the market since it has become a common habit for each of us to go on the Internet to search for information on an offer or a company;
– to maintain or increase its market share since the share of online commerce is constantly increasing;
– to enrich the relationship and the customer experience since the customer asks for a digital experience in addition to, or sometimes instead of, a physical experience;
– to launch new offers that can even be based on new business models since the economic model of platforms is constantly conquering new sectors.
Indissociable from the Internet and the digital revolution, data and customer data in particular, poses a triple challenge for marketing: technical (how best to collect and analyze data), strategic (how best to transform this data to create value) and ethical (how to create value from customer data without compromising their freedom and respecting their rights). The data issue is particularly important for B2B services19.
Thus, initially adorned with many virtues, digital technologies pose new challenges to marketing: managing e-reputation, meeting the demand for transparency that the Internet has promised, working in the immediacy that the Internet allows for, rethinking the skills of marketers as well as salespeople, etc. But above all, the Internet questions the role that humans can retain in this immaterial channel of relationship to the market and the customer.
In a 2019 report20, research firm Forrester notes:
In reality, a flood of repetitive messages now inundates consumers. They’re exhausted by the endless drone of bland ads that follows them around the Internet, clogs their inboxes, and interrupts their social media feeds. Over time, customers’ receptivity to marketing has eroded, their interest has waned, and they’re actively taking steps to block out the noise with tools like ad blockers and intelligent agents (e.g. Amazon’s Alexa).
1.3.2.2. Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressively penetrating companies to simplify, streamline and optimize many tasks and processes. Marketing is using AI to enhance the customer experience through, for example, chatbots, robots and other facial recognition technologies. In a recent study on customer evaluation of AI, Cap Gemini manages to show that customers are quite satisfied with the experiences they have with AI technologies but that human intelligence remains essential to build a truly exceptional experience21. In the same vein, Yann Le Cun, head of AI research at Facebook and a major researcher in this field, explains in his latest book that AI does not have a common sense or a global representation of its environment that would make it possible for it to react to new and unexpected circumstances (Le Cun 2019). Hence, human intelligence remains unique and essential today to analyze and react to new situations.
1.3.2.3. The manager’s customer orientation as the human face of marketing
The challenges of digital technologies, data and AI are real and strong. The company must fully address them, and marketing is in the best position to integrate them into the customer’s perspective: its status as a function attached to the top management, its resources as a major department of the company and its global vision of all the company’s businesses and markets, more than authorize it to do so, oblige it to do so. And yet, human element, through its intelligence, sensitivity and proximity, remains necessary in the construction of a full customer relationship and can even become a valuable counterweight to the potential drifts of the all-technological approach. By effectively sharing the customer orientation with the manager, the marketing perspective regains or maintains its humanity. Nevertheless, the manager must remain vigilant in developing and maintaining a mastery of these technologies, which will be more and more essential in the exercise of his/her responsibilities.
1 1 More precisely, it is the term market orientation that first appeared in 1990, in the title of an academic article (Kohli and Jaworski 1990).
2 2 The cultural approach is defended in particular by authors such as Webster (1988), Narver and Slater (1990), Deshpandé et al. (1993) and Day (1994).
3 3 Authors such as Kohli and Jaworski (1990) and Matsuno and Mentzer (2000) have taken a more behavioral approach to market orientation.
4 4 This benefit was put forward by Narver and Slater in 1990 (Narver and Slater 1990) and reaffirmed in 2000 by Slater and Narver (Slater and Narver 2000).
5 5 Several studies, some of them based on empirical validation, elaborate on these different links (Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Piercy et al. 2002; Esslimani 2012; Zablah et al. 2012; Sousa and Coelho 2013).
6 6 This is a CCO Council source taken from Cap Gemini Consulting: Cap Gemini Consulting (2014). L’expérience client à tout prix. Journal of Marketing Revolution, no. 2, p. 13 [Online]. Available at: www.capgemini.com/consulting-fr/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2014/02/journal_of_marketing_revolution_2_capgemini_consulting.pdf [Accessed 31 August 2019].
7 7 This commitment from the highest managerial levels is emphasized by Weick (1995), Kennedy et al. (2003) and Bonin and Jean (2010).
8 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOo42TBYF4k&t=3s.
9 9 Grasland, E., Bauer, A., Trévidic, B. (2018). Interview de Guillaume Faury : “Avec Airbus le CSeries a tout pour devenir un succès commercial majeur”. Les Echos, June 1 [Online]. Available from: www.lesechos.fr/2018/06/guillaume-faury-with-airbus-the-cseries-has-everything-to-be-a-major-commercial-success-991647 [Accessed 12 September 2019].
10 10 Airbuzz (2019). The Magazine for Team Airbus.
11 11 The transformational leader theory was initiated by Burns in 1978 (Burns 1978). For a summary of work on this form of leadership, see Gotteland (2019).
12 12 ZEBOX relies on corporate partners who are leaders in their field: CMA CGM, Accenture, BNP Paribas, Centrimex, CEVA, CIMC, EY, GTT.
13 13 In the very first lines of their introduction, Kohli and Jaworski make it clear that “the term ‘market orientation’ means the implementation of the marketing concept” (Kohli and Jaworski 1990, p. 1).
14 14 This hypothesis is proposed by Romero and Yague (2015), among others.
15 15 The PESTEL model summarizes the six main influencing factors in a mnemonic way: political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological and legislative.
16 16 These principles are discussed more fully in Chapter 8.
17 17 This model of a marketing mix extended to the service, which is widely used, was first proposed by Booms and Bitner in 1981 (Booms and Bitner 1981).
18 18 This managerial malaise is clear from a study conducted by IPSOS for BCG between June 14 and July 15, 2019, based on 5,000 respondents (1,500 managers and 3,500 managed). BCG and IPSOS (2019). The end of management as we know it? [Online]. Available at:
