---
title: "Traditional Marketing Is Dead, with a Five-Year Reprieve!"
description: "This article argues that traditional marketing is effectively dead, with a five-year transition period, due to fundamental changes in consumer decision-making and the rise of omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing. It urges companies to adopt consumer-centric strategies that integrate online and offline channels to survive."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2017-06-15"
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# Traditional Marketing Is Dead, with a Five-Year Reprieve!

> This article argues that traditional marketing is effectively dead, with a five-year transition period, due to fundamental changes in consumer decision-making and the rise of omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing. It urges companies to adopt consumer-centric strategies that integrate online and offline channels to survive.

Click the image for details.
This is not an exaggeration. Please read this article patiently.
1) The omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing model is a consumer penetration model that focuses on the consumer throughout the entire process. It is based on the highly interconnected environment of people-to-people, people-to-objects, and people-to-media, where consumer decision paths have fundamentally changed, and offline and online are no longer independent, separate channels.
2) Enterprises must simulate, define, and choose new ways, new places, and new media to influence consumers, approach shoppers, and move users along the decision chain of target consumers, thereby controlling key touchpoints.
3) As a consumer-centric marketing strategy choice, it will break the existing divisions between online and offline, marketing communication and sales realization, urban and rural, new and old products, and new and old channels, becoming an inevitable choice for corporate marketing strategies in the new environment.
Who killed Wu Dalang?
That's right, it was Ximen Qing. But if it were now, the killers might be Wu Dalang himself, his marketing director, or his product manager!
What kills traditional enterprises is, of course, not Internet companies, nor "Internet thinking," but a consumption environment completely different from the past 30 years that gave rise to Internet companies and Internet thinking, behind which are changes in consumer decision-making methods, technology, and consumer sovereignty thinking.
I work in a lighting company. There are nearly 20,000 companies of all sizes in the industry. Most used to do well, but now most are struggling. A dozen years ago, lighting companies that could make money mostly did so through the following methods:
1. Brand building: more advertising. A bit on CCTV, a bit outdoors, a bit of PR activities, and the brand was basically established.
2. Network building: open more stores. If you can't open them yourself, find dealers to open them. Three years, three steps: 200-300 stores a year, and in three years you can make a mark.
3. Channel building: multi-level distribution. After retail, venture into engineering; after engineering, venture into retail; e-commerce, supermarkets, hardware, other niche industry channels, etc., seemingly unlimited space.
4. Technology building: have product advantages or customer resources in unique areas. But such companies are rare, and only insiders know if they are truly doing well.
There are also those who play various concept cards, such as health, green, ecology, smart, light art, all-around king, etc.
In recent years, most companies in this industry are unhappy, whether poor or rich. Why?
Because they are increasingly unsure of their development path. The same effort and investment in what they do now may only achieve one-fifth of the effect of 10 years ago. Advertising doesn't appeal to consumers; recruitment is met with sharp-eyed young dealers; new channels face wolves ahead and tigers behind; new concepts are inherently weak and can't compete with e-commerce; technology cards are a drop in the bucket and consumers may not believe it.
**Where's the problem? The consumption environment and channel landscape have both undergone qualitative changes, and they don't shift with the will of a single brand or category!**
Consumers' habits of information contact, aesthetic standards for brands, and purchase decision paths have completely changed, spreading from niche to mainstream, from big cities to small cities, from small industries to large industries.
1. Decentralized business districts make consumers "invisible"
Urban development has led to the "decentralization" of business districts, with large districts continuously subdivided into smaller ones, down to community units.
For example, 10 years ago, Shanghai residents flocked to traditional districts like Nanjing Road, Xujiahui, and Wujiaochang to shop. Now, they can shop online, go to hypermarkets, Wanda Plazas, or other emerging shopping malls, or their favorite community stores. The same consumer might buy A through an online store, B through a community store, and C by browsing a hypermarket. Business districts are fragmented both geographically and temporally.
2. Decentralized channels drown out terminals
In the past, if you were a wealthy person, you could find a large area of old factory buildings in the city's second ring, renovate them cheaply, turn them into a building materials market, and start renting! Advertise on TV, put ads on a few buses, do a few events, and consumers would recognize you. Thus, a significant portion of the city's consumers might think of you when buying building materials.
But now, the situation has changed. Large-scale urban development, relocation of old markets, and increasingly scattered new residential projects, coupled with the rise of home improvement company material showrooms, e-commerce, O2O experience stores, group-buying events, bargaining sessions, and community online forums, have split the building materials buying channels into a dozen. You know consumers eventually buy things, but you don't know when and under what circumstances they've already bought!
3. Decentralized brands make brands weightless
Haier, Lenovo, Midea, Nike, Adidas, Li Ning... The past 30 years have been 30 years of brand warfare, and those that survived are at least somewhat notable.
