Reaching the customers and the employees
Shahzada Farhan Akbar and Adnan Ashraf Khan
Since the dawn of time, mankind has evolved in maturity from savagery to barbarism and finally to a state of civilization. It is believed that each stage of this evolution is closely linked with the growth of technology. That is to say, the savage era saw the use of fire, the bow, and pottery; barbarism saw the domestication of animals and the growth of agriculture and metalwork, while civilization saw the birth of modern-day languages. Today, by virtue of technological growth, civilization has by far crossed any earlier perceived boundaries of evolution. The world today, though spread across various continents, has reached a new height of maturity. Technology has brought all regions of the world closer and made people interconnected. This interconnectedness has given the world a new term — the ‘Global Village’.Among the many benefits of Globalization, Research and Development, professional services, marketing and solution delivery, the IT industry has seen a remarkable change from its traditional model (http://us.macmillan.com/uploadedFiles/PalgraveTrade/Non-menu_Items/Theorizing_Global_Studies_cha01.pdf). This chapter will begin by reflecting on a few of these changes in the behaviour of providers and consumers. Then, it will look at how technology could integrate different parts of MNEs.
Technology and its impact on marketing
Technology has played a key role in marketing communication for MNEs. Contemporary methods for advertising have not only brought about a revolution in the advertising industry (a search engine being one of the biggest ad revenue generators in the world, and print publications' ad revenues are drying up fast), but also the way MNEs think about how to get their messages across to consumers and buyers. Social media and its engagement models have brought about an even bigger change in the way companies interact with their customers and vice versa (Hu, 2011). We will now look at what some of these new marketing methodologies are and how they affect both business and consumer behaviour the world over, and specifically in the context of global business.
Online advertising
In the pre-internet days, advertising was limited to its traditional channels comprising primarily print, radio and television. Earlier, with the limited number of publications, radio stations and television channels, advertisers knew where most of their audience was, hence targeting was easier. With the plethora of new channels brought about by satellite TV, that audience got scattered and it started becoming more and more difficult for advertisers to target their potential clients cost effectively. With the evolution of the internet, MNEs started providing potential buyers with easy access to company and product information via their websites. With the strong emergence of search engines and the millions of user-generated queries that these search engines could manage and store, there was a new opportunity for advertisers to capitalize on, i.e. search query-related targeted ads. Search engines had all the information to display targeted ads to an audience who had just requested a particular piece of information, which meant that the audience could be provided with the right kinds of ads at precisely the right time, when the buyer might make a purchase decision. Today, online advertising makes up a significant portion of the total advertising spend in the world (Fulgoni and Morn, 2008). According to the Internet Advertising Bureau's advertising report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2011, the online advertising spend in the UK had reached £4.78 billion, a £687 million increase compared to 2010 (http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landscape/adrevenuereport).
Today, MNEs ranging from makers of consumer goods to financial service providers are all actively using search engines and other sites for online advertising. Such ads are good for advertisers who get their messages sent to a targeted set of users (and get charged only once an ad is clicked); it is better for buyers as well, as they get targeted suggestions about buying options (mostly in an unobtrusive manner) precisely when they want. This explains the constant growth in annual online ad spend.
Specifically in the context of global business, online advertising is usually more culture neutral than its other counterparts; hence companies do not have to invest as heavily in advertising content for different regions as they have to in other forms of advertising (KPMG, 2011). So, for example, with a Google ad for a product that is being sold in the United States and the United Kingdom, the content for the ad can be almost the same and the user is directed to the regional website of the company.
Technology behind the scenes
Though trading on the borders of privacy violation, the technology today brings to users what they may need to see, the right message at the right time. Moving away from window shopping to more recent web surfing, the new technology brings to users an opportunistic marketing approach; an attractive way of advertising what a user can buy when he/she is really in need of a certain product. It offers a solution for what users have been searching for. Users might initially credit it to serendipity but it soon becomes obvious that it was not just coincidence. Distancing ourselves from the debate of the legality and ethics of this form of marketing, let us focus on how technology makes it possible. This form of marketing is commonly known as Behaviour-based Internet Advertising. It is a very strong method of putting the message in front of the user.
In order for this technology to work, it simply tracks users' activities on the internet, i.e. the way one surfs online. Let us see a few of the commonly used ways this happens.
Computer cookies
Whenever a user visits any website, the cookie storage space in his or her computer stores a small file. The collection of these small files can basically have the potential to form users' profiles, i.e. what users like and dislike, which types of websites users surf these days, and so on. It is this profile in users' own machines that is giving away secrets to this new breed of advertiser. Therefore, when a user visits a webpage, there are standard advertisement banner spaces available. Instead of showing any advert, these advertisers go through the user's computer for cookies, pick up the user's preferences and advertise what the user wants to see (http://www.whatarecookies.com/).
