The explosive growth of new media and the multiple and diverse means of communications are changing consumers and brands. Digitalisation is a growing reality. As per April 2019, there were 4.437 billion internet users (around 58% of the worldwide population) and 3.499 billion active social media users. Not only is the setting changing, but also consumers' profiles and roles. Researchers have identified some emerging trends that are leading firms to change the way they communicate to consumers and develop new and innovative businesses. In this chapter, the authors present a general perspective of marketing communication and how it will affect business innovation, discuss the existing paradigm shift in marketing communication, and introduce a case study which applies some of the more recent techniques.
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The explosive growth of new media and the multiple and diverse means of communications are changing consumers and brands (Madhavaram, Badrinarayanan, & McDonald, 2005). Digitalisation is a growing reality (Vernuccio & Ceccotti, 2015). As per April 2019 there were 4.437 billion internet users (around 58% of the worldwide population) and 3.499 billion active social media users (We are social, 2019). Not only is the setting changing, but also consumers’ profile and roles. Perhaps more than ever, consumers’ attention is divided due to multitasking and a perpetual state of partial attention (Batra & Keller, 2016).This affects their media usage patterns and how they use the media sources to get information.
Researchers have identified some emerging trends that are leading firms to change the way they communicate to consumers and develop new and innovative businesses. One of these trends is disintermediation. Disintermediation “greatly democratises access to the means of communication and to information and knowledge through direct access to one-to-many communication channels” (Overton-de Klerk & Verwey, 2013, pp.367). Thus, the control of information that was once in the hands of a limited elite – management – is now available to many – stakeholders (Denegri-knott & Schroeder, 2006; Kerr, Mortimer, Dickinson, & Waller, 2012). The power shifted from the institutional communicator to the individual recipient, namely each customer, who becomes more and more empowered (Overton-de Klerk & Verwey, 2013).
A second major trend is the blur of communication genres (Overton-de Klerk & Verwey, 2013). Nowadays we are assisting to an interchange of practices between different communication genres, such as Public Relations (PR) and advertising. It became more common for advertising to use cause-related and cooperative programmes previously associated to PR, and to PR to use paid advertising to communicate critical messages. Similarly, we are assisting to media convergence, breaking away from the “above and below-the-line” models. Today, the message content is accessible via multiple media types and devices (Bosman, 2000).
These forces have a major impact on organisations that, rather than being static and imposing conditions, have to mould themselves to go along with and benefit from this communication revolution (Overton-de Klerk & Verwey, 2013).
In this chapter we present a general perspective of marketing communication and how it will affect business innovation, discuss the existing paradigm shift in marketing communication and introduce a case study which applies some of the more recent techniques.