Foreword:
The guest lecture was presented by Recki Reinhart, S.Tp., MBA. and was held at MBA ITB, Bandung, Indonesia in 2019.
Who is the customer in the digital marketing era?
It’s all started on how to shift the traditional marketing technique into digital era. To get better understand of marketing, we need to know more about the market. 80% of the population are connected to the internet. According to the previous percentage, we can conclude that people nowadays are reaching to have mobile lifestyle. The number will keep increasing even up until next year.
The customer also may vary due to their Demographic, Economic, Socio-Culture, and Lifestyle. By defining those, we can see the consumer behavior of each market that we target. According to James F. Engel, consumer behavior refers to the actions and decision processes of people who purchase goods and services for personal consumption. Therefore, there are several roles in consumer behavior while doing decision-making process. Which were Initiator, Gatekeeper, Influencer, Decider, Buyer, and User. To answer who’s the customer in digital marketing era, we absolutely can’t assume it randomly since there are different kinds of consumer.
The challenge of understanding the consumer behaviors
In understanding consumer behaviors, we need to get a better understand on how to get inside their mind. To know what’s under the black box in order to get response of purchasing the goods. There’s a model named Black Box model that consist of three steps, which is Stimuli, to transformer, and responses. Firstly, the Stimuli came from internal which is the socio-environment and marketing mix that represent the external stimuli. Next is the transformer part which is the black box or what’s inside the buyer’s mind.
The most important thing of marketing is all about getting to know the buyer’s mind. Therefore, we need to know what’s the internal influences and decision-making process that happen in their mind. The internal influences consist of their motivation/needs, beliefs/attitudes, memory/values, learning/knowledge, perception and lifestyle. As for decision-making process, it’s all about the psychology aspect in deciding and comparing which product should one’s buys. These aspects above affect their responses on whether to purchase the product or not.
—
This writing is used as one of the assignments in Marketing Management class that I took at 2019.
