Technology and Marketing

Technology: Savor of Mankind or will it be the death of us all
By Paul Herbig

Technology and Marketing

I enjoy modern technology and the ease it often brings into one’s life. But often it becomes not user friendly but user deadly. Trying to fill out forms online can be more time consuming, frustrating, and less rewarding them just to do the paperwork itself. Sometimes, and you can probably sympathize with me, I feel like picking up the PC and throwing it out the window and cheering it as it smashes onto the hard ground below. Who is serving whom? Is the technology being used to better humankind or is humankind being asked to change its behavior to accommodate technology?

As a marketer, I often wonder about whether we are properly using all the bells and whistles the technology provides us. Are we better serving the customer? Or are we making life more difficult for them? Spam allows you get message out to millions at a time but at what cost to the customer. (Spam now exceeds 40 percent of all e-mail traffic; those of you who check your email every day probably think this is an underestimate!) One article I read recently indicated a woman who worked out of her home and spammed millions of people received, on average, a response rate of several hundred per multimillion messages sent. That works out to less than a hundredth of a percent of a response rate. To which she replied she could make money at that level. So she is successfully making a living sending spam to millions to get a few hundred to buy her product. But at what cost? For the other 3plus million who must delete her message, if they each spend 1 second (or more if they care to read the message before they delete it) then with 3600 seconds to the hour, at least 1000 person-hours are being wasted taking care of spam. At a conservative $20 per hour, the costs in productivity well exceed $20-40,000 so that she can make a few thousand. She gains but society as a whole loses. Of course, if she had to pay for each contact it would be well out of her reach to continue business as she is currently doing.

Tetrabytes of information and gigahertz of processor speed enable companies to gather
Every bit of information about a customer. Fantastic new statistical packages enable data-mining, a powerful technique to find relationships where you thought none existed before.
All this is enabling companies to know more and more about its customers, to the point, as does Amazon, they can predict customer patterns and the next time you log on to Amazon it will indicate new books or media you might be interested in based upon your past history. Or Domino’s could well call you up the night before the Superbowl and say, “Do you want your regular 2 large peps at 6pm for the Super Bowl tomorrow Mr. Herbig?” or “Had a great weekend off Mr. Herbig with the family, we noticed you did not order your regular last Friday. Expect to be home this week, same as always for Friday?” Where is the border between knowing your customers and knowing them so well as to anticipate their next move and being there to serve them better and invasion of privacy? We have the tools and are using them to their fullest but at what cost to the private lives of your customers?

As Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyl-Mr. Hyde show us, technology can be a two edged sword; one can just as easily die from unanticipated side effects of the new technology as improve humankind with the very same technology. As Marketers, we need to be responsive to our customers, understanding that just because the technology is available does not mean it has to be used. As in any other endeavor, true customer focused companies should always view technology from the customer’s point of view, how is it being perceived, how is it being used (or abused) by or to the customer, even to the point of whether or not it is even needed by the customer. Technology is great to have but it must serve a purpose, not just to use it because you have it.