Effects of industry 4.0 on automobile marketing strategiesa research among auto executives in Turkey

The world is at the edge of the much expected digital transformation orchestrated by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In recent years, the industry has been going through a process that involves fully digitizing production processes, especially the automotive manufacturing industry. Intelligent production technologies such as autonomous robots, laser cutting, 3D printers, as well as new technologies such as big data, cloud data, augmented reality (AR) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have entered our lives with the Industry 4.0 revolution. To face the increasing complexity and greater flexibility in production processes in the mar-kets, it is necessary to pay more attention to customers. Recent literature shows that Industry 4.0 allow manufacturing firms to achieve such results quickly customized products and time to market response with higher efficiency and productivity rates. The concept of Industry 4.0 appears for the first time in Germany in 2011 as a concept that has been studied in economic policies. It can be considered as a strategy related to high technology and internet systems. The potential revolution called "4.0" is followed by the footsteps of the three previous industrial revolutions. The concept of Industry 4.0 can be explained as the industrial revolution based on cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT) and therefore concepts and technologies that support communication over the internet or involve continuous internet communication. This revolution means data exchange and unlimited interaction not only between consumer and consumer (C2C) but also between consumer and machine (C2M) or between machine and machine (M2M). Industry 4.0 describes the widespread integration of information and communication tech-nology in industrial manufacturing. However, it is not enough to address the developments associ-ated with the fourth industrial revolution from just a technological perspective, companies also need to transform their organization and their marketing strategy and their culture as well. While ad-vanced technologies do make it possible to access a much wider range of data, the ability to lever-age the underlying potential of this data is just as dependent on a company's organizational struc-ture and culture. From this point of view, the ultimate goals of companies are to adapt to a changing environment continuously and quickly and to increase their learning skills. In the future, cars, road signs, traffic lights, car parks and other types of transport infrastruc-ture will use sensors and processors to automatically collect, analyze, process and share data. Vehi-cles will themselves become nodes on the web (smart cars), enabling intelligent traffic flow man-agement (smart traffic). This process will be driven by especially Internet of Things (IoT) and big data management. A company's main goal should focus on understanding and fulfilling its customers' needs. This is one of the main topics of Marketing Management. As always repeated, the marketing de-partment plays a critical role in actively guiding customers to the purchase decision. By integrating individual purchasing processes into digital purchasing processes, adding value to the customer and creating customer loyalty from an early stage and placing the customer in the center of the company. This study focuses on marketing strategies in the adaptation of Industry 4.0 technologies. Industry 4.0 is an industrial revolution that occurs at the factory level and changes the way products are produced, but it is also a digital revolution. Marketing plays a crucial role in providing feedback to the production function. Therefore, it can be emphasized once again that firms should pay more attention to their marketing strategy. As briefly, marketing is additionally developing similar to new digital technology referred to as industry 4.0. To support the new digital challenges, to form cost reduction and to extend market growth, majorities of the firms are getting to change their marketing strategy alongside industry 4.0. So, it requires a next generation of marketing and sales for the organization. Industry 4.0 can be considered as market-oriented technologies that help companies improve the standard of relation-ship with buyers, as well as reduce production costs, reduce cost in terms of marketing and sales, and increase market growth with flexibility. The hypotheses of the dissertation are related to this subject. In summary of the above explanations, this study analyzes the relationships between Indus-try 4.0 and the automobile marketing strategy. In this analysis, determinants are organized with the help of technological, organizational and environmental research model. Six indicators have been investigated and examples of auto companies were investigated in Turkey.