EVENT INTRODUCTION 

12th National Marketing Konclave on Human Face of Marketing in the Data Driven Era

“A clear purpose is everything to an organization. It is an organization’s soul and identity, providing both a platform to build upon and a mirror to reflect its existence in the world. It articulates why an organization exists, what problems it is here to solve, and who it wants to be to each human it touches through its work. While it’s not the first time in history businesses are pondering why they exist and who they are to their customers.

Deloitte Consulting LLP, 2021, Global Marketing Trends.

This present era is an era of bountiful data churned into information through analytics and whipped-out insight. Marketers need to soul-search whether these so-called marketing insights are befitting to the core value of marketing function as organizations are not exclusively created for its customer but with a broader purpose to serve mankind. As in most cases marketing research mines consumer data so the possibility of not looking at non-user data is very high. Invariably with this short-sightedness we lose the focus on human beings. Further, marketers tend to forget the human side of the consumers in this touchless product and service delivery phase due to the pandemic control protocol. Bur marketers need to adopt this new reality and behave like a marketing-oriented organization full of human-like qualities. Business organizations must promote human-centric marketing approaches which treat consumers as real human beings, not a reference number or consumer ID.

The concept of human-centric marketing which gained momentum during the global pandemic and restriction on human contact is a natural outgrowth of customer-centric marketing and product-centric marketing with the evolution of marketing from sales since the decade 1980 onwards. In human-centric marketing, marketers approach customers as complete human beings with minds, hearts, and spirits. In human-centric marketing, marketers fulfill not only customers’ functional and emotional needs but also address their latent anxieties and desires. In this era of artificial intelligence and robotics, sometimes consumers are feared to lose their own identity. This deepest uncovered anxieties of consumers may be tapped well by adopting well-defined human-centric approaches touching their body, mind, and soul with well-articulated value propositions by human-to-human connection, not a machine to human artificial interaction.