While some users do not care about being tracked in this way, there still remains the question as to what happens if any user would like to opt out of this form of tracking. Though this debate is ongoing on many forums, there are a few simple steps a user can take to minimize being tracked in this way. This involves blocking the cookies in the system step-up. However, it is important to note that this may limit the user's internet experience as some websites, some commerce and trading tools, and even the search engines themselves may not display content either properly or at all.
Latest technology
A Silicon Valley-based start-up company called NebuAd has created a new technology to work on behaviour-based advertisements. NebuAd's model does not rely on cookies from the user's computer but goes straight to the hub of activities, i.e. to the internet service providers (ISPs). This requires certain hardware to be installed in collaboration with the ISPs at their premises to track the behaviour of internet surfing individuals. This technology takes away any control a user can have on tracking but this technology depends on ISPs having to accept it first (http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3769656/NebuAd+Halts+ISP+Tracking+Model.htm).
E-mails: another channel
Another method of reaching users with behaviour-based advertisements is via e-mails. These can be triggered in various ways and can be classified under the subheadings of:
• Website — sign-in and purchases. This generates an instant welcome e-mail. This provides the details of your interest to the advertising companies.
• Webpage visited. This gives away users' interests to the advertising companies where they can then trigger the respective e-mail advertising campaign for the user.
• Videos watched and shared on social media. This logs the user's interest in a particular area and will trigger e-mail advertising for the user. Other simple media triggers can be check-in via mobile app and other mobile app linkages (http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/email-marketing-ebook/email-success.aspx).
It gets more interesting as to how a user behaves when he receives these e-mails. The next step of the e-mail advertisement campaign depends on the user's reaction to the first e-mail. Several common scenarios are given below:
• opens and clicks but lack of activity on a message
• open and click and do not convert
• does not open or click for a specific time period
• clicks on a specific link in an e-mail, such as a product promotion
• frequent sharing of e-mails via share-to-social links.
Each of the above scenarios will have a different pre-arranged response in an e-mail advertisement campaign.
Social media marketing
Over a billion users are registered with Facebook today, spending increasingly more time on it and similar sites like Twitter and Pinterest. Not only that: users are interacting with their group of friends, sharing information and forming interest groups, all of which makes such sites ideal for targeted advertising. While creating an advertising campaign on Facebook, for example, marketers can limit viewers of the ad to those interested in a particular regional celebrity, interest areas, other key words and geographic location, something that was not possible before such sites existed. Most of this information is provided by the users themselves through their profile information and interactions with friends. Categorizing an audience this way was a marketer's dream, which has now come true through social networking sites (http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-social-media-marketing).
However, in addition to advertising, another very innovative way brands are trying to market themselves is by using the social media space which is now being called ‘social media marketing’. Brands can now interact directly with consumers visiting their pages on social media sites and engaging in one-on-one conversation, which has never been possible before. MNEs now use such sites to gain further insights into what buyers think about their latest products and services, what are their latest needs and what new trends are being developed in their markets.
Technology and collaboration
Collaboration within different units of MNEs has become an increasingly important and uniquely challenging task.With a culturally diverse work force scattered across the globe, multinationals are in an enviable position to gain insights into global challenges, and to form solutions that other companies can only hope for; which is why it is very important for such companies to effectively form collaboration within their organizations and to ensure learning across different regions of operation.
Technology is enabling such learning and collaboration more and more effectively everyday, and today multinationals can enjoy seamless and fluid interaction across thousands of miles, thus improving the effectiveness of such communication (Cumley, 2009).
While different forms of digital communication technologies like e-mails and voice-over internet have been around for a while, there are elements of human communication that these technologies lacked, gaps which new technologies are trying to fill. The implicit parts of face-to-face communication like interactivity, emotional cues, facial expressions and body language, etc. had previously been difficult to duplicate in digital communication, but now are being increasingly accommodated for with new technology. We shall now examine some of the most recent developments that are shaping the world of such communication.
Company intranets
Company intranets are one such example. We can consider them to be knowledge portals with varying degrees of access for all employees within the organization, no matter where they are located in the world. Such information portals can hold data from static textual information like company policies, to more dynamic data such as company notices and announcements, to media such as training materials, educational videos, conferences and lectures (Stuckert, 2000). While such intranets used to be the domain of large corporations, today smaller companies operating locally, nationally or internationally can make use of internet-based platforms like wiki to achieve the same result.
