---
title: "What Does the Future of Marketing Look Like?"
description: "Just like marketing strategies, the overall strategies of enterprises are facing increasingly severe challenges. In the 1990s, a product could sell well for 5 to 10 years, but in the 21st century, the product life cycle has been rapidly compressed. The Internet era demands higher marketing efficiency, precision, and investment returns, requiring companies to integrate technology into their marketing efforts."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2014-07-07"
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# What Does the Future of Marketing Look Like?

> Just like marketing strategies, the overall strategies of enterprises are facing increasingly severe challenges. In the 1990s, a product could sell well for 5 to 10 years, but in the 21st century, the product life cycle has been rapidly compressed. The Internet era demands higher marketing efficiency, precision, and investment returns, requiring companies to integrate technology into their marketing efforts.

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Just like marketing strategies, the overall strategies of enterprises are facing increasingly severe challenges. In the 1990s, a product could sell well for 5 to 10 years. Now in the 21st century, the product life cycle has been rapidly compressed.
The 21st century is the Internet era, which places very high demands on marketing efficiency, precision, and investment returns. This requires companies to combine marketing with technology to fully improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
Born in the 1970s, Cao Hu is "very young," but his background is quite impressive: a bachelor's degree in biochemistry, an MBA, a PhD in consumer behavior, and President of Kotler Consulting Group China...
He seems like a model scholar, but this young man also has professional experience as a regional department manager in a Fortune 500 company and as a senior consultant at a prestigious international strategy consulting firm.
Like others born in the 1970s, Cao Hu grew and matured with China's reform and opening-up. If we take age 25 as a dividing line, before that, Cao Hu had only a vague desire for marketing and business, and only fragmented impressions of Chinese marketing. But his connection with the Kotler brothers and Kotler Consulting Group suddenly opened up a huge space in his life.
In the following decade or so, his relentless efforts in the Chinese market made him an integrator and practitioner between East and West, theory and practice, knowledge and business. This integration and practice is exactly what China, now in the deep-water zone of reform, and Chinese enterprises, which are growing and beginning to have global ambitions, urgently need.
**Shopping Will Become an "Entertainment Activity"**
When it comes to marketing, it is also Cao Hu's specialty and interest. Generally, he analyzes it along a timeline. "The original intention of the Internet was not to become a huge marketing platform, but today it is evolving in that direction. The Internet has a great impact on the profit structure of industries," Cao Hu believes. In the early and mid-1990s, laptops and communication equipment were very expensive, and virtual offices or outsourcing were out of the question.
Now, technological development has fundamentally changed people's work and life, leading to changes in consumer needs, motivations, behaviors, and lifestyles. With the advent of the Internet era, these changes will be even more disruptive.
It is not hard to see that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, domestic enterprises were production-oriented. Due to product scarcity, there was no need to consider how to market products, so "marketing" barely developed at that time.
But with social development and market liberalization, the scale of production expanded, and the market quickly entered a seller's era with abundant products and scarce customers. Only then did the role of marketing begin to emerge. "Marketing only appears when products are abundant. Its fundamental purpose is to ensure that when consumers face many choices, they still choose our products. At this point, creating product differentiation is the fundamental purpose of marketing," Cao Hu said.
With increased wealth, consumers have more disposable income, and their consumption psychology and behavior have changed significantly. Cao Hu gave an example: in the past, when people had low income, purchasing behavior was basically economic behavior, emphasizing economic value. When buying refrigerators or TVs, people would repeatedly compare cost-performance ratios.
When disposable income increases, consumer behavior changes. Besides product function, they pay more attention to other product attributes to satisfy higher-level needs, such as identity and status. With more disposable income, shopping becomes an entertainment activity. These changes are bound to have a profound impact on marketing.
**The Internet Era Sparks the "Loser Economy"**
Just like marketing strategies, the overall strategies of enterprises are facing increasingly severe challenges. In the 1990s, a product could sell well for 5 to 10 years. Now in the 21st century, the product life cycle has been rapidly compressed. The 21st century is the Internet era, which places very high demands on marketing efficiency, precision, and investment returns.
