The web landscape has undergone major changes over the last 20 years, notably due to technological advances and changes in individual behavior. The development of new practices related to the use of smartphones and tablets. Since this universe has been completely changed, it is normal that marketing strategies evolve with this change. We will give a brief retrospective of these upheavals.
The key phases of the web universe
Web 1.0 marked the period from 1990 to 2003. It is the appearance of search engines and file transfer platforms. Web 2.0 appears between 2004 and 2008, social media become more and more popular. It is the emergence of collective intelligence. Finally, web 3.0 exists since 2009 and we now talk about real-time interconnectivity. Connected objects have phenomenal success, as well as the mobility and semantics of data. Each time the web has changed, marketing has had no choice but to adapt, however, this was already the case long before this technology existed. Customers and their expectations have evolved over time, as have merchant customer relationships. It is, therefore, possible to say that marketing has gone from 1.0 to 3.0.
A short retrospective of the history of marketing
This strategy existed long before the emergence of the Internet and Web 1.0. Marketing was born in the United States, it was then focused on products. It later became a discipline that was taught and studied worldwide from the 1960s onwards. This form of marketing made it possible to produce in large quantities. It later evolved and began to focus on customers. This was made possible thanks to the work of Michael Porter, who in 1979 proposed a model called "Porter's 5 Forces". This model was designed to put the competitive environment in which an industry operates in a real-life situation. We are starting to talk about the notion of targeting, even if the customer is not yet at the heart of the marketing strategy. Then we talk about brand management between 1990 and 2000. In the early 2000s, we talk about marketing 2.0 which is more customer-oriented. Companies also evolve in a much more complex strategic digital ecosystem and make extensive use of social media.
Marketing 3.0
This new form of marketing presents new challenges such as interconnectivity, mobility, personalization, and instantaneous distribution of information. These measures are important because they allow adapting to changes in consumer behavior. Marketing 3.0 has been around since the 2010s. Philip Kotler's book provides relevant explanations on this subject. For now, it seems that marketing 3.0 is just a concept, a vision that should soon be adopted by brands since the practical applications of techniques useful to this strategy do not yet exist, however, it already offers a good perspective. For the time being, companies will still have to make do with the potential offered by Marketing 2.0, which has already proven its worth.