Meaning and Emergence of Modern Marketing Trends

Marketing has moved a long way from the older, production-and-selling-centred view of business towards a customer-centred, technology-enabled, socially conscious activity. The recent trends in marketing are the practical responses marketers have developed to changes in technology (internet, mobile phones, social media), in the way customers behave and shop, and in society's expectations of business (fair dealing, sustainability, social good). Studying these trends matters because a firm that keeps using yesterday's marketing methods loses ground quickly to competitors who adopt the newer, more efficient and more customer-responsive approaches.

The trends most commonly discussed at this level are: green marketing, social marketing, direct marketing, online/internet marketing (e-marketing), relationship marketing, rural marketing, niche marketing, telemarketing, and network marketing (multi-level marketing). Each responds to a different pressure — environmental concern, social responsibility, cost/convenience, technology, customer retention, an underserved market segment, or a new distribution/sales structure — and a modern firm typically uses several of these together rather than relying on only one.

This chapter's coverage of these trends rests on the same underlying marketing-management concepts (the marketing mix, market segmentation, customer orientation) that CBSE's own Business Studies syllabus also builds its Marketing Management unit on; the specific trends discussed are common, board-agnostic developments in real-world marketing practice, not TN-specific inventions.