6. Influencing (Market thinking)
Key Practice Specialties and Communities for Adaptive Foresight
- Marketing & Sales – American Marketing Association (AMA). Since 1937. Advancing the practice and scholarship of marketing, including advertising, customer modeling, metrics. 30K members. Certification & training. Marketing News, seven journals. Many conferences; National Association of Sales Professionals (NASP). Since 1991. Certification and training in effective sales trends, strategies, and customer acquisition techniques. For some examples of best practices for foresight professionals, see Hanan’s Consultative Selling, 8th Ed (2011) and Rackham’s inspirational classic SPIN Selling (1988).
Key Influencing-Associated Practitioner Methods
Advertising and Online Advertising
Marketing comm. used to encourage, persuade or influence an audience. Info source: Advertising Age.
Brand Management and Positioning
Establishing and maintaining a particular firm and product reputation and differentiating market position.
Conjoint Analysis and Substitution Analysis
Survey research on preferences and potential substitute goods for existing products and services.
Customer Analytics
Customer behavior analytics and behavior prediction. A branch of predictive analytics.
Customer Relationship Management
IT business system managing firm’s interaction with customers. Sales, mktg., cust. svc., tech. support.
Customer Segmentation and Target Marketing
Dividing a market into sets of customers with shared needs and priorities, and marketing by segment.
Direct Marketing
Direct-to-customer advertising, database marketing, and sales activities.
Market Research
Collecting qualitative and quantitative data on markets and customers. Example: Hype Cycle.
Mass Customization and Personalized Marketing
Automated client customization of product/service. In personalized mktg., each product can be unique.
Sales Force Management Systems
Computerized sales platform that includes contact management and sales lead tracking and forecasting.
Social Marketing
Marketing to influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for social good.
Social Media Marketing
Marketing that uses social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or customer data from their social graphs.
Viral Marketing
Marketing to gain widespread social attention via web traffic, word of mouth, or other sharing behaviors.