This requires companies to combine marketing with technology to fully improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. "Because of these changes in the times, mature large enterprises have encountered bottlenecks, and the disruptors are often outsiders," Cao Hu believes. The charm of the Internet era is that it is very easy to achieve "cross-border" moves. Even ordinary people, if given the opportunity, have the chance to overturn giants.
**Why are disruptors often outsiders? Undoubtedly, the Internet era stimulates the "loser economy," which is the economy at the bottom of the entire socio-economic pyramid.** Through Internet means, outsiders can easily seize this opportunity to make money from the two lower layers of the pyramid.
"I think the market always has two levels of demand. There are always people who need high-end, personalized, customized products, and there are always people who need standardized, low-priced products. The market always exists. Enterprise marketing must find a clear positioning and bring differentiation to customers," Cao Hu said.
In the Internet era, specific marketing promotion methods and strategies are diversifying with technological development.
"In the past, it was large-scale advertising and hard selling. Now the population is increasingly segmented, and many social organizations have begun to use Web 2.0 to 3.0. The ultimate result of using Web 3.0 is that people's freedom has increased unprecedentedly, and their needs are ever-changing. To adapt, enterprises must sell products to consumers through more precise and personalized channels, and use more contactable media to let consumers understand product information."
Therefore, according to Cao Hu's theory, marketing has also undergone great changes in channels and media, with channels becoming increasingly diversified. At this stage, the close matching of market segmentation, customer preferences, and distribution channels will be the marketing secret of many successful enterprises.
**"Emotional Brands" Become Increasingly Important**
"The original shopping event has changed from a 'dedicated' activity to 'fragmented' time consumption," Cao Hu analyzed. The shopping process has changed because it has been fully integrated into people's lives. Indeed, in the past, consumer behavior was difficult to track, but in the e-commerce field, with just a little big data analysis, you can fully grasp consumer behavior and make predictions.
In the future, the specific scope of marketing will also change greatly, which is related to the development trajectory of Chinese enterprises. In the past, Chinese enterprises either did international trade or regional trade. Now, more and more Chinese enterprises are going global and truly participating in global competition, rather than simply taking OEM orders.
"Actually, this is not marketing; it's just sales," Cao Hu believes. Enterprises need to launch different products in different markets, build brands, and establish global marketing organizations. For Chinese enterprises, this breadth and depth of marketing is unprecedented.
In the future, the professional marketing capabilities of enterprises will continue to improve, because making marketing decisions requires grasping facts and data, conducting scientific analysis, and making it the basis for decisions. At the same time, enterprises also need creativity, because the end of logical analysis must be creativity. Meanwhile, marketing personnel must also have strong logical thinking and social observation abilities to observe social changes and create new products.
"From a big-picture strategic perspective, I think two capabilities of enterprises are increasingly strengthened: one is emotional marketing, and the other is strategic marketing." Cao Hu, who focuses on consumer behavior research, believes that enterprises will pay more and more attention to building brands based on emotion, and the boundaries of marketing will disappear. "In the future, changes in consumer behavior, especially psychological changes, will become greater. Many situations that never appeared before are emerging, such as same-sex marriage, which was rare before but is now increasingly common."
Indeed, in the rapid changes of society, enterprises need to deeply explore consumers' living conditions, maintain social observation, and be curious about everything. If they are not sensitive to life, enterprises cannot capture market opportunities.
**As Philip Kotler said: "Our marketing people need more lateral thinking, use right-brain thinking, and use creativity to create new demand."** In the future, Cao Hu believes that marketing personnel must also cultivate very strong lateral thinking abilities.
"Now enterprises face differentiated competition. Without differentiation, there is no marketing. How to carry out differentiated competition? When there is no difference in price or function, how do you highlight differentiation? It relies on lateral thinking to discover new product lines and new ways of use."
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