Surviving the Customer

The last decade has born witness to rapid and sweeping changes in the marketer-consumer relationship. Marketers have gained entirely new advertising and marketing platforms, but consumers have simultaneously gained an unprecedented degree of empowerment in marketing relationships, beginning in the dot-com era and culminating in the present social media era. The science of game theory, which is used to analyze mutually dependent conflicts, has particular relevance to this changing landscape, because its focus on conditions for cooperation and defection aptly describe the choices available to marketers and consumers in social media marketing. My evolutionary – as opposed to revolutionary – view of social media marketing holds that the marketer-consumer relationship can evolve toward mutual cooperation, and that an examination of digital marketing’s evolution will yield clues as to the conditions necessary for the success of social media marketing.