Digital technologies have tremendously evolved and become a part of daily life. This constant evolution constitutes a major determinant of how consumers and organisations engage. For consumers, the evolvement intensifies their socialising capacity with customers of like mind, voice their dissatisfaction, and explore alternative options. Marketers leverage the digital evolvement to engage with customers, acquire marketing intelligence, and exploit customers' purchase behaviour emotions. Recognising the growing digital technologies trend and importance to marketing, this chapter highlights the need for more effort towards enhancing the technology-marketing interface. Given that movement restriction-induced consequences of COVID-19 have intensified the paradigm shift from physical to virtual marketing, this chapter forwards a theoretical framing that takes a technology-marketing viewpoint that focuses on customer engagement and ensuring implementation processes for effectively managing associated challenges. Finally, recommendations are offered and future research directions flagged.
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Marketing is a critical organisation activity in the drive to provide customers value for their money. Consequently, marketing dynamics are of central importance to practitioners as well as researchers. In marketing discourse, knowledge development has included critical domains such as customer relationship marketing (Maggon and Chaudhry, 2015; Wu and Lu, 2012; Siu et al., 2013), business-to-business collaboration (Enyinda et al., 2020; Malshe et al., 2017; Lashgari et al., 2018) inter-functional relationship marketing (Opute, 2014; Opute and Madichie, 2017; Opute et al., 2013) and digital marketing (Barnes et al., 2012; Opute et al., 2020b; Enyinda et al., 2020; Gbadamosi, 2021), amongst others. The latter domain (digital marketing) which involves dynamics that may also be reflected in the aforementioned other three knowledge development domains, borders closely to the theoretical premise of this chapter - Technology and Marketing.
Social media and related technology are increasingly transforming marketing dynamics and this transformation impact has been re-echoed in marketing discourse in the last decades (Ozuem et al., 2008; Marshall et al., 2012; Opute et al., 2020a, Opute et al., 2020b; Grewal et al., 2020; Gbadamosi, 2021). The ways that firms market products and services to consumers have been revolutionised largely by new technological innovations such as the internet, advanced computing capacity, highly advanced mobile devices and social media.
Consumers on their part are significantly endorsing the technology induced marketing trend and are leveraging technological innovations not only in their pre- but also in their post-consumption behaviours. For example, consumers leverage technology-induced knowledge to process their preference formation decisions. Furthermore, consumers leverage technology-enabled consumer socialising for purchase decision making (Opute, 2017; Opute et al., 2020a), both for purchase (comparing products and services options and price) and post-purchase decisions. Beyond the consumer socialising function enabled by new technologies, consumers also leverage such technological innovations to engage with organisations, especially through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram (Enyinda et al., 2020).
Social media, technology-induced communication and digitisation in general have become constituent parts of daily life (Spencer and Sutton-Brady, 2020; Opute et al., 2020b; Opute, 2022). We have entered the digital era and as documented above; technology-based marketing is not a new development. Rather, marketing literature documents a marketing paradigm shift. In other words, marketing has witnessed a re-conceptualisation of the 'place' element of marketing mix (Opute et al., 2020b; Rachinger et al., 2019; Opute, 2020b), a trend that in itself warrants intensified efforts towards enhancing the understanding of technology and marketing. The Covid-19 pandemic and its devastating implications, induced largely by the movement restriction containment strategy, has further intensified that pertinence. The retail sector, a central part of the marketing sector, is one of the sectors hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic (Fernandes, 2020). From a marketing perspective, a major consequence of the pandemic was global supply-chain disruptions and stock-out situations for some products and increasing demand for others (WRC, 2020). Faced with these challenges, marketers had to adapt and resort to technology-based strategies of connecting people to products and services.