Marketing 0

PART III
New Strategies for Tech-
Empowered Marketing

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CHAPTER 5
The Digital-Ready Organization: One
Strategy Doesn't Fit All
In the 1950s, a group of scientists experimented on monkeys on
Kojima island. The scientists regularly dropped sweet potatoes on
the beach sand for the monkeys to eat. One day, a young monkey
named Imo learned that the potatoes would taste better if she
washed them first. Imo began teaching her close friends and older
family members about the new food hygiene habit. The change
started slowly. But finally, when the majority of monkeys adopted
the practice, the rest began to accept it as the new norm. The
phenomenon is known as the hundredth-monkey effect, which refers
to the required critical mass for a behavioral change to happen.
Similarly, younger generations are the ones leading the way when it
comes to digital transformation. Generation Y and Generation Z
combined are the biggest consumer market in history. Businesses are
aligning their strategies to the preferences of these generations. And
they are also the biggest in the workforce and are influencing
companies from within. Thus, they have a tremendous impact on
bringing digital technologies into the mainstream. But for the digital
lifestyle to be the new norm, the change must be massive and evenly
spread across generations and social-economic status.
The digitalization process happens fairly quickly around the world.
On the one hand, everyone seems to embrace the digital lifestyle and
cannot imagine living without it. And yet, the inertia still exists.
Many customers are still accustomed to the traditional ways of
buying and enjoying products and services. Equally, businesses have
been procrastinating when it comes to digital transformation—the
prerequisite for Marketing 5.0. The COVID-19 pandemic, however,
has changed all that and opened everyone's mind on the need to go
digital.

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