This video explores the evolving landscape of marketing throughout history and introduces the concept of "quantum marketing," which aims to transform the existing approach by putting consumers' interests at the forefront. The speaker recalls personal experiences with marketing as a joyful experience and contrasts it to current intrusive practices. They highlight how the current marketing's bombardment of ads has contributed to its negative reputation and stress the need for a paradigm shift.

In this upcoming era of quantum marketing, the emphasis will be on genuinely understanding consumer needs, leveraging data and analytics for more relevant and personalized messaging, and ensuring consumer privacy. This transformation will challenge traditional marketing norms and introduce new practices deeply rooted in consumer trust and respect. Key technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence and multisensory marketing, are expected to play a significant role in this shift.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. interchangeable [ˌɪntərˈtʃeɪndʒəbl] - (adjective) - Capable of being used in place of each other. - Synonyms: (substitutable, equivalent, fungible)

For us, in our Indian vocabulary, the words marketing and shopping were quite interchangeable.

2. bombarded [bɔmˈbɑrdəd] - (verb) - To attack persistently or insistently. - Synonyms: (besieged, overwhelmed, inundated)

Today, on an average, we are bombarded with 5,000 commercial messages every single day.

3. intrusive [ɪnˈtruːsɪv] - (adjective) - Causing disruption or annoyance through being unwelcome or uninvited. - Synonyms: (interfering, invasive, obtrusive)

Advertisements, it's impossible to process them on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is very intrusive.

4. paradigm [ˈpærəˌdaɪm] - (noun) - A model or pattern for something that may be copied. - Synonyms: (model, standard, archetype)

It's a totally new paradigm.

5. utopian [juːˈtoʊpiən] - (adjective) - Modeled on or aiming for a state in which everything is perfect, idealistic. - Synonyms: (idealistic, visionary, fanciful)

Now you might say that sounds good, but it sounds utopian.

6. confluence [ˈkɒnfluːəns] - (noun) - An act or process of merging. - Synonyms: (junction, meeting, convergence)

The confluence of these technologies as they are happening today is going to dramatically alter our lives.

7. sacrosanct [ˈsækroʊˌsæŋkt] - (adjective) - Regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with. - Synonyms: (inviolable, sacred, untouchable)

The first tenet of quantum marketing is your privacy. Your privacy is sacrosanct.

8. multisensory [ˌmʌltiˈsɛnsəri] - (adjective) - Relating to or involving several of the senses. - Synonyms: (multi-perceptive, sensory-rich, multi-faceted)

The third tenet of quantum marketing is called multisensory marketing.

9. tenet [ˈtɛnɪt] - (noun) - A principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy. - Synonyms: (principle, belief, doctrine)

The first tenet of quantum marketing is your privacy.

10. profound [prəˈfaʊnd] - (adjective) - Very great or intense. - Synonyms: (deep, intense, extreme)

Marketing is supposed to be personal. It's supposed to be empathetic. It should be relevant, it should be inspiring, it should be joyful.

How quantum marketing will change our lives — For good - Raja Rajamannar - TEDxNashville

When I was a young boy growing up in India, my mom used to tell me often, let's go marketing. What she meant was, let's go to the local market. For us, in our Indian vocabulary, the words marketing and shopping were quite interchangeable. But that word marketing, it got etched onto my mind and I started associating it with the joy and excitement of buying new things, new tastes, free samples, and friendly shopkeepers.

It used to be such a joyful experience. Oh, my God, it was so fantastic. But today, if I were to ask you what you think about marketing, I don't think you'll feel quite the same way. And I can't blame you. Look at this. Today, on an average, we are bombarded with 5,000 commercial messages every single day. That's a relentless influx of information coming at us.

Advertisements, it's impossible to process them on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is very intrusive. Sometimes you feel like you're being tracked, and sometimes you feel creeped out, and that's not fun. Take this example. Somebody forwards me or forwards you a link to an article. You click on that link, you land on the landing page full of ads that you literally have to search for your article. And if by some mistake you touch some other part of the screen, you get shipped off into another website.

And if you try to exit something, firstly, the X is minuscule in size, that when you try to press the thing, you end up opening that as opposed to exiting it. It is these kind of practices, unfortunately, that have got a bad reputation for marketing, that it is a craft of deception, misleading manipulation, and so on.

