Emerging Trends in Marketing

A district health office has a budget and a message: wash hands with soap before meals. Telling people is easy. Getting them to do it every day is the hard part, and that is a marketing problem.

Social marketing applies commercial marketing techniques to influence behaviour that benefits individuals and society. Its key components are a target audience, a desired behaviour change, exchange theory and a marketing mix. Exchange theory says the change must offer benefits that outweigh its perceived costs. India's pulse polio and Swachh Bharat campaigns are examples.

The handwashing campaign, component by component (an illustration):

• Audience: parents of young children in the district.
• Behaviour: washing hands with soap before meals.
• Exchange: the benefits (fewer sick days, less spent on doctors) must outweigh the costs (soap, water, the effort of a new habit).
• Mix: the product is the habit; the price is the rupees and effort; the place is soap and water at the school tap; the promotion is school demonstrations and wall paintings.

Green marketing markets environmentally sustainable products and practices: eco-friendly products, sustainable processes, eco-labelling and green advertising. Its aims are to promote eco-friendly consumption and build a responsible brand image. Its tools include transparency, CSR initiatives and attention to the whole product life cycle.

Its main risk is greenwashing: false or exaggerated environmental claims, which breed consumer scepticism. A detergent sold in a green box with a leaf and the word ‘eco’, but an unchanged formula, is greenwashing. Green products may also cost more to make.

Don't confuse social marketing with societal marketing, or with social media marketing. Social marketing sells a behaviour for society's good, often for a government or NGO. The societal marketing concept is a firm's philosophy of balancing customers' wants, its profit and society's long-term interest. Social media marketing is simply marketing on social platforms.

Where it breaks. Behaviour change is slow, and its long-term impact is hard to measure. A campaign that works in one community can offend another. In green marketing, many people say they prefer green products but buy on price and habit; researchers call this the attitude–behaviour gap.

For exams. Know Kotler and Zaltman (1971), the four components, exchange theory, and the meaning of greenwashing. A common trap is to swap social and societal marketing.

Sell behaviour change for society; sell sustainability honestly.

A detergent maker can cut plastic from its packs, run its plant on solar power, or simply print a leaf on the box. The first two are green marketing. The third is greenwashing, and it can cost the brand its customers' trust.

Green marketing promotes products on the strength of their environmental advantages. It works through product changes, cleaner processes, sustainable packaging and green advertising, to reduce the harm a product does in its making, use and disposal. A green product allows economic development while conserving resources for future generations. Companies look at three things: the raw materials, the product itself, and its packaging.

Objectives: to meet corporate social responsibility, reduce costs, show how environment-friendly the offering is, communicate the brand message, and adopt sustainable, socially accountable practices.

Benefits for the business: competitive advantage as consumers grow more aware; lower operating costs (natural light, water conservation, recycling); and a positive brand image that attracts talent and investors. As an illustration, a plant with a power bill of ₹4 lakh a month that cuts it by a quarter saves ₹1 lakh a month, or ₹12 lakh a year.

Practices: recycled and renewable materials, green energy (solar, wind, geothermal), less or eco-friendly packaging, avoiding toxic materials, and reusable, recyclable products. Strategies: green design, green positioning, green pricing, and green disposal systems for what the product leaves behind.

Don't confuse green marketing principles with sustainable marketing principles. These are often presented as principles of green marketing; they are Kotler and Armstrong's principles of sustainable marketing, which green marketing applies. Nor is greenwashing a weak form of green marketing: claiming green habits a firm does not practise misleads buyers and erodes trust.

Where it breaks. A price premium limits green products to buyers who can pay it. Most buyers cannot check a claim for themselves. Stages can trade off: a lighter pack may use less material but be harder to recycle. ‘Recyclable’ does not mean the pack will actually be recycled.

For exams. Know the three things firms check, the green 4Ps, the four strategies, and the five principles with their owner, Kotler and Armstrong.

Green product, price, place and promotion; green design, positioning, pricing and disposal.

A handicrafts seller in Jaipur spends ₹50,000 on newspaper ads before Diwali and cannot tell which ad brought which order. Online and direct marketing promise an answer: every rupee traced to a click, a call or a sale.

Online (digital) marketing uses digital platforms for targeted, measurable and scalable customer engagement. It aims at brand awareness, website traffic, conversion and engagement.

Strategies include inbound marketing (drawing customers with useful content), affiliate marketing and influencer marketing. In performance marketing, advertisers pay only when a measurable action occurs, such as a click, lead or sale.

Measuring a campaign, step by step (an illustration). The Jaipur seller moves the ₹50,000 to pay-per-click ads. They bring 10,000 clicks, and 2% of visitors buy. Each order leaves ₹400 of gross margin.

The ads pay as long as cost per order stays below the ₹400 margin per order.

Direct marketing is one-to-one communication designed to get an immediate, measurable response. Its forms are direct mail, telemarketing, email, catalogues and direct-response advertising. It relies on personalisation, a strong call to action, and tracking response and return on investment.

Challenges. Online marketing faces data privacy rules (in India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023), ad blockers and changing platform algorithms. Direct marketing faces intrusiveness, the work of managing the customer database, and complying with regulations.

