Rethinking Marketing

Rethinking marketing approaches is the need of the hour. Capturing customer value, expectation, and co-creation options from collective information leads business model sophistication to explore in refining the pool of resources toward contributing to the business performance. This chapter discusses the shifts in marketing practices due to behavioral swings, availability and utilization of resources, upstream evolution of social and customer values, technology, innovation, and transformation in business practices. These attributes are discussed as market-evolution grid in the chapter. Marketing managers are routinely challenged to rationalize their resources, improve the effectiveness of their marketing activities, and strengthen the firms’ competitive positions. One of the fundamental challenges faced by the marketers is how to divide their resources between aggressive and defensive marketing activities. This chapter categorically addresses the contemporary marketing challenges at both ends of the marketing pipeline by examining the aggressive and defensive marketing practices. The role of critical thinking and collective intelligence in developing cognitive skills has been discussed comprehensively in this chapter. In addition, the discussions focus on the transgenerational evolution of markets and increasing complexities in marketing operations causing aggressive marketing practices. The recent developments on crowd-based business modeling have also been discussed in this chapter.