The market doesn’t only reveal itself to us on a macro level. The digitalization of media has led to the production of a enormous amount of data. And in this data lies the advanced marketer’s treasure in the form of consumer response patterns. These micro patterns give us insight into a number of key factors which we must use for designing our marketing process.

How a given individual or a group of individuals in a social network responds to a marketing execution is a result of a vast number of factors. Many of which we still don’t properly understand. But what we do know is that the following factors play a dominant role:

• Product: Is the product relevant to the consumer?
• Price: What is the customer’s perceived cost?
• Positioning: How is the brand that represents the product position, and is the position attractive for the consumer?
• Message: How are the position and the product communicated?
• Method: Which method is applied in order to integrate the message into the media. e.g blogs, SEM, viral?
• Media: MediaCenter, Internet, Mobile, Game etc.

Each of the above factors can be combined with classical customer segmentation data, as well as time, geography and other parameters that the digital media is designed to provide. One of the most important aspects of new-school marketers is their ability to analyze data and identify consumer response patterns. This will give the marketer the opportunity to constant update and improving the marketing process. In an online marketing context, this model can be taken to an extreme by integrating the analysis with an automated response system thereby creating algorithmic marketing. In the algorithmic marketing setup, the choice of message, method and media is constantly switching, depending upon which combination gives the best effect.

But even for simple marketing tasks, where this sort of “algorithmic marketing” would be out of the question, the ability to identify and analyze the micro patterns in the market, and respond to them, accordingly marks the difference between success and failure in the new millennium.