The role of electronic data processing

Many careful students of marketing see great possibilities in the rapid development of electronic data processing for a more scientific marketing. The use of electronic data processing equipment for such things as inventory control, billing, order filling, sales analysis and dealer auditing is no longer in the planning stages. It is already in practice in important segments of marketing in various areas of the country.
One of the deterrents as seen by some who have followed this development closely is the fact that, as with automation in the factory, automation in order processing, calculating and other data processing requires a large volume of operations and may have advanced too fast, too far. It still takes people to feed these machines and, with the almost incredible speed with which calculations can be made in the latest machines, an entire day's proceedings can be recorded in a matter of seconds. A whole year's operations might be, therefore, a matter of minutes or, at most, an hour or two on the data processing machines we already have. Their use, therefore, will be limited to large corporations whose vastly complicated transactions involve millions of calculations.
For other companies, such machinery might lie idle much of the time, thus making it uneconomical. Newer machines may have to be devised which are not as efficient as the current equipment in use, in order to slow down the scientific progress of automation in distribution and marketing.
But it is certain that the use of electronic data processing is destined to increase in marketing. Many operations now carried on manually will be done electrically, with greater speed and accuracy. Office procedures will be speed. Records, analyzes, and computations will be possible on a scale not now practical. To the extent that such data processing can be adapted to medium and small businesses, substantial reductions in the cost of operations will be possible.
The major marketing trends of the decade ahead are quite apparent. They call for substantial changes in marketing practices, thinking, and planning. Marketing experts predict that all business by the end of the next ten years will be customer-oriented as a matter of sheer survival. Marketing management will be engaged in long-range marketing programming in all types of businesses, large, medium and small.
Those who watch trends estimate that marketing faces four areas of extreme change in the next ten years:
(a)    New products will come from engineering and research and development laboratories at an ever-increasing rate.
(b)    There will be dramatic shifts in channels of distribution to meet equally dramatic shifts in population and consumer needs and wants.
(c)    There will be startling changes in competition, both domestic and foreign, which can have significant impact on wages, prices, and commodities.
(d)    Distribution costs will rise and profits will be squeezed unless marketing learns to automate much more than has heretofore seemed possible.
The next ten years, according to most experts, will be a decade of change. Time-tested marketing methods and programs will be severely challenged by rapidly growing innovation. The marketing of new and improved products will be based on greater knowledge of the market, better control of the activities involved, and tight control on costs.
The productivity and efficiency of our distribution system will require overhauling. And business thinking will have to accept the fact that there will be more people working at selling and servicing goods than at making them. Efficiency in selling and servicing will have to catch up with the efficiency at production if we are to have a continued forward march of the economy as a whole.