Since the Internet’s infancy, customers have been gaining power and control over the purchasing process.
Armed with unprecedented amounts of information and enabled with new digital technologies, they’ve experienced a giddy generation of greater control. For marketers, this changed everything. Instead of calling the shots, they found themselves dodging bullets.
But there’s a major shift underway. Even as customers continue to exert unprecedented control of purchasing decisions, power is swinging back toward marketers, with a nudge from technology and analytics that play a new and larger role in the middle.
Here’s why. As customers face an ever-more dizzying array of choices, they are turning increasingly to technology to help make decisions. That’s enabled by four converging trends:
- An expanding Internet of things which embeds sensors almost anywhere to generate smart data on customer preferences and trigger actions and offers by marketers.
- A shift from active engagement to “automated engagement” where technology takes over tasks that buyers once performed themselves, from information gathering to actual buying.
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