Digitisation poses challenges to marketing organisations and decision-makers that rarely affect just individual company divisions, but rather the entire corporate strategy, corporate culture, organisation and all operational processes. For this reason, it is not surprising that digital projects, initially supposedly isolated, quickly require a complete change process in all areas of the company, often combined with operational restructuring. Attempts at digital transformation while simultaneously defending the status quo are usually doomed to failure. So here we have an ambivalent situation: on the one hand there is the dogma in the sense of “Digital is the New Normal” and a legion of start-ups just waiting to cannibalise the existing business model, on the other hand there is a multitude of painful and cost-intensive experiences (and personal wounds) from joint marketing/sales and IT projects in the past, for example in the CRM environment. For customers and consumers on the other hand, digital innovations have long since become part of everyday life (such as the use of WhatsApp or Netflix) and are being adapted at an astonishing pace.

The future of marketing as an interface between companies and consumers in terms of
market-oriented corporate management is characterised by a few central developments, summarised as 10 theses on the future of marketing:

– Hyper-individualisation and storytelling for top consumer target groups: Mass in sociodemographic target groups is replaced by storytelling for the respective audience.
The basis: Insights, catalysed in data-driven plans;

– Artificial intelligence for further automation of customer interaction: In chatbots, the killer app is seen here, as a consistent first point of contact the automation of customer contact
to redefine;

– Changed legal framework conditions: due to the DSGVO and all the associated challenges to the collection and storage of mainly personal data in contrast to walled gardens (such as Google, Facebook and Amazon);

– Programmatic revolution eats its children: Walled Gardens, whose advertising sales have practically always been programmatic, make it increasingly difficult for independent technology providers. The DSGVO tends to promote (indirectly) the strengthening of oligopoly-like US market structures;

– 3D printing is coming of age: mass customisation in the end product
is made possible by 3D printing and gradually becomes socially acceptable;

– revolution in pricing: data and algorithms allow for mass differentiation even in
of pricing, up to the mass play of individualised prices. This concerns in particular
also the pricing of innovations;

– brand versus sales: has been the focus of most marketing departments in recent years
rather on sales (performance marketing, lower funnel) and were in this course
brand management has been reduced or abolished, there is now a gradual realisation that the
by making brands important as points of reference for consumers and consequently strengthening brand communication (brand marketing, upper funnel);

– Direct-to-Consumer: driven by the need to share proprietary data and related
Having to gather insights about consumers, more and more companies are starting direct-to-consumer
Consumer or also omnichannel projects – parallel to the established retail structures as intermediaries;

– MarketingTech: the realisation of digital pipe dreams requires the development of own application landscapes and the creation of intelligent integration scenarios. What is needed are innovative skills in the form of Marketing Technology Experts.

Against this background, the 5 S building blocks for successful marketing in the future will continue to exist in 2020 1:

– Science: the use of scientific (multivariate) methods for the analysis of customer journeys, customer preferences on the basis of different data sources (big data) in the sense of real-time marketing or the optimisation of marketing expenditure, for example in the context of causal-analytical modelling. This requires not only considerable knowledge of methods, but also extended knowledge in the field of marketing technologies;

– Substance: the management of customer experiences (Customer Experience Management), consistently across all touchpoints, including the development of new products and services;

– Story: Transmedial storytelling as an instrument of content marketing – i.e. instead of push / inside-out, rather pull / outside-in, quasi as a bridge between brand and user in the relevant context; Digital
Marketing, brand strategy or also content
Marketing & Optimisation2

– Speed: on