Companies spend billions in marketing initiatives today to attract foot traffic, acquire new consumers, retain existing ones, and regain lost customers. However, few companies take the route of technology to achieve them. The rest of the companies resort to the conventional mode of marketing strategies that involve the consumption of resources (materials and manpower) to achieve the set target. At present, the world is moving towards achieving sustainability in all aspects of our life involving several initiatives for the conservation of natural resources. It is high time for the companies to resort to holistic technology-based marketing initiatives that include focusing on human connection in achieving the set goals. It is important to draw a fine balance between using technology and human connection in marketing to achieve maximum performance output i.e. achieving company goals with the least resource consumption and cost. Therefore, companies need to work on identifying an appropriate set of marketing initiatives which includes technology and human connection to achieve the mentioned goal. Looking at the existing practices of several companies, they largely use marketing strategies targeting a big group of consumers with generic and mundane promotional offers and price benefits.

To promote such initiatives, they often spend millions to reach target consumers. While assessing the performance output of using such initiatives, the outcome is not encouraging because most of the time, it fails to generate expected results due to its generic nature and focus on all sorts of target consumers. So, how such a predicament could be resolved and generate the much needed revenues for the companies? It is high time for companies to embrace technology and human connection to design their strategies personally targeting individual consumers. It would feel like sci-fi had it been discussed 30 years earlier, but with the advent of cutting edge technologies, targeting individual consumers is highly possible and achievable. The companies need to approach this aspect by integrating technology into human elements. Most of the companies take the technology route to reach target consumers forgetting the fact that their offers should be able to satisfy the expectations of consumers for the price they pay for.

It is imperative to focus on the basics of designing appropriate products/services that would satisfy and provide value to target consumers. Such aspects would encourage target consumers to share such experiences with their community, generating positive word of mouth and establishing a human connection. So producing and delivery value to consumers is a vital aspect to satisfy them, turning them into brand ambassadors, encouraging them to connect with their community and share experience, and establishing trusted human communication within the community. Once the connection is established, the companies need to bring in technology to augment and reach individual customers as a part of their retention strategy. Such technology includes big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, real-time connectivity, robust network, etc. Making customers declare their profile and important dates in their life is a major task for the companies. Such data would be extremely valuable to profile individual customers based on their requirements to establish and activate purchase triggers.

The purchase triggers would act as a stimulus to design and offer personalized offerings to individual customers based on their profile and self-declared important dates and the same to be communicated through different sources using cloud and telecommunication. Such triggers would induce customers to react positively to the offers and generate value for both customers and companies. Such an exercise would create a win-win situation for both consumers and companies. The outcome of the exercise would motivate customers to share their experience with their network, creating a continuous chain of human connection, and a cycle of events leading to revenues, profits and growth. Such aspects would reduce the usage of offline sources, thus, preserving the resources ensuring sustainability. Smart companies need to strike a balance between using technology and human connection to achieve their goals, growth, and prosperity in the transforming era of sustainability. Leading universities in Dubai offering BBA, MBA, and BSIT programs offer courses dealing with technology-based marketing, cutting edge technologies, and sustainability.