But the new generation of consumers, represented by those born after 1985 and 1990, have been brand consumers since childhood. They are "a generation wrapped in brands," and for them, brands are "nothing special, nothing new."
These current and future mainstream purchasing power for the next 10 years, after their parents' rational choice of brands, have quickly entered an era of emotional consumption.
How many brands can continuously tell a good brand story to move these groups? Difficult, almost impossible!
**This is a decentralized era.** Your brand is yours, mine is mine. Today I'm all in名牌, tomorrow I'm happy with clearance items. Especially the big brands that have conquered the market in the past are now completely weightless! For the new generation, the moment you stop telling stories, you're just a name.
**Traditional enterprises will bury themselves with "traditional marketing methods"**
Let's look at what Wu Dalang had: his early-morning hawking, his one-man channel, products sold as much as they could, and his marketing comfort zone in his own small plot.
If Wu Dalang's business were to continue to now, what would happen?
Our purchasing power and consumption demand haven't changed qualitatively, but what has changed qualitatively is: in a more democratic, more dispersed, more self-centered environment, with the push of new technology, consumers' access to product information, brand evaluation standards, and freedom and democratization of purchase methods are completely different from before.
This directly affects how consumers come into contact with you, how they rate your brand, and how they open their wallets.
Now, in management meetings of traditional enterprises, the five major topics often discussed are:
1. How to complement and integrate online and offline, and how to create incremental growth?
2. How to deal with the younger generation of consumers?
3. Where is the next mainstream new channel, and how to develop it in advance?
4. How to cooperate with external platform-based companies?
5. How to manage the new generation of employees? This is the external driving force triggered by changes in the external environment.
So, whether you call yourself a traditional enterprise or not, at this time, what the enterprise should do is more important than what it can do! But the sad reality is: many traditional enterprises are clear about "what they can do," but unclear about "what they should do." There's a saying: die without knowing how. Either sudden death or euthanasia. **In the era of "making users scream with products" and "from Internet to mobile Internet, to online-offline business integration," we need not feel sorry for those companies labeled as "traditional enterprises" with a heavy feel, because it's never that consumers are fickle, but that these traditional enterprises are burying themselves with their own "traditional marketing methods."**
In the era of large, medium, and small screens, "TV" corresponds to consumers in the traditional marketing communication environment, "computer" corresponds to the new generation of the Internet era, and "smartphone" sweeps up the former two, giving rise to the new consumer generation in the mobile Internet environment.
When Internet users, smartphone users, credit card and other electronic payment tool users, and users with convenient logistics delivery overlap to a certain critical mass, a new omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing model emerges.
It can be said that consumers no longer live in a single geographic scene, time scene, shopping scene, or media scene; there is no mainstream, only mashups. It can be said that tradition is dead, with a five-year reprieve.
The real threshold of the "fully consumer-centric" era: The omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing model I understand is a consumer penetration model that focuses on the consumer throughout the entire process. **It is based on the highly interconnected environment of people-to-people, people-to-objects, and people-to-media, where consumer decision paths have fundamentally changed,** and offline and online are no longer independent, separate channels.
Enterprises must simulate, define, and choose new ways, new places, and new media to influence consumers, approach shoppers, and move users along the decision chain of target consumers, thereby controlling key touchpoints.
As a consumer-centric marketing strategy choice, it will break the existing divisions between online and offline, marketing communication and sales realization, urban and rural, new and old products, and new and old channels, becoming an inevitable choice for corporate marketing strategies in the new environment. Online and offline will be inseparable in how consumers obtain information about brands, products, prices, and word-of-mouth. At different locations, they can autonomously and freely adopt "coexistence and double-jump" methods of online and offline, breaking the current single-track, single-choice situation of offline physical stores and online stores.
Especially after individual mobile Internet, the full coverage of smart cities, smart communities, and smart buildings makes consumer decision paths rich, overlapping, and dynamic. From community engagement, online search, word-of-mouth verification, offline experience, community service endorsement, etc., all have the infrastructure for seamless connection and multi-directional interchange, and this infrastructure will solidify consumption habits.
The only thing consumers need to do with their hands is: choose where and in which scenario to place an order, as I please.
So, if your store tells consumers, "You can't go online here," "You can't see other users' feedback here," "I can't feel the fun of the store here," "Online is all fakes," "Online is all old inventory"... Sorry, your physical store, like online stores that always play the promotion card, will face: guests leave faster than they come, and what can be bought are only single products that speak with price. Marketing communication and sales realization cannot be separated. What does marketing communication do? Simply put, it's thinking about three types of people and doing three types of things: how to make consumers know, how to make shoppers approach, and how to make users praise.
Most companies position the content of marketing communication as narrow advertising and PR, and the work of marketing communication is placed in the brand department. What does the brand department usually do? After completing VI, CI, "X" I, it's busy with annual and quarterly advertising, PR, and exhibition placements.