Collaboration platforms
A collaboration platform differs from an intranet in the way that it enables not just broadcasting of information from a few sources, but an interactive problem-solving and discussion environment for team members based in different regions. Collaboration has been a particular challenge for organizations that have teams situated in different locations. The interactivity and fluidity of sitting across the table and working on problems is something very difficult to replicate in digital environments, and is exactly what some of the new technologies aim to achieve. One such platform that is gaining traction is the web-based ‘Yammer’ (recently acquired by Microsoft). Yammer is already being used by more than 200,000 companies worldwide and by 85 per cent of Fortune 500 companies including Shell, Ford, eBay, O2, DHL and Cap Gemini. Such platforms enable discussion boards, sharing of images, videos and links by employees, opinion polls, document sharing, and similar other options that enable employees to work more closely and effectively on projects and tasks. Although an extension of social media that the internet has been set ablaze with in the last few years, platforms like these have been specifically designed not only for people to share information with each other, but also to iteratively discuss, debate, contribute towards and solve problems that any team could be working on. Such multimediarich and user-friendly environments designed to facilitate collaboration will definitely be huge assets for multinationals to leverage.
Internet-based conference calling
Conference calls have been around for a while as well, but have always been somewhat troublesome to manage. Traditionally, conference calls have been implemented on landlines or mobile phones, both of which have had no interface for the users to manage such calls well. Some new companies are trying to make such calls easier to manage and more interruption-free to handle, and using internet-based solutions for that. For example, a service called ‘uberconference’ aims to deliver a conference call experience over the internet with a very intuitive user interface where each user is represented by an image, and the person currently speaking is clearly represented with appropriate highlights. Such services are being used by companies large and small that have to cut across boundaries in order to get their global solutions delivered (Lawlor, 2007).
Video conferencing
Similarly, the area of video conferencing has seen huge developments in recent years, enabled by great increases in internet speeds available to users and owing in large part to the constrained travel budgets in today's economic climate. Employees and executives, for whom travel was a must in order to accomplish certain tasks, can now simply hold and attend meetings with their colleagues in other locations, right from the confines of their offices. Cisco has been a company really pushing forward the case for innovative video conferencing quite aggressively. Not only are MNEs investing in high-speed internet and the latest software that makes such video conferencing possible, they are also investing in technologically enriched meeting rooms that are physically set up in a way to make digital attendees feel more like they are present in the room (Tan, 2002). Such developments have greatly increased the effectiveness of video conferencing in the last few years. Once again, such technologies remain the luxuries of not only large corporations, but also smaller businesses that have easy access to software such as Skype and Google Plus, which have their own versions of well-functioning video conferencing capabilities.
Online video
The dramatic explosion in the realm of digital online video has perhaps been the single most important advancement that will impact on organizational learning in times to come. While websites like YouTube championed the user-generated content era, there have been many more companies that made use of such technologies and brought them to more focused use. Today we are seeing a similar explosion in online teaching and learning solutions for consumers and organizations alike. Innovative start-ups such as Khan Academy are disrupting secondary education, while universities such as Harvard, Stanford and MIT are opening up their courseware to be shared publicly for everyone to benefit from, all using online videos as their basic tools. Videos are playing a similar role in education within organizations as well. Today training materials, conference coverage, presentations, lectures and slides translated into various languages are frequently being used in MNEs to bring education and learning to a new level.
Conclusion
We are moving towards a world where the voice of the consumer is becoming stronger as connectedness over the internet goes on increasing.Today, many blogs are playing a more important role in information dissemination than mainstream media, users on Twitter break news faster than any news channel in the world can, and user reviews gain more reliability than critics' reviews for products and services. On the flip side, these forms of connectivity can also be used for malicious activities, the most recent incidence being the negative communication and planning used by young people during the UK Riots of 2011.
Businesses, both regional and global, have to take this changing landscape into account when operating in today's world. Since the world has become a much more connected place, news in one part of the world travels to the other in no time at all, and the general public forms opinions before a business has had time to react. Brands are no longer seen and observed by regional buyers, but by international ones. Apple's keynote address is watched live by millions of people all over the world, news about corporate miss-steps such as the recent BP oil spill spreads like wildfire across the globe, and a product launch in the USA creates demand in India in no time.
Another big shift in how marketing works in the world of today is the popularity of ‘user reviews’ for different products and services and their impact on buying decisions by new buyers. Again this is a global phenomenon and affects multinationals as much as it does local businesses. Today, websites such as amazon.com (books and products), booking.com (hotels), imdb.com (movies), toptable.co.uk (restaurants), Apple's app store (software applications) have democratized the rating process by giving users of a product or service the power to rate and review it to help other users make a buying decision. This is word of mouth and recommendations by friends taken to a whole new level.
While there was a time when film critics' opinions swayed a film's audience one way or the other, now all that matters to moviegoers is what others like themselves are saying about the movie on imdb.com or rottentomatoes.com. Similarly, users depend on each other's opinions of buyers and sellers on ecommerce sites such as eBay and Amazon, thus creating a user, generated system of trust which is quite robust.
Businesses and consumers thus exist in a very transparent world today where it is not just the brand speaking and conditioning consumer perception; other consumers are doing that more and more frequently. What this means for a MNE is that it can no longer consider its marketing efforts in a region in isolation, but must also keep in mind that whatever they do in one part of the world will have an immediate impact on buyer behaviour in other parts.
Bibliography
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