Digital Transformation of Marketing Management

The last decade has been marked by new scientific and technical advances in the field of information and communication, with intense, far-reaching, multiple and varied interactions with private and public organizations. These advances are evident in :

• the massive spread and multiplication of social networks and smartphones (especially since 2011 in France);

• the vertiginous development of Big-data, Machine-learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI);

• the new performance of logistics and/or supply chain management systems.

In this context, marketing - that is, the organizational function in charge of exchanges between organizations and their markets or audiences - is undergoing significant and rapid change, and, like any rapidly evolving "technology", is increasingly breaking new ground.

To reach customers, marketing professionals now rely on a myriad of possible and constantly expanding channels, thanks to the new performance of logistics systems, ranging from the brand's own stores to the mobile applications of the brand or its partners. This is the era of the "omnichannel". They can imagine ever simpler, smoother and more varied customer experiences, for example by equipping customers with barcode scanners at the point of sale ("scanners"), or by giving customers the option of making their purchases via Drive, or "click-and-collect". In a future already in the experimental phase, they may also offer product delivery by drone, or place robots at points of sale to advise customers and answer their questions, as is already the case with online chatbots. In addition, they are also using increasingly sophisticated approaches and methods (algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning...) to read, decipher and make the best use of databases, whose growth is accelerating still further thanks to the almost continuous collection of information from connected objects (IoT – Internet Of Things) on the behavior of their users. In particular, the marketing function within the company is acquiring an increasingly marked analytical and scientific dimension in which the skills of Engineers are invaluable and in demand (see for example: https://www.welcometothejungle.co/articles/metiers-porteurs-avenir-2018 .)

The aim of this article is to present the main transformations in marketing over the last decade, from a B-to-C (Business-to-Consumer) perspective. These transformations are linked to the interweaving of the most recent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) with organizational...