convergence and the elimination of intermediaries.

The technologic evolution has improved the way people sell and buy, now the companies find information of their potential costumers through the information recompiled from social networks, this is how nowadays the information has become more valuable and people are earning a lot of it using the biggest source of information in the planet, The Internet.

The  tools that the Web has provide to companies have transcended to a level in which talk about the improving of Web 2.0 to 3.0 is equal to the change of marketing from 1.0  to 2.0 and finally the new 3.0 concept.

In words of Philippe Kotler in the video in which he explains Marketing 3.0, “it’s all about keywords”, the change implemented in web 2.0 to improve to 3.0 is the addition of metadata storing in databases and the posterior analysis, which means no more than the recompilation, monitoring and examination of keywords introduced by each one user in the web to make a profile of interests and needs of them, in few words, all that the marketing of the companies need in order to convince the costumer to buy their products.

The holistic Marketing, according with Kotler, is the approach of marketing where all the activities involved in marketing are important and are needed to adopt a wide and integral perspective looking for the recognition and interdependence of them, very similar to the perspectives of marketing 3.0, where we not only need to produce like Product-centered  Marketing 1.0 and find a way to sell it like Consumer-centered marketing 2.0; in Marketing 3.0 we need to integrate all the qualities what a client as a human has, Creativity, Culture, Heritage, and Concern for the environment , transforming the way how the companies must work, becoming more human-centered and expanding their focus to humankind issues, just like Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono expressed in the foreword of the book Marketing 3.0. 

I think Apple is a company concerned for all the human conditions that compose a costumer, also manage a holistic perspective of marketing and all that have bearded fruit, giving them a huge amount of fans and more important devotees loyal to the consumption of every device with the bitten apple in it. But regarding all of that, all that shine isn’t gold, because I am afraid of them may be making a mistake called by Phillipe Kottler as Demarketing in situations like I expose next:

Most of the people are a mass of individuals waiting to be molded for the company who find their interests and offer a certain product satisfying superficially the expectative, always looking for earn more and more money through optimizing and incrementing the capacities of the original item of sell, just like the fans of Apple (including me) felt that happened with Apple when they expose the latest gadget in the market, the iPhone 4S. However all the people were waiting a rebuilt version of iPhone 4 in expectations of the called iPhone 5; this may create a disagree between Apple and his fans promoting Demarketing problems, but they have always search quality on their products, which guarantees loyalty to the brand even when it has a mistake or two.

There are a lot of other companies applying the Marketing 3.0. by using social networks to promote their brands and earn fans or potential consumers of their products. But now, one company in particular is pioneer in the use of social networks to sell Services instead of products, I talk about the Dutch airline KML with his initiative of selling passages and allowing their clients to pick their seat and his fellow traveler according to the information obtained from their profiles in Facebook or LinkedIn.

The KML case is the perfect and more actual case of how the world is in a revolution due to the excessive development of the technology and people must rethink the way they understand the marketing by applying the concepts and ideas of the marketing 3.0. All companies and industries related to communication, have very clear (or should be) faced with a new exercise in which the major review of its policy should be focused on the analysis of three key variables: Changes in access to information, the results of the inclusion of social action in the communication, the inevitable process of change from an irruptive and segmented communication, to an open and participatory.

Social networks, specifically Facebook and Twitter, take advantage of the viral and dynamism nature of the ideas in the web, and they have become distribution vehicles of incomparable nature, which circulates large amount of content being created and shared daily on the network. Users have the same tools as companies that makes available to communicate with their networks, form communities and through this partnership, denominated “Storytelling” by Philippe Kotler, establishing the consumer as the new owners of the decision.

The elements that made the traditional model of communication have undergone major changes. Nowadays consumers participate, comment and broadcast. Social Media is now an inseparable part of our new culture in partnership with people with whom you share interests, needs and opinions, we are at the axis of the new social order. 

The brands are aware to be in social networks because today is not an option; users interact in a social web in simultaneously action with the development of their habits and customs of everyday life, a universe in which “the client is king” but also decides the influence of each brand. Knowledge and innovation have become common property, so all the paradigms associated with the monopoly of information have collapsed. Only through active listening, transparency in the information sharing action and a commitment to growth and increase the quality is what the traditional media will need to take the final leap into the new social order.