INTRODUCTION

Transformative marketing is the process of driving organizational change through a firms

marketing activities and strategies to cope with and leverage the rapidly changing market place

in order to deliver superior value to customers and gain additional profit for the firm. It has

become imperative to use transformational marketing to connect with your audience, to deliver a

superior brand experience, command loyalty from your consumers and gain competitive

advantage (Day, 1994).

Over time the focus of marketing has shifted from appealing to the masses through mass

marketing, to sensory marketing which attempts to develop emotional associations with

customers by engaging all senses, along with targeted marketing which focusses on the

preferences and needs of each individual consumer, and which has finally evolved into

transformative marketing. It uses traditional marketing knowledge, insights into human behavior

and the study of choice to increase customer satisfaction through their engagement with the

brand without any negative ramifications on customers or the environment (Kumar et al, 2017).

Because transformational marketing is grounded in ethics and values and committed to

environmental sustainability, it strives to reverse the unfavorable image the marketing has

created for itself (Heath, et al, 2012) and acknowledges the responsibility that both businesses

and consumers have towards the environment through their business choices and consumption

practices. (Hossain, et al, 2013)

In transformative marketing, marketers focus on the reason why the company exists and matters

and use this as the crux of their communication efforts. Brands attempt to build a narrative which
is simple and aligned with consumers needs and aspirations. The consumer must be able to put

himself at the center of the story and resonate with it in order to create interest and desire about

the offering. The heart of transformative marketing lies in strategy and actionable consumer

insights, weaved around which, is the creative expression of a compelling story teller.

The benefits of using transformative marketing includes reaching more potential customers,

driving more targeted lead generation and higher rates of eventual conversion into sales thereby

boosting company’s top line and bottom line.

OBJECTIVES

 To understand the impact of transformative marketing on the top line of an organization.

 To study the influence of the use of transformative marketing on the bottom line.

 To analyze whether customers feel more engaged with the brand if transformative

marketing is used

 To decipher whether the use of transformative marketing inspires brand loyalty in

consumers.

 Given that millennials seem to prefer brands that follows sustainable practices, do

consumers perceive brands that use transformative marketing more positively?

Examples of transformational marketing can be seen all around us. Spotify, a digital music

platform, gives users personalized playlist recommendations. In relation to the sustainable facet

of transformational marketing, Legos initiative to use sugarcane instead if plastic was a big win

for the company. Tesla follows the direct-to-consumer model, omitting the need for middle men

which enables them to have complete control over the car buying experience and make it

enjoyable for customers.

As Marketing students, the topic of transformative marketing caught our interest because it is

deemed to be the future of marketing (Kumar, 2018). In todays volatile, uncertain, complex and

ambiguous (VUCA) world we have seen major disruptions in business environment due to which

companies have to adapt to the changing times or risk becoming insignificant. Because

transformative marketing is an upcoming domain, there is an acute dearth of research in the field

which is a gap we would like to fill. The researchers would like to objectively measure the

impact of the practice of transformative marketing on business parameters such as revenue,

profits, customer loyalty, brand perception and level of customer engagement

References:

Hossain, A., & Marinova, D. (2013). Transformational marketing: Linking marketing and

sustainability. World Journal of Social Sciences, 3(3), 189-196.

Heath, T. P., & Chatzidakis, A. (2012). The transformative potential of marketing from the consumers'

point of view. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 11(4), 283-291.

Day, G. S. (1994). The capabilities of market-driven organizations. the Journal of Marketing, 37-52.

Kohli, A. K., & Jaworski, B. J. (1990). Market orientation: the construct, research propositions, and

managerial implications. The Journal of Marketing, 1-18.

Teece, D. J., Pisano, G., & Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic

management journal, 18(7), 509-533.

Kumar, V. (2018). Transformative Marketing: The Next 20 Years.

Kumar, V., Rajan, B., Gupta, S., & Dalla Pozza, I. (2017). Customer engagement in service. Journal of

the Academy of Marketing Science, 1-23.

Ottley, G., & Bechwati, N. N. (2018). Teaching an Elevated View of Marketing: Marketing with

Customers. Marketing Education Review, 28(3), 217-229.

Varey, R. J. (2010). Marketing means and ends for a sustainable society: A welfare agenda for

transformative change. Journal of Macromarketing, 30(2), 112-126.

HYPOTHESES

1. H0: There is no significant impact of transformative marketing on the top and the bottom

lines of a company.

H1: There is significant impact of transformative marketing on the top and the bottom

lines of a company.

2. H0: There is no significant impact of transformative marketing on the level of customer

engagement with a brand.

