Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Every business, every communicator, faces challenges in the market spaces and places of the twenty-first century. Every market is under attack as competition accelerates. Customers, the vital essence of business, are more demanding and discerning of what businesses and brands are and what they stand for. Consumers are more sophisticated and critical of business practices. Pressure groups are scrutinizing and criticizing corporations. Technological advancement is opening new dimensions of communication. Social media is gaining ground and, in many cases, challenges traditional media. News is transmitted within seconds to different parts of the world. And these shifting tectonic plates of communication necessitate both online and offline communications.
Suddenly, there are no invisible companies. What happens in one geographic market is transmitted swiftly via global media to receptive consumers via computer, television and cellphone screens and is almost immediately accessible. The world of such information accessibility and the demise of corporate invisibility is a communications reality for businesses and consumers today. Thus, while communication, preferably of an integrated nature, is needed, it is not necessarily required in the same formats and forms of the past.
This paper discusses the rip tides moving through the world of marketing communications. We commence by discussing the changing global environment, before marking new trends in the marketplace underpinned by the information explosion. Consumer typologies are then considered generationally in terms of X, Y and Z. Finally, we explore the significance of these issues from the context of postmodernism, before concluding with the managerial recommendation that different communications are needed for different markets. Although this may seem self-evident, many companies still act as if potential customers are just waiting for the next advertisement via traditional modalities. However, and inexorably, power is shifting from producers and manufacturers to retailers and intermediaries and finally will lie (and perhaps it always has) in the hands, hearts, minds and computers and keyboards of twenty-first century customers and consumers.
Renaissance and reformation
Change in the marketing environment during the past two decades continues to accelerate, and technological developments underscore many activities (Brown et al. , 2012). The communications world is now dominated by Internet connectivity and served by devices such as hand held computers, touch screen lap-top devices and mobile phones with full Internet access...