As they do this, the brand department becomes a relay station for third-party partners within the company. Brand capability is basically crippled!
In terms of understanding new technologies and digital marketing methods for marketing communication, they are inferior to third parties, so they are often fooled by third parties, and then fool their leaders.
In terms of understanding business needs and customer pain points, they are inferior to the sales department, so they are often blamed by salespeople (of course, salespeople aren't all "good things" either).
Don't say that our company's brand department is only responsible for advertising and PR. If that's really the case, after finishing the above routine work, this department can basically rest or be reassigned.
Unlike traditional brand departments, in the omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing model, the definition of marketing targets, content production, and method selection will see unprecedented collaboration between the brand department and the sales department, and unprecedented integration between headquarters marketing and regional marketing. **The transformation trend is: 1. From function to functionality. In an omnichannel marketing environment, no independent department can fully assume the function of marketing communication.**
Users in different channels, users in different scenarios, as long as you don't want them to passively receive information, need to interact with them in real time using corresponding marketing tools. This includes tool development by the brand department and tool usage by the sales department.
This is a huge challenge for the former brand department, and an independent digital media department cannot handle it either. It must stand on the consumer decision path and decompose the functions of communication and interaction into different organizations of the enterprise (such as sales, channels, customer service, supply chain, after-sales, etc.).
20 years ago, business owners liked to say, "In a company, everyone is a salesperson," but now they must say, "In a company, everyone is the brand department."
**2. From centralization to decentralization. Marketing communication is still content is king, but content producers are no longer the traditional brand department or company, but are dispersed along the path of the omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing model, produced and disseminated by various roles in the business structure.**
For example, salespeople provide consumer experience videos at the terminal, quickly upload them to a shared center, and stimulate the interest of similar consumers at other similar terminals at that moment.
For example, after a service provider visits, user feedback and "that satisfied smile" can be promptly uploaded to the community APP, simultaneously initiating a good-neighbor referral business...
We are moving toward a fully consumer-centric era, and the omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing model is the solution!
If already scaled brand enterprises ignore the existence of this phenomenon, whether you are a traditional store or a traditional e-commerce, you will all be reduced to your original form. It can be said that within 5 years, a batch of traditional physical enterprises and a batch of traditional e-commerce enterprises will disappear from consumer minds. Only by establishing an omnichannel, all-touchpoint marketing strategy can your target consumers enter your hunting range.
**Source: Jintuobang, Hejun Consulting Group - New Business Wisdom Alliance**
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> Suzhou · Shanghai · Hangzhou. 19th: Check in at designated hotel in Suzhou; 20th: Visit Suzhou Medline; 21st: Visit Shanghai Hd; 22nd: Visit Hangzhou Wangcang; 23rd: Return or free arrangement for sightseeing;
**Introduction to the platforms to be visited:**
**Medline**
Youshang Software, a well-known domestic information system provider, launched the "Medline" brand in 2015. Based on Youshang Software products, with artificial intelligence technology as the internal force and efficient operation as the breakthrough, Medline helps distributors build a new B2B business model. It has provided software technical services to distributors in more than 50 cities nationwide.
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Shanghai Hd Information Engineering Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Hd Company): a domestic first-class management consulting and software R&D company for commercial circulation, e-commerce, and modern logistics solutions.
Since its establishment over 20 years ago, it has been committed to creating modern commercial management models for customers. Hd's systematic products and solutions with independent intellectual property rights have strong competitiveness in the three business formats of chain retail, commercial real estate, and warehousing logistics. It currently supports more than 500 well-known large and medium-sized commercial enterprises and group users in 30 provinces and cities nationwide. It is the largest retail software provider in China.
**Wangcang**
Zhejiang Wangcang Technology Co., Ltd. was established in June 2011. It is the earliest and currently the only large-scale independent fourth-party intelligent warehousing and distribution service provider in China. Wangcang has been committed to the innovation, implementation, and daily operation of refined and collaborative warehousing and distribution solutions for e-commerce enterprises. Today, Wangcang has the capability to provide solutions from B2C e-commerce warehousing and distribution to B2B+B2C full supply chain integration (warehousing and distribution).
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Other expenses are self-paid.
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**Group photos of previous study tours:**
**Group photo of the 6th B-end E-commerce Study Tour, from top to bottom: Zhongke Shangruan, Shuhai Supply Chain, Yunmei Co., Ltd., Yishang Logistics.**
**Group photo of the 5th B-end E-commerce Study Tour, from top to bottom: Huiwangxing, Beiquan, Tongying Tianxia, Quanshihui, Zhongke Shangruan.**
**Group photo of the 4th B-end E-commerce Study Tour, from top to bottom: Alibaba Retail Link, Qianmi Network.**
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