Page 28 - MYM 2015

Insights for Decision Making
in a Global and Digital
Marketing Environment
V. Kumar PhD Bharath Rajan
Abstract: The proliferation of digital media platforms extends across communities, markets, and countries, and has transformed the way rms and customers interact. This revolution has resulted in close interaction between rms and customers that involve communication, commercial transactions, and content creation. This presents both opportunities and challenges to marketers and academicians. While the opportunities will help rms leverage the power and in uence of the digital medium using the data created and shared; the challenges, if left unattended, could result in market failure. Amidst such compelling setting, identifying and extracting the value of data and generating timely insights will be the keys to organizational success. This study presents a general framework for generating insights in the digital marketing environment (DME) for decision making by (a) understanding the medium and forms of interactions in the DME, and (b) assessing the environmental elements that cast an in uence on these interactions. The environmental elements are probed deeper to assess the existing insights, and identify future research directions that will aid in decision making.
Global consumers across geo-demographic barriers actively interact and engage with rms via the digital world. A McKinsey report found that global online traf c across borders grew 18-fold between 2005
and 2012, and the volume of traf c could increase eightfold by 2025. Further, the report found that more than 200 million megabits per second of data were exchanged worldwide in 2013 (Manyika et al. 2014). These developments clearly indicate the popularity of online social networks and word-of-mouth (WOM).With respect to WOM, product information is routinely shared between and across users and nonusers that has to potential to create new customers.1 Consequently, rms are increasingly investing in social channels to rapidly create or propagate their brand through viral content,
social media contests and consumer engagement efforts. This is re ected in the CMO Council’s recent nding that marketing spend on social media is expected to increase 126 percent by 2020 (Moorman 2015). If the social media indicates rapid growth, the mobile media looks to outpace this growth very soon. For instance, in 2013 mobile media consumption worldwide ranked rst at 1.8hours of the 7 hours spent consuming media through all media channels including TVs and computers.2 Further, the global mobile data traf c amounted to 2.5 exabytes per month in 2014, and is expected to reach 24.3 exabytes per month in 2019.3 Given these developments in the digital world and the high levels of spending, it is important for managers to ensure that the spending transpires into insights that are meaningful and implementable.
1 We use the term “product” to describe both products and services, unless speci ed otherwise.
2 "Global Mobile Media Consumption," Inmobi Insights, [available athttp://info.inmobi.com/rs/inmobi/images/Global_Mobile_Media_Consumption_ Wave_2_Whitepaper.pdf.
3 "Global mobile data traf c from 2014 to 2019 (in exabytes per month)," [available at http://www.statista.com/statistics/271405/global-mobile-data- traf c-forecast/]
28 I October 2015