By: Prof. A M Sakkthivel, Skyline University College

Post millennium witnessed numerous disruptions in the way of doing businesses such as emergence of internet, online business, online banking, digital currency, driverless automobiles, free information to all, and many more. Such disruptions leading to creation of several new ventures focusing on creating products and/or services of disruptive nature such as UBER, AirBNB, Facebook, Tesla, Google Glass, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp to name a few.  Some of them went on a rampage mode of expansion and few of them stopped abruptly. However, the momentum of disruption began which paved a way to creation of new era of disruption. Such a new phenomenon motivated companies to rethink their way of doing businesses and targeting consumers. Needless to say the role of marketing in running a successful business. Therefore, marketing in era of disruption required an innovative and disruptive approach to tackle competition and targeting consumers. Marketing managers need to rethink ways of approaches and strategies done traditionally and develop new disruptive marketing strategies to create a new market space which ensures a protection from competitors or identify a new market space which does not attract competition. Such a disruptive thinking is required to succeed in the era of disruption.   

Companies have moved from traditional P’s of marketing to newer P’s and C’s. Ever mounting competition forced marketing managers to add new P’s in their marketing arsenal such as Positioning, Payment Procedures, Promise, and People (Consumers). They also converted traditional P’s into C’s such as Product becomes customer solutions, price becomes cost of acquiring consumers/customer individual profit, place becomes convenience and promotion becomes communications. Such conversions changed the orientation of companies doing business through selling products/services into creating and delivery value to target consumers. It is a major shift from companies focus on doing business through reaching and wooing target consumers through positioning a product/service through Unique Selling Proposition (USP) into offering Unique Value Proposition (UVP) i.e. aligning and matching company’s USP with target consumers’ expectations. Top universities in UAE and MBA universities in Dubai offer state of the art IT and Management and MBA Marketing programmes understanding recent requirements of students, thus offering courses involving latest technologies and tools such as Marketing analytics, Online Marketing, Digital Marketing, Enterprise Computing, Big Data Analytics, Robotics etc.

The era of disruption requires massive use of technologies in targeting, reaching and ensuring the sales among target consumers. Thus, heavily using technologies to achieve such goals such as taking business to wherever the consumers are (TESCO Korea launched virtual stores at Metro stations enabled waiting time of consumers into shopping time, thus increased its business and connection with target consumers), ensuring reach, recall and sales by using ONE GO technology (Donkin Donuts Korea used Flavor radio advertisement spreading coffee flavor through radio advertisements MRTS (Mass Rapid Transportation System) enabled target consumers recall Donkin Donuts coffee, thus increasing its sales on coffee), know target consumers before entering stores using facial recognition technology (X stores would know the entry and existence of target consumers, thus could offer customerised offers  based on such consumers purchase history, motivating them to buy products which they have not before). Such use of technologies marked the arrival of the era of disruption and setting such trends would continue in the future. It is imperative that technologies would rule the future of the world, needless to say, their intervention and impact over businesses, specifically marketing strategies and practices. Therefore, it is up to marketing managers to embrace new age practices including such aspects into marketing strategies to survive and succeed in the era of disruption.