This week I’m at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2014. The opening ceremony was fairly lackluster, and offers of back stages passes to the Bare Naked Ladies (a Canadian rock band) was met with lukewarm response from the audience of hard-nosed retailers, marketeers, and technology professionals. Jay Baer did a great job as Master of Ceremonies, and I’ll point out here that he also gave the titled keynote covering marketing technology. In real-life he runs a marketing advisory firm. The other highlight of the opening session was Kenichi Ebina, an overly dexterous performer, who had the audience pulling out smart-phones.
The key take-away for me was the announcement, by Robert Le Blanc, of IBM ExperienceOne,
So on the the Marketing and Merchandising Keynote,
Marketing is all about engagement, it does not come cheap or easy.
Jay said that to drive meaningful engagement you need utility (Youtilitiy), and what is Youtilitiy,
- It’s useful and interesting engagement
- People would pay for your content
- Customers would pay for the communication
- This is not communication that people simply tolerate
- The bar has been raised.
- Your message needs to be not just interesting but intriguing
Scrabble took vans carrying portable wifi stations around Paris to places where people wanted wifi access. To get access you challenge yourself to a game of “mini-scrabble”, and if you get the word correct, it becomes your wifi password. The more correct words, the longer you airtime.
TweetPee example:
Huggies Brazil was testing TweetPee last year, the advert features a baby peeing with a voiceover:
- nice and warm, but not crying
- mommy comes to the rescue
- baby has Tweet Pee (Huggues)
- tracks diaper stock
- no unnecessary changes
- save money / more toys for baby
- exists in Brazil
Go beyond authenticity, but be truly meaningful.
A university and an ad agency built the first-ever billboard to capture air humidity and turn it into potable drinking water in Lima, the second largest desert capital in the world. The University of Engineering and Technology of Peru and an ad agency called Mayo DraftFCBand created the structure for the residents who are forced to draw polluted water from wells.
Peru gets less than two inches of rain a year and has an atmospheric humidity of about 98 percent. The billboard system uses reverse osmosis, a water purifying process, and then stores the water in tanks that hold 20 liters each. The water is dispensed at the bottom of the structure, which has provided 9,450 liters in three months, according to the school. This is enough to provide water to 1000’s of families each month.
Next up was Kevin Bishop – IBM VP of EMM. He was exciting about how visceral marketing can be, and reminded us of the need for systems to help transmit and capture “Moments that Matter”.
- IBM does qualitative and quantitate research
- The nature of marketing is changing, in 2014 it is about knowing each customer in context, whereas in 2012 it was about understanding each customer as an individual. Marketing has always been about knowing the customer – it’s the degree that is changing.
Previously many companies would place their product or service at the center of everything they do, now marketing is about placing the customer at the center.
- merchandising :: right product – right time – right place – right price.
- who are the most important customs and what are the most important moments
- Understand -> Engage -> Optimize
- Marketing -> Merchandising -> Sales -> Customer Service
(See IBM circle chart)
Continuous customer engagement is challenging, but rewarding
Limited insight of customer behavior across touch points
Siloed systems and processes
There is a significant lack of skills in quantitate and analytical skills in marketing.
There is a shortage of data scientists, particularly those that are able to talk to marketing directors.
After marketeers have all this new data, and the right tools to act on it, they will want to push out messages to their audience. There is a fine line to balance and get this right:
- relevance vs context vs creepiness
Messaging needs to be relevant, and in the right context, but should not come across as creepy. An example of missing this would be an airline that offers an upgrade on a flight that has just been cancelled.
There was a panel discussion and some highlights include:
- “multi-channel attribution is voodoo – you can’t get the emotional engagement” – Boots
- “attributions is more art than science”
- “we still have paper in the marketing mix, but it’s used in conjunction with other channels.”
- “word of month is number one assess – leveraging passion of fans”
Afterwards we where reminded of IBM ExperienceOne and that it’s an integration of
- Unica
- Tealeaf
- Silverpor
- CoreMetrics
- Xtify
IBM helps you attract, delight and measure the lifetime value of customers
—
IBM has proven solution patterns for business outcomes
- Ignite and Grow Customer Relationships
- Understand Your Customers
- Curate Meaningful Customer Interactions
- Convert Digital PRospects To Loyal Customers
- Deliver Empowering Digital Experiences
- Serve And Delight
Chris Wong, IBM VP
- Customer is interested in what is relevant / meaningful to them
- meaningful engagement
- customs express themselves in data
- data analytics
- digital engagement – silverpop (cloud based marketing automation), customer journey mapping
Bill Nussey – CEO Silverpop
- started with email
- moved to behavioral marketing
- content management
- 100% cloud-based behavioral marketing
—
Customer experience needs to have a single intentional design
- make customer engagement real and easier
- essential to your business
- dynamic and agile
- built around the way you work
systems of engagement are essential to your enterprise = these need to work all the time, and need to innovate, dynamic and continuous change
- available all the time
- agile
- the systems needs to work around the way you work
systems of record = HR, CRM, Finance etc
How to collaborate with IBM ExpereinceOne
- collaboration is critical
- omni-channel customer designer – customer journey across channels
—
Kareem Yusuf
IBM VP of SaaS Operations
IBM ExperienceOne (innovation priorities)
- User Workflow and Experience
- Visualizations and tool sets which create collaborative experiences that integrate processes across organizations
- delivering new interactions modes so marketeers can get insights faster
- which steps readily lend themselves to mobile – such as approvals
- understanding the customer (data)
- Contextual View of the Customer
- synthesize contextual views of customer behavior and activities as they flow across channels
- identity management – how do we know what different interactions are from the same customer
- data format – digita data exchange with W3C
- Customer Journey Map
- cross channel
- Realtime Personalization
- richer intelligence to deliver relevant, personalized interactions across channels
- understanding the events in context of all other relevant events
- browsing for a loan, also has an existing account, new job, life changes
- personalized pricing
- delivered out to the engagement point at the right time
- Mobile
- deepen behavioral insights and harness device innovations to enable seamless engagement
- native mobile replay – in browser as the customer experiences it
- near field engagement technologies (like iBeacon)
Moving towards User-Centric development from Feature centric development
