Soon, we will no longer be able to shop at the three JcPenney stores located at Dunkirk-Fredonia Plaza, Westfield Sunrise, and Palisades Center in the New York region.

JcPenney decided to close 138 stores all over USA as part of its strategic decision  to align with their omnichanel strategy. Wal-Mart’s 2016 strategy was similar when they closed 269 stores and acquired fast growing e-commerce store Jet.com and leading women’s online fashion retailer company Modcloth in the beginning of 2017.

This phenomenon of closing brick and mortar stores and acquiring fast growing online retailers is to attract the customers who are shopping-driven. Yes, loyalty-driven customer base is decreasing and shopping-driven customer base is increasing.

Research from McKinsey revealed surprising results in relation to consumer behavior in 30 categories. Out of 30 categories, only three categories are loyalty-driven consumers while the rest are shopping-driven customers. Of the 27 shopping-driven categories, most are daily consumable and non-consumable products. You can find the full research and analysis in The new battle ground for marketing-led growth.

Organizations should craft their digital marketing strategy according to consumer behavior towards their products and brands. And invest their marketing efforts accordingly. By definition, shopping-driven consumers are those who do not stick with one brand. Instead, they keep changing their choices or experimenting with price and quality. This kind of behavior in consumers is increasing because of the many shopping channels, the superior customer experience, and new service offerings through the supply chain strategy.

Meanwhile, the state of marketing is being driven by the digital marketing hub with the convergence of marketing technology and ad technology. Technology research firms define digital marketing hub as the platform where there is convergence of marketing and advertising technology with the power of analytics, automation, and real-time data access.

Gartner has released Magic quadrant for digital marketing Hub for 2017. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been named as one of the leaders. However, marketing and technology leaders consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the ideal platform because it’s hosted on the leading platform as a service (PaaS), which is force.com and also part of Customer Success Platform. Salesforce (PaaS) has been awarded the leader in Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for PaaS.

AppExchange provides another edge to current users when compared to other marketing cloud vendors in the Magic Quadrant. Salesforce Marketing Cloud users can download custom-built free and paid applications from AppExchange to integrate applications and adopt custom business processes based on their needs.

“I like to say that the four Ps of marketing — product, price, promotion, place — have to be supplemented by the four Cs: culture, content, community, connect,” says David Dubious, social scientist and marketing professor at INSEAD Business school, in “The Digital Value Loop.” He also stresses on the fact that organizations need to adopt the Potterian marketing model where digital and social channel fits exactly to this model. The idea behind this model is to build the brand along with generational consumers and their changing behaviors by having a lifetime conversation. This will help the brands to evolve with the customers.

I would like to reiterate one of the key and unique strengths emphasized upon by Gartner in relation to Salesforce.com (SFDC), is that the marketing cloud envisions the full-life cycle of customer engagement. This is a crucial feature in which technology and marketing leaders need to focus on when selecting the digital marketing hub. Among other leaders in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hub, SFDC Marketing Cloud was specially recognized for having the ability to build long-term conversations with consumers through the vision of full-life cycle customer engagement.

I hope this has provided valuable insights to marketing leaders for crafting their strategy around digital channels and consumer behavior and to technology leaders working to reduce complexity in decision-making for choosing a digital marketing hub platform.

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