Marketing in a Shifting World

Thoughts on Toffler and Marketing

In order to understand current marketing issues, it is critical to have a grasp on the trends that shape society. Such is the purpose behind studying Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave”, which examines shifting trends in terms of waves of change that wash over society, overlap with one another and ultimately create a new landscape from which individuals and businesses operate. The Agricultural age gave way to the Industrial Revolution which then gave way to the Information age, and so on. Toffler states “once we understand how these parts, processes and principles are interrelated, and how they transform one another, touching off powerful currents of change, we gain a much better understanding of the giant wave of change battering our lives today”. Toffler breaks society down into “spheres”, or sectors of society that together formulate the workings of any society. The spheres include the Techno-sphere, Socio-sphere, Info-sphere, Bio-sphere, Power-sphere and the Psycho-sphere. Toffler wrote “The Third Wave” in 1980, before many innovations such as the Internet and cell phones had fully reshaped society. He scripted prophetic passages such as: “Instead of being dominated by a few mass media, Third Wave civilization will rest on inter-active de-massified media, feeding extremely diverse and often highly personalized imagery into and out of the mind-stream of the society”. One cannot help but think of many of today’s web-based interfaces such as YouTube, Myspace, Facebook and the like, which have become fundamental social networking vehicles in society, not too mention the movement toward web-based interactive media. What strikes me as remarkable is that Toffler wasn’t describing new technologies; rather he was reflecting the currents of civilization that were already beginning to take shape within the information age—technology only later became an enabler, or a vehicle which allowed the shift to happen faster.

From a business and marketing perspective, Toffler’s writings and ideas forced me to think broadly about the past and more narrowly about the future… To me the most significant occurrence came between the first and second waves, in which consumption became divorced from production. Ultimately this was a massively important event that created an information asymmetry which, in part, fueled many of the industrial & post-industrial business models that have thrived for decades. This divorce between consumption and production gave the information edge to businesses since they had the financial and organizational means to research & develop products and markets from a top-down perspective in order to gain mass appeal and brand awareness. The average consumer had neither the means nor the time to research every product he or she consumed, thus traditional marketing played a crucial role because it was, in many cases, all the information that the consumer had to go on. Many businesses, of course, thrived under this scenario, after all they were dealing with a consumer base that was more reactive to products than proactive, and thus more open to being persuaded by savvy marketers. It seems natural that the information age would develop from this set of circumstances--technology has provided the consumer with an opportunity not only to level the informational playing field, but to in fact engage in a race for knowledge with business.

So, where does that leave us now? I suspect that this struggle for an informational advantage will lead to incredible new technologies, with capabilities far beyond what we have imagined. The readings and viewings that describe advances in Aritificial Intelligence (AI) and Conversational Interface (CI) paint the future with a decidedly Sci-fi brush, and make a compelling case in the process. AI promises to create computers with greater computational power than the human brain and CI will reshape how we interact with computer-based technology. I don't dispute that these technologies will be created, available and used in some niche markets, but what I haven't heard discussed in any of the readings is the role of the free market. Consider the Segway scooter, billed as a revolution in technological design and function, set to redefine individual transportation either on the job or in leisure. Yet the free market has not shared that view. Yes there are some niche/novelty markets for this technology (Downtown Anchorage tours!), but it has not been fully absorbed into the cultural zeitgeist. One factor is that today’s consumer is a much more knowledgeable, sophisticated & skeptical being with highly specialized needs and wants, therefore if a product misses the mark even slightly (especially a specialized product), it risks its own mass appeal. Traditional industrial/post-industrial marketing may have allowed a business to simply tell a consumer that "This is a revolutionary product!' and they would buy it, but today's information-age consumer seems to be a much more nuanced sell--almost as if to say "I need more than that". The point of the segway reference is to raise the caution that there is an unpredictable element to how and at what rate these waves take shape. The free market will determine what new technologies comprise the next new wave, and also the rate at which the shift occurs. Toffler seems to predict the rate of change to be very rapid, yet there are global and socio-economic mechanisms that could slow the rate of change. For example, suppose an unfortunate combination of natural disasters create a worldwide food and energy shortage, which then fans the flames of global inflation, places intense downward pressure on wages and increases unemployment. This dramatic socio-economic hiccup may not necessarily derail progress, but it certainly puts short-term limitations on what new advancements the free market is willing or able to accept, especially if a depressive economy reduces our wants and needs back to basic pre-industrial times. Although Toffler contends that such thinking is brought on by "a steady diet of bad news, disaster movies and Apocolyptic Bible stories" (The Third Wave, pg. 11)--and, indeed, provides an excuse for inaction--his vision of the future seems to be predicated upon steady long-term economic growth. He acknowledges that there is an element of unpredictability to the future, yet at the same time rejects that it can change history's course. Instead Toffler maintains that any upheaval and chaos is merely part of a pattern of changes that ultimately "add up to a giant transformation in the way we work, live, play and think..." (Toffler, pg. 12)—a notion that seems to assume that no challenge, however great, can ever derail waves of change.

I’m not completely convinced that the developments of CI and AI represent an entirely new wave. Rather they seem to be a natural extension of the Information Age, which carries with it a certain degree of autonomy. Surely these advancements will reshape how we interact with technology, and will have many practical uses within society (I’m envisioning ordering dinner from a conversational computer screen at a restaurant), but it seems logical that the information age would culminate with some form of symbiosis or singularity. As it is right now, our technological advancements have enabled us to live extremely different lives from one another. You and your next door neighbor can share zero commonalities simply because you can choose to immerse yourself in a very narrowly defined informational world… Only time—and the conditions shaping the global free market--will tell if there is a complete paradigm shift across all of Toffler’s “sphere’s” of society, or if the Fourth Wave will simply prove that the information age was just the tip of one iceberg. So, how does this societal information translate into an understanding of marketing issues? It is essential to understand both how businesses function in a changing landscape, and how consumers function in society at large. One must have a grasp on the prevalent trends at hand, and the savvy marketer must understand that cultural changes can be known, studied and predicted, thus anticipated.