Marketing and Communications During the Fourth Industrial Revolution

By Iman Ghorayeb, Director, Marketing and Communications, EMEA and APAC, Avaya

The only constant is change, as the old saying goes. It’s true of businesses, professions, methods of work, and even social relations.

The COVID-19 epidemic may be the event that changed our entire world, but it is certainly not the cause of that change. The Fourth Industrial Revolution had already shown its first signs of emergence years ago. COVID-19 came at a pivotal moment, and it accelerated the process of transition to the new digital world – felt most obviously with a boom in remote-working.

But that shift has changed everything, affecting fields as diverse as press, healthcare, banking, education, transportation, and public safety.

And the B2B marketing and communications sector, where I play, has reached this turning point, too. Marcomms experts are looking for ways to work remotely while still occupying that common space in which marketing, communications, and sales work together.

This hasn’t always been easy: The transformation we are seeing in the way work is done has been fast and radical, rather than gradual. All of a sudden, there could be no reliance on personal meetings and traditional direct marketing, usually pursued through exhibitions and conferences. Immediately, things shifted towards digital advertising, meeting applications, and virtual events.

This posed unprecedented challenges and opportunities, as marketing and sales experts moved from planning and executing face-to-face events to new, unfamiliar areas. Instead of focusing on designing the pavilions at exhibitions, on distributing resources, on allocating exhibition space, they have had to create, sometimes from scratch, entirely new digital strategies that still provide the ROI that their businesses need.

Instead of inhabiting a world made up of visitor spreadsheets, exhibitor badges, and handshakes, marcomms pros suddenly found themselves in a digital realm relying on the cloud, visual communication applications, big data, artificial intelligence, data analysis, and other tools.

Then the desire to bring the offline-online came. And we started seeing major global events go digital. The global virtual events market size was estimated at $77.98 billion in 2019, but it will be worth $404.45 billion by 2027. Clearly, this change is here to stay.

Interacting with remote visitors calls for different content and mechanisms of action. The good news is that the digital spaces provides a wider scope for creativity, being able to support video, text, images, and interactive presentations.

There’s the added bonus that you can monitor the interaction of a digital audience when they are being presented with content. The digital world provides us with numbers, statistics, measurements, and data analysis. And through analyzing the behavior of the digital audience, we can improve our messages so that it resonates perfectly with the audiences we’re targeting. This provides scope for reaching the pinnacle of marketing and communication goals: meeting the requirements of the customer to enhance trust and loyalty.

Success is often a result of trial and error - all of this is new. We are witnessing the birth of a new science, but it will not be long before academic research catches up and forms best practices that enable organizations to benefit from this new form of virtual event to the maximum extent.

It is true that COVID-19 has pushed the global business community to increase its reliance on digital solutions in marketing and communications. But will that reliance be lessened once the pandemic is over? Common sense says no – the savings achieved by digital solutions alone make them a worthwhile investment.

Last August, Bloomberg published an investigation stating that in the transportation sector, working from home reduced the bill for Americans who commute to work with their cars by about $758 million a day. This figure consists of several sections, including the price of fuel, the value of time, the maintenance of the car, the cost of accidents, the pollution bill, and the social implications of moving to work with cars.

And it’s not just the transportation sector that is seeing these savings. Imagine replicating these kinds of figures across any industry – including marketing and communications – and it’s clear that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already happened. So we’d better be ready.  

Opinions in this piece belong to the author.