Marketing in a New World

13 October 2009. What these companies are doing better than their competitors and how enterprises will design their marketing in the future is the object of a survey of more than 200 managers entitled Marketing in a New Worldconducted by the Institute for Marketing (IfM-HSG) of the University of St.Gallen (HSG). The study will be presented on 16 October in the context of the 2009 St.Galler Marketing Fachdialog conference.

More than 200 managers surveyed
For the purposes of this study, more than 200 managers were surveyed in mid-2009 for the fourth time in a row. Besides the tried-and-tested statistically underpinned data, the new edition of the study for the first time also provides a long-term analysis that includes a comparison with the 2001 recession and the 2006 boom.

Almost 50 percent of the industries shrinking
About 46 percent of the managers that were interviewed indicate that their industries are shrinking; in 14 percent of the cases, the industry has even shrunk by more than 30 percent, as the matrix in the appendix reveals. In 64.7 percent of cases, corporate growth is in line with the growth of the industry. This is where the general trends of the industry also affect most suppliers. Only 5.5 percent of enterprises are growing more slowly than the industry, whereas 29.8 percent of the firms are growing more strongly than the industry.

New media play a particular role
“We explored how in spite of similar framework conditions, successful companies manage to attain their objectives better than the average,” says Dr. Christian Schmitz, Head of the Business-to-Business Competence Center at the IfM-HSG. The study also reveals a trend towards the utilization of new media such as viral marketing and the interactive Web 2.0, where the multiplication of marketing activities in so-called “customer communities” plays a particular role.