While speaking with a recently graduated former companion who was just finishing his first year on his first job, I realized something: what we’re doing nowadays in marketing and the way we relate to clients doesn’t have a great deal to do with what I had been taught at university just a few years ago. The books we studied then are no longer sold, and the tools we were taught are not applicable today or have changed their names. So how can we continue to do a good job and grow in the current situation?
Marketing in general, and how companies relate to clients in particular, have changed a great deal in recent years, especially since there has been massive access to the Internet and digital technologies. Anyone who was a student more than five or ten years ago should consider that his knowledge has been overtaken and needs updating.
Clients are just as much the center and reason for being of companies as they ever were, but it’s the clients themselves who have changed and developed: they’re more complex and demanding and have values and expectations in their relations with companies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Today it would be wrong to think that clients are just a “subject of marketing and sales” and that what happens in their contact, although indirect, with all the other areas of a company, doesn’t have an impact in our relation with them, doesn’t affect the way the way they value our brand.
The answer to how to continue to be relevant in the current market was staring us in the face: like that recent graduate, we must never stop studying and learning (and also unlearning!) to keep up to date.