H1: There is significant impact of transformative marketing on the level of customer

engagement with a brand.

3. H0: There is no significant influence o transformative marketing on the level of brand

loyalty felt by customers.

H1: There is significant influence o transformative marketing on the level of brand

loyalty felt by customers.

4. H0: There is no significant influence of transformative marketing on the customer’s

perception about the brand.

H1: There is significant influence of transformative marketing on the customer’s

perception about the brand.

 LITERATURE REVIEW

[1] reviews new insights and understandings from modern social marketing practice, social

innovation, design thinking and service design, social media, transformative consumer research,

marketing theory and advertising practice and develops a model for transforming social

marketing thought, research and practice. Based on the results, it also lays emphasis on taking a

step further from conventional marketing and further getting involved in design research to fit

the puzzle and people, seeking empathy and insight into people’s motivation and values,

focusing on creating exchanges with people and stakeholders, measuring how, when and how

often has a company touched people in a variety of ways (both intended and unintended).

[2] contrasts the traditional perspectives on customer involvement in the new product

development process with the emerging perspective on customer collaboration in virtual

environments. It also lists down a number of Internet-based mechanisms for engaging customers

in product innovation and highlight the relevance of these mechanisms at different stages of the

product innovation process, and for different levels of customer involvement. The paper also

undertakes two case studies of firms that have implemented some of these mechanisms—Ducati

Motor from the motorcycle industry, and Eli Lilly from the pharmaceutical industry. Co-creation

of value is an important source of competitive advantage in the network economy. While co-

creation is a compelling notion, it needs to be described and analyzed for every specific

marketing process, including customer relationship management, new product development,

customer support, sales, marketing communications, and brand building. This paper provides
useful insights into co-creation in virtual environments to support one key marketing process—

developing new products.

[3] studies the evolution of Marketing processes beginning from the models when the focus was

on efficiencies in the production of tangible output, which was fundamental to the Industrial

Revolution. The goods-oriented, output-based model has enabled advances in the common

understanding, and it has reached paradigm status. However, now that the times have changed,

the focus has shifted away from tangibles and toward intangibles, such as skills, information, and

knowledge, and toward interactivity and connectivity and ongoing relationships. The orientation

has shifted from the producer to the consumer. The appropriate unit of exchange is no longer the

static and discrete tangible good. As more marketing scholars seem to be implying, the

appropriate model for understanding marketing may not be one developed to understand the role

of manufacturing in an economy, the microeconomic model, with its focus on the good that is

only occasionally involved in exchange. A more appropriate unit of exchange is perhaps the

application of competences, or specialized human knowledge and skills, for and to the benefit of

the receiver. These operant resources are intangible, continuous, and dynamic and have

transformed the way companies target and retain their customers.

[4] explores the transformation that can be brought about in marketing a product through media

and advertising by means of integrated marketing. In integrated marketing, the consumer is

viewed whole, not as just a person who buys a certain category of product. The focus is on the

consumer’s life and the experience of how things fit into that life. There is also an orientation to

fitting the brand to different consumers. Advertisements in such scenario go beyond the

traditional agency creative interface in at least three important ways. They treat advertisements

as experiential contacts as opposed to persuasive messaging. They evaluate media based not only
on potential exposure but also on the strength of relevant experiences provided by the media

context and building a relationship brand by sub segmenting and customizing advertisements by

how the different subsegments experience the brand.

Using qualitative studies involving executives and customers, [5] explores the nature and scope

of customer engagement, which is a vital component of relationship marketing. Customer

Engagement is defined as the intensity of an individual’s participation in and connection with an

organization’s offerings and/ or organizational activities, which either the customer or the

organization initiate. The paper argues that it is composed of cognitive, emotional, behavioral,

and social elements and offer a model in which the participation and involvement of current or

potential customers serve as antecedents of engagement, while value, trust, affective

commitment, word of mouth, loyalty, and brand community involvement are potential

consequences.

[6] calls for a paradigmatic shift from marketing techniques and concepts to markets as a social

construction. The paper presents certain arguments of revisioning the creation of value in

markets to include meanings; reconsidering the efficacy and limits of working from the

perspective of the marketer; incorporating more conscientiously consumer subjectivity and

agency; reformulating the nature of relationships between consumers and marketers from

individuals to social beings inhabiting communities; addressing more explicitly cultural

differences in the form of subcultures within nations and international differences between

nations in level of development; and finally, exhorting the importance of marketer reflexivity. It

works towards a more radically transformative marketing practice that is socio-historically

situated, culturally sensitive, and organic, in accounting for and adapting to contemporary global,

technological, and sociocultural developments.

