As the environment changes and companies adjust, marketers also are rethinking their philosophies, concepts, and tools. Here are the major marketing themes at the start of the new millennium:

-Relationship marketing: From focusing on transactions to building long-term, portable customer relationships. Companies focus on their most portable customers, products, and channels.

-Customer lifetime value: From making a port on each sale to making ports by managing customer lifetime value. Some companies offer to deliver a constantly needed product on a regular basis at a lower price per unit because they will enjoy the customer’s business for a longer period.

-Customer share: From a focus on gaining market share to a focus on building customer share. Companies build customer share by offering a larger variety of goods to their existing customers and by training employees in cross-selling and up-selling.

-Target marketing: From selling to everyone to trying to be the best .ram serving welled .need target markets. Target marketing is being facilitated by the proliferation of special-interest magazines, TV channels, and Internet newsgroups.

-Individualization: From selling the same offer in the same way to everyone in the target market to individualizing and customizing messages and offerings.

-Customer database: From collecting sales data to building a data warehouse of Information about individual customers’ purchases, preferences, demographics, and portability. Companies can “data-mine” their proprietary databases to detect different customer need clusters and make differentiated offerings to each cluster.

-Integrated marketing communications: From reliance on one communication tool such as advertising to blending several tools to deliver a consistent brand image to customers at every brand contact.

-Channels as partners: From thinking of intermediaries as customers to treating them
as partners in delivering value to .anal customers.

-Every employee a marketer: From thinking that marketing is done only by marketing, sales, and customer support personnel to recognizing that every employee must be customer-focused.

-Model-based decision making: From making decisions on intuition or slim data to
Basing decisions on models and facts on how the marketplace works.

Marketer Responses and Adjustments