Marketing managers can see the future and they can make it happen. They are the new megatrend makers of business and society. The implementation of megatrends concepts by marketing managers has become such a compelling factor that it affects all our lives in one way or another.
It is nearly 30 years since Alvin Toffler, the original futurologist, published Future Shock, a book that is now known as the “Old Testament” of futurology. Toffler attempted to describe shifts that happen so quickly that people are simply overwhelmed by change. He coined the classic definition of future shock as too much change in too short a period of time.
The “Old Testament” of futurology was followed by the “New Testament”, the book Megatrends by John Naisbitt, in 1982. The influence of Megatrends can be gauged by the fact that it has sold more than nine million copies in 57 countries.
A megatrend is when a change factor becomes self-sustaining in everyday life after some threshold point has been reached. The “entrepreneurial woman” is an example of a mega-trend as nearly 50% of all small businesses in the United States are women-owned, a trend that was predicted 30 years ago.
In assessing the accuracy of the predictions made more than two decades ago, it is remarkable how accurate many have proved to be.
However, there are a few lessons that we have learned from the discipline of futurology — now offered as a subject at innovative business schools or in departments of sociology.
One lesson centres on the “coining” of the megatrends. It has to do with putting a name to a mega-trend, a fairly complicated process in which tons of information must be sifted to extract the most salient aspects. Looking at the careers of the most influential marketing managers in South Africa, it is apparent that these top professionals are natural megatrend “architects”.
Marketers are excellent at selecting strategic important information, then connecting divergent sets of information and giving a name to the trend.
Marketing professionals not only work with a set of activities performed by organisations, but also need to understand the social processes operating outside their organisations. It involves grasping the implications of a trend once it has been coined.
Futurology is not uncommon to developing a good marketing strategy and turning the strategy into a marketing plan — actions that require the sensible blending of ideas.
An example is Postnet, in which the marketing manager, with the executive team, accurately “read” the megatrend of the need for a personal and convenient logistic and communication service. Postnet has realised the importance of delivering the service in a one-stop, friendly and efficient manner and is now so successful that its franchises are in big demand.
If marketing managers are becoming the wise futurologists of tomorrow, the challenging question is how they are to be educated and trained. It is evident that the scope of their education must be broad. The role of a marketing manager can vary significantly, based on the type and size of an organisation and industry context. Marketing managers must not only be able to coin and understand future trends, but also to implement marketing techniques.
In a certain sense it is true to say that marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing and composition of customer demand. Their jobs will encompass both the development of new products and services and their delivery to customers.
The marketing education programme should include a basic business component, but marketing managers should be shaped to operate as megatrend architects.
They need to think in terms of long-term time frames and be able to foresee the implications of long-term decisions. Their intellectual orientation needs to be of an inductive and intuitive nature and they need to find synergy among diverse pieces of information.
Marketing managers should be educated as proactive leaders who can verbalise the ever-changing and dynamic trends in society in such a manner that business opportunities can be extracted from the trends. The era of the marketing manager as a mega-trend architect has just dawned.
Futurologist Professor Zak Nel is the academic head of the IMM Graduate School of Marketing