[7] studies the shift which is required in marketing these days i.e. going green. Green marketing

is not achieving its potential for improving the quality of life of consumers, while improving the

natural ecosystem. The failure is the result of the inability of consumers, firms and governments

to adopt systems thinking, in which macro-marketing perspectives are integrated into their

respective micro-decisions, that is, the anthropocentric view of the natural world is disregarded.

The paper proposes some actions to address these difficulties. It includes: Marketers need to look

for new ways of calculating and communicating value that integrates environmental value,

thereby moving away from financial measures which have no real environmental meaning;

change the discourse regarding the environment, highlighting the importance of action and

inaction which needs to be based on increased education about the human–environment

interface; marketing to refocus its emphasis on want satisfaction, shifting away from the

acquisition of goods, thereby enhancing how marketers create value. Making these changes can

allow marketers to operationalize transformative green marketing so the human condition and the

natural system that humans operate within are both improved and bring about transformative

green marketing.

[8] highlights the importance of social media in engaging the customer. The paper adopts an

affordance perspective that leads to identification of three distinctive social media affordances

for customer engagement in tourism: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and

triggered engagement. Affordance enables the simultaneous understanding of technology and

organizational characteristics, and social media use in the tourism industry represents an optimal

context for the affordance perspective. It also extends prior research on customer engagement by

examining the process of recognition (proprioception, exteroception and co perception) through

which organizations engage customers in social media.

[9] provides a holistic picture of customer engagement marketing in various contexts. It provides

an in-depth

understanding of and clarity on customer engagement as it discusses the scope and definition of

the construct, its antecedents, consequences, and the various contexts to which customer

engagement can be applied.

Although there has been some discussion on customer engagement, the conceptual framework of

customer engagement is empirically validated only partially. This is done by understanding the

various marketing activities of the firm like advertising (online/offline) and promotions (free

samples, coupons) and focusing on empirically testing the complete process of the customer

journey from the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

Even though customer engagement has become a strategic imperative for many companies,

managers continue to struggle with its implementation. [10] sheds light on this very issue and

discuss two possible engagement strategies: customization and personalization. While both

approaches hold great potential to achieve customer engagement goals

across the customer lifecycle, the paper delineates that the level of autonomy for customization

strategies and the level of granularity for personalization strategies need to be aligned with

customer characteristics as well as characteristics

of the customer-company relationship. Since the level of familiarity and trust in the customer-

company relationship varies across the customer lifecycle, companies need to tailor their

customization and personalization strategies accordingly. According to the research, companies

benefit from low-level customization strategies and segment-level personalization strategies in

the acquisition and attrition stages, whereas high level customization and individual-level

personalization strategies appear preferable in the retention/development stage.

Links for Literature Review

[1] Lefebvre, R. C. (2012). Transformative social marketing: co-creating the social marketing

discipline and brand. Journal of Social Marketing, 2(2), 118-129.

[2] Sawhney, M., Verona, G., & Prandelli, E. (2005). Collaborating to create: The Internet as a

platform for customer engagement in product innovation. Journal of interactive

marketing, 19(4), 4-17.

[3] Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for

marketing. Journal of marketing, 68(1), 1-17.

[4] Calder, B. J., & Malthouse, E. C. (2005). Managing media and advertising change with

integrated marketing. Journal of Advertising Research, 45(4), 356-361.

[5] Vivek, S. D., Beatty, S. E., & Morgan, R. M. (2012). Customer engagement: Exploring

customer relationships beyond purchase. Journal of marketing theory and practice, 20(2), 122-

146.

[6] Peñaloza, L., & Venkatesh, A. (2006). Further evolving the new dominant logic of

marketing: from services to the social construction of markets. Marketing theory, 6(3), 299-316.

[7] Polonsky, M. J. (2011). Transformative green marketing: Impediments and

opportunities. Journal of Business Research, 64(12), 1311-1319.

[8] Cabiddu, F., De Carlo, M., & Piccoli, G. (2014). Social media affordances: Enabling

customer engagement. Annals of Tourism Research, 48, 175-192.

[9] Kunz, W., Aksoy, L., Bart, Y., Heinonen, K., Kabadayi, S., Ordenes, F. V., ... &

Theodoulidis, B. (2017). Customer engagement in a big data world. Journal of Services

Marketing, 31(2), 161-171.

[10] Bleier, A., De Keyser, A., & Verleye, K. (2018). Customer engagement through

personalization and customization. In Customer Engagement Marketing (pp. 75-94). Palgrave

Macmillan, Cham.