How can marketing contribute to the restart?

2 July 2020

From 1 to 3 of July there is Restart by Marketing, a series of live meetings on Milanofinanza.it within the fourth edition of the Milano Marketing Festival. Among the speakers involved, BBS Associate Dean Fabio Ancarani who attended the opening conference ‘Human VS Tecnology’.

The initiative, promoted by the Lombardy Region and the Municipality of Milan, involves university professors, professionals, entrepreneurs and managers, for a virtual round table aimed at analyzing how marketing can contribute to the restart of our country.

Among the topics discussed during the first day, the delicate relationship between technology and creativity, which has emerged in all its limits and potential in recent months. The human factor has become of fundamental importance in a context in which we have witnessed a spread of some trends already underway on a global scale.

“The theme of restart is central and involves multiple layers: covid and post-covid are nothing but accelerators of pre-existing trends – says Fabio Ancarani, Full Professor of Economics and Business Management and Marketing at the University of Bologna, Associate Dean for BBS Executive Education and Scientific Director of the Executive Master in Sales and Marketing.

In this context, we can trace some accelerators functional to the restart, such as first of all the brand value: the brands that have something to say and to give will resist and start again better. Even companies that reason with long-term goals will be able to get up faster than those looking for opportunities in the short term. Another aspect of leverage is the ability to exploit data, integrating analysis and social media marketing into classic promotional activities. Of fundamental importance is to foster multi and omnichannel logic and focus on a competition that privileges value and not short-term turnover “.

The professor then relates to the relationship between human and technological aspects in comparing the consumer to the figure of the centaur mentioned by Jerry Wind and Vijay Majan in his 2002 best-seller The consumer centaur. That is the marketing of convergence. “a sort of half digital and half physical mythological figure – continues Ancarani – and this duplicity can only reflect on companies, which are required to consider, embrace and communicate this double soul. The covid has shown how consumers can access technology faster: just think of the medical recipes that arrive via WhatsApp even to older and less accustomed users to interface with some tools “.

Digitization is, according to the professor, one of the strengths of the recovery, alongside a high-quality product, a strong customer orientation, a logic devoted to innovation, an objective target of niche. These are the keywords of marketing on which Italian companies will have to focus in order to stand up and establish themselves in the international context. In this scenario, managerial training plays a decisive role, given that the professionals of the future will be able to deal with such complexity, seize new opportunities and identify new routes only through the union of knowledge and an open, flexible and forward-looking mindset.