Which era of business are we currently in

Just how much has marketing changed in the last years? Simple Trade Era Pre-Industrial Revolution : The simple trade era was a time when everything was hand created and only available in a limited supply. It was also a time when basic commodities ruled. Households would produce what they consumed. Products were produced in mass and at a low cost.

Typically businesses only produced one product at a time. Due to the current market, businesses could sell anything they produced. Sales Era ss : As the market continued to become more saturated and intensify, competition increased among businesses.

This created a need for marketing and sales techniques. Companies hoped through persuasion techniques that they could convince customers to purchase their products. However, companies were concerned with selling products simply to get rid of them for a profit, not because it would fulfill the needs of their customers. Everything in the sales era was about the price, not the quality of the products or the customer needs.

Marketing Department Era ss : The marketing department was defined during this era. We see advertising, sales, promotions, and anything marketing related all grouped into one department. Marketing Company Era ss : This is an era when the marketing department takes control. All employees are also involved in marketing, making it important for the success of the company. In addition, there is a shift from mass production to the need to satisfy customers.

The customers become king and are now the main focus. Businesses survive because they are here to fulfill the needs of customers. Distribution channels and pricing strategy are also defined during the marketing company era. Relationship Marketing Era s : During the relationship marketing era, the focus is not only on creating relationships with customers but also long-term relationships.

The ultimate goal for businesses is to create customer loyalty. Businesses want to create products that will ensure their customers come back every time. The customer is in the driving seat now, not businesses. During much of the sales era, marketers and advertisers pushed content to consumers regardless of if they were interested in the product or service.

This kind of disruption could be something such as a TV ad during your favorite show or phone call from a telemarker at your family dinner. Traditional marketing hoped to grab your attention and distract you from what you were previously doing. The mid-twentieth century was a period of remarkable growth in theories of management, and in the guru-industrial complex. Statistical and mathematical insights were imported often from military uses forming the basis of the field that would subsequently be known as operations management.

Peter Drucker, one of the first management specialists to achieve guru status, was representative of this era. His book Concept of the Corporation , published in , was a direct response to Alfred P. But something new was starting to creep into the world of organization-as-machine. As knowledge work grew as a proportion of the US economy, the new reality of managing knowledge and knowledge workers challenged all that organizations knew about the proper relationship between manager and subordinate.

When all the value in an organization walks out the door each evening, a different managerial contract than the command-and-control mindset prevalent in execution type work is required. Thus, new theories of management arose that put far more emphasis on motivation and engagement of workers.

The idea of what executives do changed from a concept of control and authority to a more participative coaching role. Today, we are in the midst of another fundamental rethinking of what organizations are and for what purpose they exist.

If organizations existed in the execution era to create scale and in the expertise era to provide advanced services, today many are looking to organizations to create complete and meaningful experiences. I would argue that management has entered a new era of empathy. This quest for empathy extends to customers, certainly, but also changes the nature of the employment contract, and the value proposition for new employees.

We are also grappling with widespread dissatisfaction with the institutions that have been built to date, many of which were designed for the business-as-machine era.

They are seen as promoting inequality, pursuing profit at the expense of employees and customers, and being run for the benefit of owners of capital, rather than for a broader set of stakeholders. At this level, too, the challenge to management is to act with greater empathy. In many cases, companies should consider collaborating with NGOs, governments, and other companies to manage their sociopolitical relations. The downside of working across different organizations is that it can be time-consuming and slow moving.

It took Nike and other companies seven years to establish the Fair Labor Association. In addition, some social issues may simply be too big for industry associations to tackle. So how do companies determine when to work together and when to go it alone?

As a general rule, when companies can capture first-mover advantage as BP did when its CEO acknowledged the dangers of global warming , cannot afford to collaborate, or are targeted by specific activist campaigns, they should eschew partnerships. But when stakeholders view all companies as equally culpable, when regulation is likely to be imposed on an entire industry, or when individual actions would destroy value, companies should unite in rewriting their social contracts. Companies must not only understand which issues matter most and reach out to their fellow travelers.

To cultivate the fifth R — reputation — they must lead with their actions and develop more sophisticated communications to convey those actions to the public.

Rather than yielding to single-issue interest groups, these companies gain trust and respect by insisting on a more complete conversation. As consumers become conscious of the trade-offs companies make between corporate interests and the common good, consumers become more sympathetic to the companies. AstraZeneca is one company that has learned the value of straight talk. After the U. But it also took the unusual step of posting raw data from clinical trials on its Web site, allowing independent researchers to draw their own conclusions.

This was a high-risk decision, because different analyses of the same data set can yield different conclusions. Effective communications cannot be the sole responsibility of public relations agents and lobbyists.

Companies must undertake concrete activities to improve their reputations. These reputations in turn create a virtuous cycle: Employees live up to the reputation, developing values-based codes of behavior that are much more effective than a rulebook at instilling honesty.

They are the only ones who can convince employees, investors, and other stakeholders that the company should move in a new direction. And they are the only ones who can align entire companies around shared social objectives.

If companies delegate these issues to anyone below the CEO, internal conflict is likely to ensue. CEO leadership is also critical because chief executives are often the public faces of their companies. Some sociopolitical goals require changes to entire industries. CEOs must lead these changes if they are to take hold industrywide. These sweeping changes included the Marshall Plan and the Trilateral Commission.

And although CEOs are often reluctant to meet a critical public, our experience suggests that businesses have consistently gained more from entering the fray than from avoiding it. A full response to the sociopolitical challenges facing business will require companies to hear from, and speak to, more diverse audiences than they ever have before.

To accomplish this, they are hiring leaders from a broader range of fields: the civil service, the diplomatic corps, the formerly feared and shunned NGO sector, the media, and the world of pollsters and political advisers. But companies must also embrace a broader range of organizational models.

Most companies are not prepared to manage their social contracts. By their very nature, social issues flow across the membranes of the whole corporation. They also flow across industries in such a way that it is no longer useful to distinguish between heavily regulated industries, such as telecommunications, and lightly regulated ones, such as retailing.

Businesses need new structures and processes that recognize these realities. Companies are first and foremost agents for wealth creation. By virtue of their scale and global reach, however, they have also become agents for profound social change. As businesses grapple with their new and expanded role, they need to take a more strategic approach so that they may create value for shareholders; attract highly talented, motivated employees; spread a positive form of capitalism; and make the communities in which they work happier and healthier.

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The Social Contract Corporations have always had complex relationships with the rest of society.