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Chapter 1The Customer Is in Control

The only thing that is constant is change.

—Heraclitus

The stakes have never been higher for marketing; to win the marketing game is to transform marketing into one of the most important drivers in achieving business objectives. To lose or even fall behind in marketing could result in your organization dropping back as your competitors take control.

Organizations and marketers need to adapt to, take advantage of, and stay at the leading edge of emerging technology. Marketers need to use technology as a competitive advantage, like Netflix eating Blockbuster's market share or Amazon.com changing first how we buy books, then changing how we buy retail products, and now disrupting everyday shopping with the Amazon Dash. Marketers who aren't ready to adapt and use the new technology will be left behind.

As a marketer, these are very exciting times—we are in the midst of a marketing revolution and we get to influence the outcome. Making the right decisions now and acting on them will not only help achieve your business objectives, but will also increase your marketing skills, your personal expertise, and your professional value.

Traditional marketing is fading away and will soon disappear altogether. This is the legacy marketing strategy where the approach was to broadcast a generic set of marketing messages to large groups of customers in different channels, like television, billboards, web, email, and social. Even when the messages across different ...