And I can understand that as a consumer. For example, coming from India, I love Bollywood songs and videos and also animal videos. And I'm watching them. Not even five minutes into my watching that video, it abruptly stops and they show me an ad, a stupid ad that they don't care about. I'm not looking at the ad anymore. I'm looking at when the skip now button appears. The moment it appears, I click on it and I get taken back to my video.

But by then they have already destroyed my experience, if you think about it. And as if it is not bad enough, now they serve me two ads. The first ad, I can't even skip. I have to suffer the full 15 seconds, right? This is crazy. And if I don't want to be suffering that imposition of these stupid ads on Mike, I have to pay money. They say you can pay for ad free content. Frankly, this feels like blackmail to me.

You pay or else you are getting ads. I understand the economic realities of the advertising ecosystem and why they are charged for ad, free content and so on. But honestly, as a consumer, it just doesn't feel good. Now, I am a lifelong marketer, and as a lifelong marketer, I can tell you this is not what marketing is meant to be, nor what it truly aims to be.

And in the next few minutes, I'm going to talk to you about the next era of marketing that is dawning on us as we speak. It's called quantum marketing. What is quantum marketing? It's a completely different, radically different way of approaching marketing. It's a totally new paradigm. In this paradigm, consumer is genuinely and truly at the front and center.

Companies are smart about trying to understand what consumers need and want in a smart way. They know how to make the best offerings and messages to you that are most relevant to you and compelling to you. They know how to communicate with you in a transparent manner and in a winning manner. And they engage with you in a very effective fashion. Now you might say that sounds good, but it sounds utopian. You can't trust these marketers.

Now I can tell you this is what consumers around the world are demanding. If companies don't adapt to this new approach, they are going to go extinct. Quantum marketing challenges every established theory, principle, foundation and strategies of marketing of classical marketing. In other words, it is marketing totally reimagined. And this is going to be very exciting.

How does it do quantum marketing? Actually, what it does is it leverages into multiple areas, technology and innovation, it delves into data and analytics, it looks at various sciences like the science of color psychology and so on, and understands the economics and rephrases economics. But most importantly, it is grounded in humanity. It's very principled.

And this is what will be the North Star for quantum marketing. Now I'll tell you about my childhood once again. When I would go marketing with my mom, my most favorite product category was ice creams. Even now it is when he'd go to the ice cream shop. The shopkeeper knew my name, he knew my favorite flavor, pistachio. And he would treat me so well, so nicely. It was a beautiful, joyful experience, which even after so many years, I still fondly remember and cherish.

That's what marketing is meant to be. Whether from a tiny shop or a gigantic multinational company. Marketing is supposed to be personal. It's supposed to be empathetic. It should be relevant, it should be inspiring, it should be joyful. That is what quantum marketing is going to do. And we will Dive into that.

But before we jump into quantum marketing, we need to understand how marketing has evolved to where it is. Because in its evolution, marketing learns from its previous experiences and builds upon them. Builds upon them, makes some pivots, builds upon them and comes to where we are.

And that's what I'll walk you through. Now, you might be surprised to know that marketing is not a new craft. It's been around for a long time. 2000 years plus. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of marketing in the ruins of Pompeii. There were posters for political candidates that were extolling their virtues and asking people to vote for somebody and not the other person.

Obviously, life has not changed in these last 2,000 years. Right, we're exactly going through that now. Marketing evolved in four distinct paradigms. The first paradigm of marketing is all about product. You create a fantastic product, package it very attractively, price it very reasonably and make it available widely. Everyone will flock to that product and that will become the market leader.

Because at the end of the day, why will people go anywhere else with all this kind of a combination of benefits and features? After all, aren't people logical in their thinking and rational in their behavior? Marketers discovered very quickly there is something called psychology. People are irrational and illogical. Their decisions and choices are driven by emotions and feelings.

That was the dawn of the second paradigm of marketing, which is all about emotions. It's emotional marketing. If you create the right emotions and right feelings amongst people, you don't even have to talk about the product. And the product will become a market leader. And I have seen it time and again and again. It works.

That was the second paradigm of marketing, tapping into the emotions. The third paradigm of marketing happened during mid-1990s with the advent of the Internet. People suddenly started connecting through the Internet all times of the day. There is nothing called prime time. All the time is prime time. And that was the first time where marketers suddenly had the ability to connect with people one on one.

