Content area
Full Text
The ultimate customer solution is products and services that are unique to individuals and change with their needs. ecent advancements in management practice, made practical by technology changes in a number of important fields such as materials, manufactur.ing, and information management, have created a new phase in marketing's evolution that conquers both the individual needs of customers (customer space) and the continuous evolution of those needs (customer time). We refer to this new phase as real-time marketing, to distinguish it from other, less potent forms of marketing. Real-time marketing differs from earlier marketing approaches, not just in form, but in degree, because it meets the needs at the "customers' point of requirement," despite how those needs change over time. Real-time marketing calls for goods and services that are not only customizable to the individual consumer, but also inherently capable of adapting themselves over time. Clearly, while real-time marketing is only possible because of increases in technological capabilities with concomitant decreases in costs, it also depends on the ability and willingness of marketers to decentralize customer relationships.
Thus, real-time marketing derives not only from technological innovation, but also from the realization that individual customer needs not only differ across any given market segment but also vary over the good's/service's lifetime. This realization is not particularly new to marketing practitioners. What is new, however, is the understanding that technology can deliver such capabilities cost-effectively, and that consumers are increasingly being conditioned to demand them.
An analog for real-time marketing might be found in biology, where plants, animals, and even people, constantly adapt themselves to contextual environmental changes. The cellular systems of these living organisms have decentralized "intelligence" inherent in their molecular structure that responds to contextual changes over time in order to maintain equilibrium with its environment. Likewise, in the real-time marketing paradigm, goods or services are created with a decentralized "intelligence" capable of reacting to changes in customer needs over time, and acting to restore the equilibrium between the good or service and the customer's new needs.
The real-time marketing principle includes both physical goods and services. In fact, smart products and services that adapt to changing contexts are already available. Among those are software products that adapt themselves to an individual user's practice, a...