As I was reading the sad news about the 150 job losses at the UAE operations of an international bank, I was distracted by an incoming call from a seemingly legitimate Dubai-registered landline.

Upon answering, I was confronted by an automated sales message from a local UAE bank asking me to activate a credit card which was sent to me without me having even requested it in the first place.

Have robots already taken over? Are the two seemingly unrelated incidents of job losses and the cold call somehow parts of a new world order? Have marketers lost the plot?

Or is it shareholder pressure that has effectively ushered us into a world where marketing services and products will be done by microchips and software just to save on costs? Do consumers even have a choice?

Speaking at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul a few years ago, Thomas Frey from ‘The Futurist’ had predicted that over 2 billion jobs will have disappeared by 2030. Sectors that will be particularly hard hit include power, automobile transportation and education, as well as industries vulnerable to replacement by 3D printers — manufacturing — and the next generations of robots, e.g. mining.

Over time these sectors could see hundreds of thousands of jobs disappearing — however, at the same time these changes will create new kinds of jobs.

With 68 per cent of all purchases unplanned, 70 per cent of brand choices made in-store, and only 5 per cent of shoppers loyal to a particular brand within any particular category, brands and retailers have the affordable technologies at hand that can help them treat people as active shoppers, rather than passive consumers.

However, it seems that the opposite is true. Instead of leveraging the advantages of new technology to emotionally engage with consumers, brands choose to dehumanise the very essence of life — simple, old-fashioned human-to-human communication.

Call centres are just another example that put barriers between consumers and brands. How many times have I hang up after waiting on endless virtual queues trying to obtain a simple piece of information? And how many more times will I have to do the same? Is that what brands want?

The challenge for marketers is to learn how to use new technology to emotionally engage with consumers and not alienate them, which unfortunately seems to becoming some sort of a trend.

Brands need to proactively and urgently address the emerging information consumption habits by adapting their marketing tactics to the new media landscape and consumers’ surfacing needs. And do not expect this to happen in reverse order.

Sophisticated and discerning consumers — the very people brands want to target due to their high net worth — will always be more likely to snub a brand and turn their backs once they feel cheated or unhappy about the ways the brand chose to deploy in order to approach them.

With all the hype surrounding ‘Big Data’, marketers seem to think that once they manage to mine and harvest their databases, their job is done. According to research, 91 per cent of senior corporate marketers believe successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions.

But as data reveals more details about the path to purchase for individuals or groups of consumers, the real dilemma emerges. Do you develop a number of different bespoke strategies and tactics to tap into the full potential presented by the findings of Big Data analytics?

Or do you resort to more generic and cost-effective solutions that can generally be made available through technological innovations?

Grappling with having to answer this question, most marketers choose the latter option as the lesser of two evils, not due to lack of experience or blurred judgement on their part but mainly due to the CFO’s spreadsheet.

Consumers today want to engage. Receiving cold calls in the middle of your working day from a machine is not my definition of engagement. And the sooner marketers stomp their boots on the ground in defiance of their CFO’s direction, the more appealing and successful their brands will be.

The writer is Head of PR and Social Media at Al-Futtaim and author of Back to the ‘Future of Marketing — PRovolve or Perish’.