Tweet me cruel: Perspectives on battling digital marketing myopia1

In the marketing academy, and the marketing profession, we have collectively created a monster called 'digital marketing'. in doing so we have introduced a business focus that is represented in our thinking and professional activity as something separate and discrete from marketing itself. we have created a new marketing myopia - one that is narrowly driven by technology and technological devices. embarrassingly, we have been down such a blind alley before and yet again we return to the same territory - in the late 1990s we called it internet marketing and it then was re-christened electronic marketing before becoming digital marketing. there is one common aspect to all this misguided effort to be current and to signal that our subject discipline is relevant to today's digital world - the focus moves away from substantive marketing, (as defined by our customers' needs), to something myopic and 'trappings-related', (as defined by the technological innovation itself), and in the process marketing orientation is at risk of being lost. through a conceptual modelling approach this article explores the implications of digital technology for the marketing discipline generally and customer relationships in particular and asks that marketing returns to its roots in order to better integrate digital solutions into the customer value proposition more effectively.