Giuseppe Stigliano: acknowledging marketing academic basics

A PhD in Marketing, an extensive professional experience in the field culminating with the current position as Global CEO at Spring Studios, Giuseppe Stigliano was our guest for a Disrupting Patterns talk. Here are some extracts of his conversation with Gaya Calabrò, Programme Leader Master in Luxury Brand Management and Master in Fashion Management.

Nowadays the job of a marketer is improperly conceived to be pushing what a company does (both products or services) onto the market, or in other words, promoting. On the contrary, marketing should be about the fine-tuning of supply and demand, through the ability of understanding what people want, need and desire to spot current or future problems that need to be solved. Promotion, following Philip Kotler’s pillar theory, is just one, of the 4 Ps of marketing, probably even the last one to be addressed, while the other 3 (Product, Price, and Place) need to be contemplated and are the starting point for a marketer.

The digital and virtual worlds posed a revolution for companies in the matter of customer journey. By first becoming phygital and then evolving to 3d (physical, digital, and virtual) the customer journey was disrupted by hundreds of new and unpredictable touchpoints for each step. Because of these evolutions in platforms and, consequently, customer journey infinite ramifications, both the multi-channel strategy (too fragmented for customers) and the omni-channel strategy (too resource-demanding in terms of budget and people for companies) are obsolete and inadequate.

Getting to the awareness that it is impossible to be everywhere and reach significant results anywhere, Giuseppe Stigliano and Philip Kotler theorized the Optichannel solution. Optichanneling means optimising one’s platform/worlds presence choices based on a thorough understanding of a multitude of significant variables with the aim of not losing the customers in between too many, not enough attended, channels. The company’s budget, its priorities and goals, the digital alphabetization of the customers combined with the digital maturity of the company, are all aspects to be analysed to realise an Optichannel strategy. As a result, data collection, awareness, and analysis skills are of indispensable value.