The Marketer’s Challenge: How to teach Customers New Behaviours

Brief Summary

The author emphasise that with the advancement of technology and with more and more innovations
coming into the market, it has become imperative for the marketers to teach customers about the
newer innovations. Now days when a new product comes into the market, it is entirely a different thing
for the customers for example i-phone has preceded mobile technology with an unimaginable
innovation. So the customers also need to be educated such that they can benefit completely from the
innovation and at the same time contribute in innovation. The companies must monitor consumer’s
behaviour if they want their innovation to fit into consumer’s needs and wants. The companies could
start teaching new behaviours starting from kids. Unlearning is also a good method by teaching
customers to shed off their traditional behaviours and embrace the newer technology. Teaching could
be done through one of these approaches- emotional/affective, cognitive, behavioural and using AIDA
model (for awareness, interest, desire and action).
Emotional/affective: In this approach, the marketers have to connect emotionally with the consumers.
Cognitive: In this approach customers don’t know the utility of the innovation. Once they understand
the utility of the innovation, they start embracing it.
Behavioural: This is related with reinforcing certain behaviours into customers using stimulus response
model.

The author highly emphasize that if consumer’s behaviour is not changed, all innovation is worthless.
The process of product innovation should go simultaneously or slightly ahead to behavioural innovation.
Linking the product innovation with consumer learning has helped companies like Apple. Apple makes
its products so simple and easy to know at the design stage such that when the product actually comes
into the market, all the potential customers are actually learned.
Companies also adopt CRM (customer relationship management) strategies to teach customers about
their innovations. In this way these companies can easily predict the future needs of the customers.

Implications on International Marketing

Teaching new behaviour to customers is a huge challenge for the marketers. Marketers will have to
learn the various cultures of the different countries to find the appropriate approach to teach the
customers. For example, when P&G was to launch Pampers in Indian market, it did complete research
about the culture of the country and then finally hit the bull’s eye. Before that no company entered with
pampers into that market. So, modifying the behaviours will open huge business opportunities for the
companies. Since the number of companies using CRM (customer relationship management), which is
also a part of spreading awareness among customers, is very small, the new companies that embrace
this method will highly benefit. Teaching would help companies to predict needs and demands of the
customers.
Analysis

Changing customer’s behaviour would be a challenging task for the marketers and companies. This will
give a new direction and opportunity to the marketers.

Due to internationalisation of the economies, all the technologies of the world have potential to
penetrate into each and every corner of the world. The pace of development has also increased due to
increase in co-operation among various firms (free trade agreements, technology transfers). So teaching
new behaviours to customers will highly impact the flow of technologies and innovation across borders.
It will also accelerate the pace of development of the economies of the developing and transition
economies.

Companies can assign a different department within marketing that concentrate on spreading
awareness among customers in advance about the products that are in design phase. For example,
Nokia starts promoting the new features of the product much before the product is launched into the
market.