Marketing? It is not a sales technique, but a knowledge technology

Social media, finance, politics, advertising... the menu of research areas in the Bocconi Department of Marketing is extremely varied and ramified, reflecting the breadth and pervasiveness of the discipline. It may also be for this reason that since it has existed as an independent field of inquiry, marketing has been one of the most popular subjects for students and graduates to start their careers in companies. Paradoxically, this was not the case for Gaia Rubera, Professor of Marketing and now Director of the Department, as well as holder of the Amplifon Chair in Customer Science. "For me it was not love at first sight", says the teacher. "As a student I liked organization, the passion for marketing struck me later, during my PhD in Management and especially during the years spent in the US. In Europe, still in the 2000s, the subject was still considered more qualitative than quantitative and this devalued the perception of its status; in America it was exactly the opposite, it was a field of study with very practical applications for the life of companies and consumers and had a theoretical part which still needed to be written".

These are the years in which social media is already growing, not surprisingly the first terrain of her studies. How have studies in this area evolved?
Compared to when I started, the aspect that has progressed the most is the ability to collect data from sources other than social media. In addition to numerical data, today we are able to acquire text, analyze data from images and even audio. From a theoretical point of view, we have begun to ask ourselves new questions about consumer behavior and their relationship with brands.

In this regard, an ad hoc chair has recently been created at Bocconi, the Amplifon Chair in Customer Science.
Customer Science is a discipline that aims to understand the consumer by photographing him/ger throughout the customer journey, from the first moment s/he comes into contact with the company until the completion of the journey which does not end with the purchase, but with product satisfaction and repurchase. How you move the consumer along this itinerary, how to keep him/her engaged, how to personalize the dialogue with him/her..

Do you need to be a technology expert if you want to study marketing today?
Yes, in order to know what you can ask from technology, you need to know how it works. In the case of audio data, for example, for a long time we didn't know what to do with it, but now we have neural network models that allow us to interrogate and analyze them to extract emotional aspects related to the customer-company relationship.

What are the frontiers of marketing today, the areas in which research still has everything to discover?
Apart from the topic of image and audio data, a new topic is certainly that of NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens. Seen from a marketing point of view, NFTs are elements that allows one to demonstrate one's status in a digital environment. If in real life we wear certain brands, when we have an avatar we will want to equip them with the same NFT clothes. It is not very different from what happens with our profile on social networks, we choose it, we take care of it, we modify it to give users a first-impression image of us. NFTs will be an evolution of all this and for companies it will be a very important market. Another topic in which we have invested at the Department is the Marketing/Finance interface, or rather how companies market themselves to the stock market, how they communicate with analysts and investors. It is an area of research that promotes the new idea that marketing is not only directed to consumers but also to investors. Always along the same lines, another area that is emerging is that of Political Marketing, that is to say studying parties and politicians with the same theoretical schemes with which we study brands. Marketing is increasingly expanding its boundaries, involving all aspects of individual life.

Are there still great marketing schools outside universities? Once upon a time, working at P&G was equivalent to taking a Master's degree...
Big tech companies are a privileged observatory on consumption, because they have a vast trove of data at their disposal. Two years ago, for example, LVMH entered into an agreement with Google to cede some of its data; in that moment Google potentially became a major fashion player. And the same happens in many other areas, because these companies have databases that allow them to know more than anyone even about their own markets.

However, there are still elements of imponderability, unpredictable dynamics that drive consumer behavior. Is this why predictive marketing was born?
I'll answer with an example: a few years ago, there was a Dutch startup that proposed an algorithm which, by acquiring data on song sales from Spotify, was able to predict whether a new song would be successful or not. The result of the first tests gave out a different outcome: the algorithm was able to identify (in 93% of cases) the songs that turned out not to be successful, while it proved to be unreliable in predicting which ones would be hits. This happens because machine learning is always built on the experience of the past while people's tastes change with changes in culture, sensitivities and history. Predictive analytics is a very interesting marketing activity, but there is nothing predictive about it as we normally understand the term. It is not possible to predict the future of consumer behavior because people are not robots. Is it a limit? Maybe, but it's also what makes our research more challenging and interesting.

With all these elements, it is easy to imagine that marketing classrooms are really busy today. Is the appeal of discipline always strong for young people?
Yes, when marketing manages to talk about important issues for society, it always attracts great interest. I see a lot of attention, for example, when we talk about disinformation in the classroom or about how with social bots it is possible to influence people's opinions or which kind of messages can increase vaccination rates. Today's 20-year-olds are not attracted by marketing as a tool to help a company sell more or better, but rather as a discipline that can shed light on some important social issues. Marketing embraces a wider scope than is usually thought because it is not a sales technique, but a knowledge technology.


SHORT BIO
A Bocconi Graduate in Business Administration, Gaia Rubera is Professor of Marketing, Director of the University's Marketing Department and holder of the Amplifon Chair in Customer Science. Her research in this area began during her PhD in Business Administration and Management, spent partly at the University of Southern California and then at Michigan State. "I had to spend a semester in the United States, I ended up staying there six years," recalls the professor. "At that stage, I started getting interested in social media. I had a Facebook profile but my students were all on Twitter, which had just started. To follow them, I started studying social media and I liked it to the point that I looked for a research idea that could include its use and attendance. The beauty of marketing lies precisely in this aspect, it is a discipline that still allows one to transform one's passions into the subject of study".