Based on a variety of industries, this final chapter aims to provide a coherent helicopter view on interrelated topics in the field of digital marketing integrated with traditional marketing approaches. It combines a body of academic research on the field with practical knowledge. To achieve this aim, mainstream research articles are summarized, illustrating YouTube videos and practical cases, recommendations are presented, interesting future research propositions and questions suggested and conceptualized frameworks provided. The thematic potpourri spans from knowledge management, increased consumer power, multi- channel marketing, integration and channel choice factors, a discussion on business models for multi-channel marketing and online marketing, virtual reality, web and customer analytics and Big Data in relation to corporate performance and corporate competencies. The chapter concludes with a hypothesized summarizing conceptualization on effectively designing online and offline channels, suggestions for future research and strategic foci. The chapter concludes that the path of adopting and anchoring digital marketing is not a mechanical but rather an organic change requiring a holistic change management embracing a cross-functional perspective with strong leadership involvement.
Questions
- 1.
Performance- wise: what is the gain if we manage to integrate digital with traditional marketing?
- 2.
Can online businesses stand alone or will the brick and mortar option always be the king?
- 3.
What is the strategic aspect of digital marketing?
- 4.
Beyond Google Analytics: what does academia say about web metrics?
- 5.
Is ignorance a bliss for companies?
General Overview On Customer Knowledge Architecture
Earlier in our book, we have already mentioned some key concepts on customer knowledge management, there with the scope to utilize our insights in order to form realistic and purposeful personas. In this chapter, we take the analysis a step further, focusing the following paragraphs to a general and basic overview of the importance of managing customer knowledge for enhancing marketing performance.
A comprehensive conceptual chapter on Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) aiming to establish the influence of its dimensions on the organizational marketing performance is provided by Panni (2015). The customer relationship profitability as an exemplary and important indicator of marketing performance achieved by Customer Knowledge Management and expressed by the term Customer Life Time Value, has been researched, for example, by Shimp (1997) (Figure 6.1). While adopting an integrated marketing strategy, effective multichannel integration, which facilitates multichannel shopping, is regarded to have a significant bearing on the increase of the Customer Life Time Value.
Figure 1. Source: Shimp (1997, p. 394) The model shows that, in case of an increasing rate of retaining the customers, the cumulative Net Present Value Profit and, hence, the live time value per customer increases.
Based on thoroughly researched secondary data, Panni (2015) suggests a framework for customer knowledge management integrating the so far incoherent frameworks as proposed by previous authors. Emanating from this eclectic and chronological literature review, the chapter also suggests further missing links that need to be included in the proposed integrated framework which has led to develop a hypothesized index. The framework and the index developed from this chapter attempted to provide a clear direction to the future researchers and may be tested empirically in a later study to testify its impact on the organizational marketing performance. The findings of Panni’s secondary research can be summarized by the following hypotheses that are useful to structure our thoughts and our research as well: