From market share to wallet share

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: At its essence, marketing is an attempt to understand and influence consumer behaviour. Therefore understandably the quest for marketers over the years has been to look for powerful consumer-influence tools and tactics.

Technology has been the primary change agent in shaping marketing over the years. It has influenced the shift from traditional mass marketing to contextual one-to-one marketing that can provide customers with products and services that they want to buy, when they want to buy and where they want to buy. Thus, over the years, the marketing focus has gradually shifted from ‘share of market’, as in traditional mass marketing, to ‘share of customer (wallet)’, as in one-to-one marketing.

The paradigm shifts in marketing have been aided by rapidly evolving computing technology and the advent of the Internet. Currently, the shift is from relationship marketing to behavioural marketing and contextual marketing, which is all about delivering the right product or service to the right person at the right time and at the right place. Behavioural marketing, at its core, relies on analysing past behaviour (transactions) of consumers to build models to predict future behavior to maximise profits over the lifetime of a customer relationship. Contextual marketing, in addition to looking at customers’ past behaviour, looks to analyse current transactional data at the point-of-sale to model future behaviour. Currently evolving online marketing technology can now even assess the activity of the consumer in real time, at the very moment he or she is researching a certain product or category. In fact, the Internet and RFID technology enable real-time contextual marketing in a robust and scalable manner.

With ever-increasing pressure on cost efficiency and productivity, marketers are being forced to look for newer tools to not only get a more comprehensive and holistic view of consumer behavior across multiple touch points, but also engage consumers in a preferred behaviour. Thus, the challenge for any new marketing tool will be two-fold. One, ability to conjure an integrated map of consumer behaviour and two, ability to influence consumers to engage in preferred behaviour across a network of touch points. An integrated map of consumer behaviour is a multi-dimensional view, inclusive of past and present (real time) transactions and behavioural interactions, across multiple touch points in different contexts.