Don't confuse direct marketing with direct selling. Direct marketing reaches customers through media, such as mail, phone or email, and asks for a response. Direct selling is selling face to face away from a shop, as in door-to-door or network selling.

Where it breaks. A click is easy to count, but it does not prove the ad caused the sale. Some buyers would have bought anyway. Too many messages feel intrusive, and customers block or ignore them; permission marketing (in Customer relationship marketing) is the answer to that.

For exams. Match each component to its purpose, know that performance marketing pays only for results, and list the forms of direct marketing.

Targeted, measurable and paid for by results.

A sweet shop in Lucknow is told it needs ‘digital marketing’. Is that a website, a search ad, a message to regular customers, or the LED screen outside? It can be all of these, and the terms overlap.

Traditional marketing is largely one-way. Digital marketing allows two-way communication, and it reaches people where they spend more and more of their time: on screens.

Benefits: global reach, a low cost of entry, measurable return on investment, precise targeting, and the flexibility to change course quickly. It gives an immediate connection with buyers who research online, builds relationships through social media, and makes conversion easy, since a buyer can act at once.

Budgets scale with the firm: basic (websites, blogs and social media for start-ups), intermediate (adding SEO, SEM, PPC and email for medium firms) and advanced (comprehensive, often global, strategies for large firms).

Building a strategy, with the sweet shop as an illustration:

1. Identify marketing goals: more Diwali gift-box orders from local offices.
2. Settle the digital sales process: enquiry by message, a price list sent back, payment online, delivery by the shop.
3. Define target customers and buyer personas: the office administrator who buys gifts for staff.
4. Choose channels: a local search listing, email to past corporate buyers.
5. Set clear benchmarks: say, 30 office orders by mid-October.
6. Adjust as results come in: drop the channel that brings no enquiries.

Don't confuse SEO with SEM. SEO improves where a site appears in the free search results, and it costs effort, not a fee per click. SEM buys paid placement in search results. Firms often use both.

Where it breaks. A low cost of entry means many competitors, which raises the price of paid search. Likes and followers can grow while sales do not. Platforms change their rules, and reach built on them can fall overnight. Many rural and older customers are still easier to reach offline.

For exams. Know the nesting of the three terms, the methods in both tables, the three budget levels, and the six strategy steps in order.

Goals, sales process, personas, channels, benchmarks, adjustment.

A shampoo maker's bottle sells well in cities. In a village where a farm worker is paid by the day, the bottle sits on the shelf, while a single-use sachet sells. Rural customers are not city customers with less money; they buy differently.

Rural marketing designs strategies for rural consumers. It aims to penetrate rural markets, meet local needs and help raise living standards. It needs efficient distribution, affordable prices (small packs and sachets), products adapted to rural conditions, and promotion in local languages.

Who counts as rural. India's Census treats as urban every statutory town, and any other place with at least 5,000 people, a density of at least 400 per square kilometre, and at least 75% of male main workers outside agriculture. Everything else is rural.

Indian practitioners often frame rural marketing in four As:

Strategies use local opinion leaders, weekly markets (haats), agriculture-linked marketing, folk media and street campaigns. Challenges are logistics, poor infrastructure, and cultural and linguistic diversity.

Don't confuse rural marketing with agricultural marketing. Agricultural marketing moves farm produce from farmers to buyers. Rural marketing runs both ways: goods and services into villages, produce out of them, and trade within them.

Where it breaks. ‘Rural India’ is not one market. Incomes, languages and habits differ from district to district. Small packs keep prices low but leave thin margins against high delivery costs. Sachets are hard to recycle and add to plastic waste, which links rural marketing back to green marketing.

For exams. Know the four As, the meaning of haats, the Census criteria, and the difference from agricultural marketing.

Available, affordable, acceptable, known.

A new café near a Bengaluru metro station has no advertising budget. A phone brand launching nationwide has a large one, and wants every television viewer to see its ad on launch night. They need opposite tactics.

The two cases (illustrations). The café chalks coffee-cup footprints from the metro exit to its door, and commuters photograph and share them. That is guerrilla marketing: little money, much surprise. The phone brand books the 9 pm break on all the major entertainment channels at once. A viewer who switches channels to escape the ad finds it again. That is a roadblock.

Don't confuse guerrilla marketing with ambush marketing. Ambush marketing is one guerrilla tactic: a brand links itself to an event, such as a cricket tournament, without paying to sponsor it. Guerrilla marketing is the wider family of low-cost, unconventional tactics.

Where it breaks. Guerrilla stunts need permission from the authorities, can annoy or alarm the public, and lose their surprise once copied. Their effect on sales is hard to measure. Roadblocks cost a great deal, and repeated exposure can tire viewers. Many viewers now skip or ignore ads whatever the channel.

In practice. Choose by budget and goal. Guerrilla tactics suit a small budget and a local audience. A roadblock suits one big moment, such as a launch, when reach on that day matters more than cost.

For exams. Know Levinson (1984) and the four rows of the comparison table.

Guerrilla surprises cheaply; roadblock saturates expensively.