An Overview of the Marketing 3.0 Era

Kotler divided marketing into three eras, the first of which was Marketing 1.0.As Henry Ford said, "No matter what color car you need, Ford only has black ones." This is the product-centered era. The core of this era was product management and marketing was confined to one of the seven functions that support production activities; its primary function was to create demand for the product. McCarthy's 4P theory was held up as the guideline for the 1.0 era: develop the product, set the price, conduct promotions and establish channels. In short, marketing was still at the tactical stage and required little innovation. Marketing 1.0 was essentially a seller's market.

Starting in the 1970s, the world gradually entered the era of the buyer's market: products became more plentiful, and companies began to compete blindly with each other for customers. At this time, more marketing factors were born, such as the 4C's emphasizing customers, cost, convenience and communication, and marketing also attracted more and more attention from enterprises because it was in the era of insufficient customer demand, gradually rising from the tactical level to the strategic level. Marketers recognize that to create demand more effectively, they must change their product-centric approach to a customer-centric one.The emergence of the STP strategy is the core symbol of the Marketing 2.0 era, which emphasizes market segmentation (Segmenting market), targeting market (Targeting market) and positioning (Positioning). In fact, this is the most commonly used marketing strategy model in marketing today.

Starting from the 1990s, computers and the Internet gradually entered people's lives. With the deepening of networking, human beings have also started to become highly interconnected, information is no longer a scarce resource, and consumers have become exceptionally well-informed, as well as greatly facilitating the spread of word-of-mouth. In order to adapt to these new changes, marketers have once again begun a marketing transformation, focusing more on the emotional needs of humans. New age marketing concepts have also emerged, such as emotional marketing, experiential marketing, and brand equity marketing. The earlier traditional consumer-targeted market positioning model could no longer continue to create demand, and marketers now had to focus on the inner needs of the consumer as well. This is what Kotler calls Marketing 3.0.