Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Chapter 4

Demand Generation Emerges

A s marketing organizations came into their own over the past half-century, specialties within the discipline began to emerge, triggered by the concurrent emergence of global brands, sophisticated academic frameworks, and new digital marketing technologies. Some marketing professionals gravitated toward the “softer” side of the profession—design, communications, brand—while others preferred to work on the product side and become experts in describing, positioning, and pricing.

Of course, the nature of buying—and therefore the marketing required to encourage buying—differs for various kinds of products and services. For a wide array of consumer goods, powerful brand identity and clever promotions like coupons and loyalty programs are proven ways to spur buying. Those branding campaigns have leapfrogged, essentially unchanged, directly into the newest social media channels.

For other kinds of buying, however, it’s just not enough to create an image, an impression, an aspiration, or a discount deal, and hope that customers will buy. Customers who spend hundreds, thousands, or even millions on a purchase need to be a bit more deliberate. They take the time to research alternatives, determine quality, check compatibility, and make sure their purchase decision is a good one. They make a considered purchase.

This kind of considered buying is common in some business-to-consumer (B2C) segments such as automobiles, mortgages, wealth advisors, insurance, ...