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Archive 2000
or : Metropolis to NETropolis.
(INTRO) 1959 New Year's eve. Hudsucker Industries —whose motto was "the future is now"— got as president a young man gone from small Muncie to New York City where he gained celebrity by inventing a colorful pastime named by marketer the 'hula hoop'. From the "The Hudsucker Proxy" movie by Joel Coen, 1996.
Aristotle wrote that "people come to the city to find safety and happiness, to lead the good life". One attraction of the city is the greater number of choices it offers residents in work, recreation, and social contacts. Marketing practice has always had big interest for social mobility, thus becoming familiar with the reasons and motives for that people relocate into large-sized community instead of staying in small towns. These causes are strictly bound to the wide offerings of products and services to sell in a single space and time (community). Many studies demonstrate that marketing of 2000 tends to be a Relationship Marketing and not a Mass Marketing. Their arguments are spacing from "the future of the mass audience" to "understanding community in the information age", where the new media environments are thought as paradigm for a new management of communication process... I would explain some evidence on how the mass marketing reveals to be not so worth as the direct marketing mediated by digital technology. Nowadays the Internet should settle down and become a vital communication tool for both business and individual. Let's look closely at such a state of flux.
Click on the colored '0' to read the article part 3 (blue) and 1 (green).
Which are the greatest cities on the planet? I collect here the 20 most developed megalopolis by inhabitants number during '90s, according to general estimates. You will notice that a) most part of the 20 top world's city communities lie not in North America neither in Europe!; b) the metropolitan areas have on average twice as many inhabitants as the inner city has (6m vs. 12m); c) these 20 cities represent a total of 230.0 million people, about 10% of the world's cities population.
Probably a first half of population from those cities is crowding into the Internet and running the digital revolution, while a second half is excluded at all from the digital tools. They call it the 'Digital Divide'!
Million Inhabitants by Metropolitan Area about Y90.
22.2 MEXICO CITY, mx -> inner city 8.5m- 18.1 NEW YORK, us ->7.3m
- 15.2 SÃO PAULO, br ->10.1m
- 13.3 SHANGHAI, cn ->7.3m
- 13.2 MOSKVA, ru ->8.8m
- 12.6 BOMBAY/MUMBAI, in ->9.9m
- 11.9 TOKYO, jp ->8.2m
- 10.9 CALCUT, in ->4.4m
- 10.8 BEIJING, cn ->6.8m
- 10.8 BUENOS AIRES, us ->3.0m
- 10.6 SEOUL, kr ->?m
- 10.6 LAGOS, ng ->?m
- 10.2 RIO DE JANEIRO, br ->5.6m
- 9.1 PARIS, fr ->2.2m
- 8.9 LOS ANGELES, us ->3.5m
- 8.7 BANGKOK, th ->5.6m
- 8.4 NEW DELHI, in ->0.3m
- 8.3 JAKARTA, id ->7.8m
- 8.1 CAIRO, eg ->6.3m
- 8.1 CHICAGO, us ->2.8m
— The metropolitan area consists of a city and its adjacent suburbs. The people who live in a metropolitan area often think of it as a single city. Marketer sees the metropolitan area as an interesting market.
— Other European: Greater London, uk is 23rd at 7.0m; Berlin, de is 34th at 4.0m. Milan (3.8m) and Rome (3.2m) are the top Italian metropolitan areas.
— DMLR research from scores of sources. To get the ultimate figures see the online service of world's population statistics supplied by United Nations. {www.un.org.
The United Nations foresee that in 15 years 27 megalopolis will be counted all over the world, cities with more than 10m inhabitants. 18 of them in Asia and no one in Europe. With barely 29m will Tokyo be the greatest megalopolis before Bombay (27m), Lagos (24m) and Shanghai (23m).Who really cares for the globalization? I will answer with examples. The general global competitor profile implies group or business from a small country seeking to increase sales outside the domestic or continental market to grow and face the major competition from bigger countries/markets. Let speak a Dutch-based global competitor: "The world's population is becoming more international. Young adults in Munich are the same as in Stockholm and Shanghai. They are looking for common symbols to identify with" —explains Heineken's boss Karel Vuursteen on 'The Economist'. Heineken is probably the world's second-biggest brewer. {www.heineken.comOther global competitors speak to us every day from telly and press advertisement: "We make markets. Worldwide." {www.messefrankfurt.com"43 Millionen Menschen weltweit glauben an uns." {www.axa-colonia.de
"Learn globally. Study locally." {www.fletcher.tufts.edu
"The Internet can put you in touch with millions of customers around the globe. So, why do you feel so alone?" {www.fujitsu.com
"There are a lot of cities in Asia waiting for your business. But there's only one right way to connect with them. NTT communications." {www.ntt.com/world
Abraham Maslow developed a theory of the human motivation as illustrated by a model of the five needs priority. This model is represented by a pyramidal order from the basic needs (lower) to the less urgent ones (upper):_Self-actualization
____Estimate
_______Social
__________Security
_____________Physical [basic needs].
Despite the hierarchy of needs you may consider the succession of motives as a continuum from lower to higher level. For a marketer seeking to understand the prospects and clients, the motivational approach means every individual is simply different from another and the same product or service could be actually able to satisfy either simple needs or complex wants if sold at different place and time. In fact the individuals differ deeply each other according to where they are along the needs ladder at different stages of their own life —usually the living within satellite towns or the inner city or in 'bidonville' means different needs to be fulfilled!
Some management scientists are liking to set out "our lives are made of seven vital areas: health, family, financial, intellectual, social, professional, and spiritual" {D.E. Wetmore, www.balancetime.com. The men's purpose is to get a balance in their own life until all areas be equally well satisfied. This is another method to read the behavior of people instead of considering them as a blur consuming mass. If your product and service is sold to individuals then the marketing approach would benefit from information on the private personal life as first as from general demographics! This principle backs up the Relationship Marketing.
Actually the physical needs are the most surveyed by the mass marketing approach, because they are easily measurable. For example, each day the human body consumes on average 1.85 kg of water as liquid and 0.73 kg in food. So each day Mexico City population —see chart— consumes about 41.07 million kg of water and 16.21 million kg in food, that is yearly about 14 billion and 990.6 million kg of water and 5 billion and 915.2 million kg in food! You can divide this global weight of 'physical needs' by an average bottle or can of drink and by a packaged food in weight to know the potential demand for a single product family or category —or a single food service category like restaurants or supermarkets.
The 'upper' needs affect basically the men's mind not the body which is indeed real and high and wide etc.; if you have to measure the self-actualization the only way is to use a questionnaire and create a complex survey on the psychologic profile of any individual you are dealing with. And you should expect both hard work and high failure rate for learning to think like the customer. The first rule in direct marketing is just test, test, test. Nevertheless mass marketing methods have the limit to turn a complex consumer behavior into a general propensity to buy, useful for a foreseeable mass production. Not the sky but the knowledge is the limit!
Click on the colored '0' to read the article part 3 (blue) and 1 (green).
(OUTRO) "Why do you lie, foreigner?". Kublai Khan noticed all the cities Polo told him were seeming to resemble as though the passing from one to another shouldn't imply a journey but an exchange of elements only. Promptly Khan was going to browse on his atlas the maps of the cities which threaten from nightmares and curses: Enoch, Babylon, Yahoo, Butua, Brave New World... {From "The Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino.
Maybe you too, while surfing the Net, realize the differences are going to vanish and each city looks like all other cities, an out-and-out dust swarms into the continents. Cities akin to Dante's Inferno? Read on...