Experience the Future today

Last week I presented at the Marketing Association Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (MARUG) where around 350 students and 100 businesses where attending. The topic was about customer insights and analytics. I started with showing a youtube around what todays already is possible with available CRM data and sales data and some standard algorithms using Watson. A first view of marketing insights as a service.  The lack of good analytical marketing skills drives companies like IBM to develop these kind of services.

The move towards customer, consumer or shopper understanding in much more detail is something marketers and predictions has been talking about for many years. The digital footprint we leave behind give marketers insights and contribute towards a 360° view of the client. In first instance we focus on a B2C environment but it is also possible for B2B2C and B2B route to market. Today we analyse data using psycholinguistic and visual analytics. The psycholinguistic analytics based on interpretation what has been said on social media give a profile of a person based on 4 dimensions. The social behavior, the personality based on OCEAN (openness, consciousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism [O’Brien ’96, Neuman ’99, Gosling ’03, Wholan’06), the Needs 12 dimensions (Aaker 1995, Maslow 1943, Fords 2005), and base values of the person. These personal intrinsic traits create a unique digital personality. Another trend is that millennials use less text and more visuals to communicate. Through analytics of those picture (pure the visuals) we are now able to identify brands and surroundings (beach, sports...etc) which also provides input to build a digital profile.  Combining the two would provide great capabilities for marketers to create personalized or hyper personalized propositions. This all fits still to the paradigm we already concluded in our CMO study in 2011. Understand your customer as an individual.

Now with knowing your customer as an individual and using science Analytics or an Analytical service,  there is still the challenge for marketers to develop an attractive intelligent customer journey that provides maximum value at every touch point. That was paradigm 2 in the CMO study.  Digital has a lot of impact on the channels to engage with brands. These digital channels will increase and it is the marketer who needs to incorporate those in an intelligent way. As marketer you need to show that you have a clear understanding of all the journeys your customers can take and make logical connections between the different phases, steps and channels. If a car manufacturer envisions that in the near future he is unable to bring every model to the dealer showroom what point solution they should add to the customer journey. In this case it is not driven by the customer but also from the car manufacturer from cost perspective.  With a Customer Experience LAB you can start envisioning what future customer experience would be possible to give the customer a "near" real experience of the car he is planning to buy. The look, the color, the sounds, the feeling of the seats, the speed and acceleration, how does the car think...what intelligence is included...
This opens opportunities for augmented reality or using large screens, oculus rift. Now we are almost back to the game development and virtual reality to develop the near future showroom of the car manufacturer.  This virtual reality experience is my bridge towards the next paradigm.

 The 3rd paradigm: design your culture and brand so they authentically one. Due to communication today all companies become more transparent. Like we expect our clients to be transparent so the brand has to be transparent. There is no longer a strong internal and external separation in the way a brand communicates. The employees, customer care departments, sales, marketing etc...all communicate with customers and all communicate towards the outside world and in such way also represent the brand. As marketers we always were responsible to protect the brand promise. How to do this in the digital world of today. Like in the previous paradigm the brand will be experienced through every touch point. Therefore you have to start with defining the brand character which is build up based on does it sound, feels, looks (reads), tastes and thinks like "your brandX" ...........when you are operating at your best. When you do a quick scan you probably already know a couple of gaps between the touch points with your customer journey and how you should operate at your best to meet your defined brand character.  And now we are back full circle as through social listening you can understand what the sentiments are around your brand and understand the gaps and take actions to close those. I help customers to design the brand and the journeys based on analyzing their customers, consumer or shopper. Envision the digital possibilities in the near future and incorporate those in the overall experience. The questions is is your marketing department ready for all these changes or do you need some help to transform towards the new marketing organization and what idea do you ahve of that organization? What are the skills needed, which processes need to be revisited, which technologies you use, how to structure your organization including digital, how will you be measured...how does the marketing operating model of 2020 look like for your organization.....if you have an idea...let me know or lets start a conversation.
@B2C2D