# A Better Integration of Industrial Robots in Romanian Enterprises and the Labour Market
## 2 Recent Evolutions in the Robotics Market
### The Added Value of Robotics: A Marketing Perspective for Increasing Competitiveness  
In recent years, literature attempts have focused on determining how robots may increase businesses' competitiveness, particularly highlighting the importance of facilitating SMB adoption of labor automation and augmentation through the deployment of robotic applications. From a marketing perspective, robotics adoption calls for redefin  
Figure 3: Correlation between average percentage change in employment by country and percentage change in the use of industrial robots during the period 2012–2019. Source: [PERSON] and [PERSON]. [PERSON] (2021), “What happened to jobs at high risk of automation?” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 255, OECD Publishing, [[https://doi.org/10.1787/10](https://doi.org/10.1787/10) bc97f4-en]([https://doi.org/10.1787/10](https://doi.org/10.1787/10) bc97f4-en), accessed on 21 February 2022.  
ing the marketing mix of businesses, by influencing the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. Through a product marketing lens, the scopes of goods and services are viewed by the means through which they succeed in meeting customer demand and not necessarily as tangible assets. Robotic applications are reshaping the way in which products are being manufactured, by partially or totally substituting the human labor, while also allowing for better quality control and standardized production. The substitution of human labor includes using collaborative robots for automating repetitive tasks, such as goods' quality inspections, welding, painting, packaging, or even creating assembly line systems comprised of multiple industrial robot arms, which manage the entire manufacturing processes of large goods, without the need for employing multiple workers. Likewise, the specialized literature has shown that for various industries, the fast growth of human labor costs and the dynamism of market shares means that robot substitution brings significant cost advantages throughout the whole life cycle of robotic assets. However, these cost advantages resulting from robot adoption may be observed to different degrees and are based on various factor analyses, depending on the business specifics. A case study, for the case of the automobile industry, noted that industrial robotic work substitution allows for \"continuous heterogeneous resource investment\" [29], while for the hospitality and tourism industry, service robotic work substitution minimizes operational costs and allows for enhanced customer experiences, simultaneously reducing waiting times and contributing to the improvement of service consistency [30]. Moreover, subscription-based robotic applications, such as the recently developed Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) technology comprised of a robotic device leasing model and the cloud computing solution designed to facilitate human-robotic collaboration, allow businesses to benefit from robotic applications at a much more affordable cost of deployment, while also providing the needed interfaces for various functions, including data collection and sharing options, communication control, state maneuvering, or robotic cooperation. The observed cost reduction achieved through robotic work substitution and increase in production flexibility finally mean that companies can ensure a method through which they can offer standardized goods and services, offering the demanded mix of features, quality, and usability, at more affordable prices, while also allowing companies to cover a greater market share in a much shorter period, compared to traditional labor. When it comes to the place component of the marketing mix, robotic applications are consolidating the logistics and transportation value chains through technologies that allow for autonomous driving and control of vehicles and machinery.