It was called one to one marketing. And it was during this phase that data analytics came in a big way into the world of marketing. Marketers discovered the power of data and started analyzing so that they don't have to spray and pray, but they can be precise in their targeting to see who are the specific individuals who are most appropriate for their product or service and market it to them and have an ability to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, which was fantastic.

And then this is what has led to what we call as digital marketing or data driven marketing. 2007, marketing got ushered into its fourth paradigm, there were two very powerful technologies that got launched. One was the smartphone and the other one was social media. Smartphones took our lives over. The first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, you look at your phone.

And throughout the day, on an average, people look at their phone 300 times. And the last thing that they do before sleeping, they have to look at their phone and say bye bye to the phone. And if they wake up in the middle of the night, God forbid they have to look at the phone so they know they are not missing out something when they are sleeping. That's how inalienable these smartphones became as a part of our life.

And to add fuel to the fire, you had social media people started connecting and interacting with each other. Folks that they either don't know at all or people they never kept in touch with since high school. They're coming out of the woodworks, connecting and sharing everything about themselves.

Your most recent holiday with all the fancy photos, desperately seeking attention and appreciation. Now, can marketers be far behind? Of course not. They jumped in as well. And this was the birth of mobile marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing. A whole bunch of new branches of marketing were born.

And life is interesting now. We are at the verge of the fifth paradigm of marketing, which is called quantum marketing. This is a big pivot in this era. Our lives are going to be disrupted by more than 24 different and powerful technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, Internet of things, wearables, the list goes on and on and on.

The confluence of these technologies as they are happening today is going to dramatically alter our lives. Let me make it simple and tangible. You wake up in the morning, you take your PNG toothbrush to brush your teeth. It's a connected toothbrush. It tells you exactly which part of the mouth you are ignoring.

Are you putting too much of pressure or are you rubbing your teeth off very badly? It'll also tell you when it is the right time to reorder the next brush head and all the data is gathered and kept somewhere. Then you step onto your Whiting's scale. It measures your weight, it measures your bmi, puts the data somewhere on the website.

You go to the Philips toilet, it does whatever analysis it does and puts the data in the cloud. All this is good for you, trust me, and I mean it, not as a joke. Marketing is going to move from being an intrusion in your lives to becoming your personal assistant. It will sense exactly when your needs are and what those needs are. And where those needs are and serves you effectively.

If you are like me, you won't believe it, but here is what I'll tell you. When so much of data is floating around already today, now, imagining all these devices, you've got your connected coffee maker, connected dishwasher, connected washing machine, connected stove, connected shower, everything is connected.

They're all gathering data. They will be gathering data, putting it somewhere. It's obvious that it's very unsettling and I can relate to it. A few years back, I went through a small surgery at a hospital. Four years after the surgery, I get an email from the hospital saying that, congratulations, your data has just been breached.

Your Social Security number, your date of birth, your age, your address, everything is now in the public. And don't worry, we'll give you a subscription for a credit monitoring service of $9.99 per month, which you have the privilege of monitoring yourself to see if you're in trouble. It's infuriating.

So I said, look, firstly, why did you have to collect that whole bunch of information about me or data about me to do the surgery? Okay? If you had to do it for whatever good reason you might have, why did you not purge the data after the procedure was done?

And lastly, if you don't know how to keep my data safe, you have no business to collect my data. Right? That's how you feel now quantum marketing is going to change that. The procedures and the methodologies and the techniques have started advancing so rapidly that you don't need personally identifiable information anymore to do targeted marketing. That's a huge breakthrough.

What data sliver about your life is required, very precise to that particular context and that particular need is the only thing looked at without linking it back to you as a personally identifiable individual. That's very powerful. The first tenet of quantum marketing is your privacy. Your privacy is sacrosanct. Your privacy cannot be compromised.

And what happens in this is data security is vital and your privacy is sacrosanct. And companies would not have any choice but to follow these. And the great thing is the technological breakthroughs, the data analytic breakthroughs are going to enable this. It's already happening. It's not five, 10 years down the line. It is happening as we speak.

This is the first and fundamental tenet of quantum marketing. There are lots of tenets of quantum marketing. I'm just going to focus on four in the interest of time. The second tenet is interesting. It's about consumer economics. And what I mean by this is, you know, I told you we are bombarded by 5,000 messages every single day.

That's only half of the story. The other half of the story is that your span of attention is shrinking by the ear. Today, the average span of human attention is less than 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish. And that is true. I don't know how they measured it, but it is true.

So you have this narrow window of attention through which 5,000 ads are trying to get through. Each time an advertisement is served to you, the brand behind that advertisement pays the media company. Today, going forward, that's going to change. You will get the economic benefit as well. So the money that is paid, a part of it will come to you. It's beginning to happen.

In some select sites, in some select places already. You will have the right to give the permission of whether you want ads or not, what kind of ads you want, how often do you want to see ads, and how much you will get paid for it. It's going to be a fascinating change in how the entire ecosystem works. And this is already beginning to happen. As I said, there's a second paradigm, the third, the second tenet.

The third tenet of quantum marketing is called multisensory marketing. So far, the vast majority of the companies have advertising led marketing strategies, but going forward, that's going to pivot to experiences led marketing strategies. What it means is you will be put as a consumer in immersive situations like a musical concert or a conference of these sorts, or you'll be at a sporting event or in a restaurant, in a hotel.

Call it whatever. You will have an immersive experience that will be curated and created by brands at scale, wherein they tap into all your five senses to create the right feeling and emotion, which then subtly gets associated to the brand which is facilitating it. They don't have to talk about the product or the service. Still, you'll fall in love with the brand. That's going to be a significant pivot.

The last tenet I want to talk about, which is the most foundational, fundamental and most important tenet of quantum marketing, is brand trust. So far, it is actually your attention which is treated by marketers as the currency for which they're willing to pay money. Going forward, it's going to be your trust in that brand. You might be fascinated that 85% of the people who buy brands and use them don't trust the brands.

Those very brands, they don't trust them, which is pretty fascinating. And what that means is when another brand comes along, you as a Consumer won't think a second before you switch the brand and go to the other brand. Yet ironically, marketers around the world are spending more than a trillion dollars annually to win your loyalty and run loyalty programs. Obviously, it's not working. That's going to change. They will start fighting to earn your trust.

And how did they do it? We already talked about privacy and data security, which is very crucial. There is going to be a lot of transparency, which is again very, very important in trust building. But the most important aspect here is doing social good. 80% of the people in the world expect brands to not simply peddle their products and shove advertisements at your face.

They want brands to do social good. Now, companies cannot do it only for political correctness or for opportunistic situations, or for their CEOs to make speeches at conferences. This is going to be something which will come from a true sense of purpose, consistent and committed over the long term.

And I'll tell you a beautiful example from a payment solutions company. When the war in Ukraine happened, unfortunately it led to the largest human migration in Europe since World War II. More than 10 million Ukrainians fled and a vast majority of them had gone into Poland. Poland was welcoming them, but when this mass influx of refugees was happening, it was totally breaking down the Polish infrastructure.

And these people who are coming, what do they do? And they just don't know how to settle. It's all chaotic. So this company had come up with a beautiful solution. It is a simple app called where to Settle. It's powered by artificial intelligence. It has got a ton of data analytics, both from its proprietary data, public data, government data, everything.

And it asks a few non personally identifiable questions like what's your qualification, what's your work experience, what kind of work are you looking at, how many children, what family situation you have, et cetera. Based on that, it will scan the market instantly and tell them, say that hey, there is one job in Krakow, there are two jobs in Poznan that you can actually apply for because they are most suited for your background.

This is the approximate salary that you can expect. This is the cost of living there, this is the quality of living and this is the kind of schooling and so on. One out of five Ukrainians who settled in Poland have settled through this app and that's huge. So much so that the government of Poland adopted it as their own app.

And this is making true and lasting difference in people's lives. Now, the company I'm talking about has nothing to do with all these migrations, human migrations and resettling them. The businesses are completely different. But what that company got in return was incredible amount of trust and brand love, which in turn opened doors for a whole bunch of other opportunities.

This is how you do quantum marketing. You pursue passionately your purpose. Profits will eventually follow. Normally, you don't think like this in traditional marketing, you do it in quantum marketing. So welcome to the era of quantum marketing. It's really going to be good for all of us. So let's go marketing.

MARKETING, QUANTUM MARKETING, TECHNOLOGY, INSPIRATION, INNOVATION, CONSUMER-CENTRIC, TEDX TALKS