Brian Solis's Blog, page 99

August 11, 2015

It’s About the Customer Experience; So, Why Is Your Brand Ignoring Customers?

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Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They’re not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions.


A few weeks ago, I visited New York on a beautiful summer day to participate in an event that I would love to repeat everywhere around the world.


Prophet, a global brand strategy firm that recently acquired Altimeter Group, hosted an intimate event to explore the new horizons of digital customer experience (DCX). I was invited to share my thoughts alongside a very enchanting and sage MaryKay Kopf, CMO at Electrolux.


While informal, it was illuminating. MaryKay shared the story of how her team helped change a company founded in 1919 to compete in a digital economy.


Attendees ranging from some of the biggest brands to the hottest startups also shared the challenges and equally solutions. I left inspired and I wanted to share with you highlights from the event so that you may feel the same.


DCX + CX = The Experience: You either add value to it or you take away from it. It’s a choice.


TL;DR: 5 Takeaways to Make Customer Experience a Competitive Advantage
1. Find your “Undercover Boss” moment

Leaders need to reconnect with what it’s like to be a customer. Empathy is key to creating rewarding customer experiences, and it has been lost in today’s corporate culture. When you are empathetic toward your customers they become more than demographics – you understand their full lives, what makes them tick, where they want to be reached and how – and therefore designing a rewarding experience for them is simple. With this level of understanding, you’ll become so in tune with your audience that you’ll be able to provide them experiences they don’t even know they want yet. A true hallmark of a relentlessly relevant brand.


2. Innovation isn’t about technology, it’s about disruption

Use the TV remote control as an example of what innovation should mean. Instead of adding new features to it or making it more powerful, try to completely re-imagine a better way to control the TV. (Hint: it’s wouldn’t be a plastic brick with 100 buttons). To create experiences that matter to your customers, first think about what the experience should be and then use technology to bring it to life.


3. The new “Kodak moment” is a cautionary tale

The rate of disruption has increased exponentially, and many Fortune 500 companies have met their demise because of it. All companies need to embrace change, both in customer behaviors and expectations and in how you think about your business. Are you an automaker or a company that provides personal transportation? If Kodak had recognized new customer behaviors and had a broader sense of their purpose as a company, they could have been the leader of the new world of photography instead of standing still – ultimately losing relevance and share.


4. Swipe right to connect with millennials

Members of this digitally native generation want to shop, work and interact with your brand the same way they date – easily and intuitively. This doesn’t mean your company (necessarily) needs to go out and build a trendy mobile app, but you do need to create an experience that is intuitive, valuable and fun for your audience. Many decision-makers in companies today are from an older generation, so it’s easy to overlook how differently millennial consumers want to interact with your brand. The good news is they aren’t shy about telling you. This generation will provide a constant stream of feedback via social media – you just have to be willing to listen.


5. Love = value creation = shareholder value

Doing the right thing by the customer might not be the most profitable decision in the short term, but it does make good business sense. If your customers love your brand, they will buy your products, recommend them to others and become a customer for life. Foster your customer’s love by delivering excellent customer experiences throughout their journey and across channels. Brand lovers are crucial to a successful company and a healthy bottom line.


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Unabridged: Customer (and Employee) Experience Happens With or Without You; So, Design It
My Opening Remarks

By and large, companies want to do the right thing by their customers. The problem is they simply don’t know how. Companies are not designed around customers. Instead they have processes, budget pressures, silos and systems that reward short-term value for shareholders. When you consider this structure, it’s no wonder that customer experiences have suffered.


Remember customers are going to have an experience with your brand – good or bad – and in today’s social, digital world, they are going to share that experience. It is up to your company to ensure that experience is a good one.


More companies need to find their “Undercover Boss moment.” Leaders need to reconnect with what it’s like to be a customer. Empathy is key to creating a rewarding customer experiences. Companies have gotten good at dealing with the problem without dealing with the problem. They’ve created customer care centers, call centers, but they need to improve the actual customer experience.


Once social media empowered customers and gave weight to their voice, companies started trying to fix the experience. But they came at it the wrong way. They just wanted to shut people up, instead of trying to design/articulate a good experience that you want people to share.


Companies need to ask themselves what are the experiences people have with my brand? And what are my products? There is always a gap between the two. The question is how big is that gap and how do you fill it?


Digital customer experience is different. It can be mind-blowing for those in older generations because it’s not how we grow up. The TV remote control is a metaphor for customer experience. We don’t question it every day, but since the 50’s it’s gotten worse. It’s changed iteratively, but there has been no thought of innovation. If you were to invent the remote control today from scratch, it would look completely different.


Today’s leaders (the older generation) are making decisions by based on their experiences, but digital customers think differently. And it is almost always counter-intuitive to the older generation. Example: Millennials don’t want to buy houses. The idea of the car and car ownership will completely change in our lifetime.


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This type of change is happening because companies have screwed it up. Disruption is letting customers demand a different experience.


I recently worked with Google to study micro moments – “I want to …” moments, including “I want to go to dinner, get a cab, etc.” What we found is brands are not investing in what the actual customer experience is. The customer journey is so fragmented. New, “disruptive” companies cater to customers that believe the world literally revolves around them. Think of an app – it usually brings something to you. Millennials don’t like the way most companies work. They want to work like they date – swipe right. Easy, intuitive.


How can companies create experiences that matter to their customers? Think about it should be, design it, build it and use technology to help bring it to life.


Is the rate of disruption accelerating? The book End of Business As Usual looks at how many companies that were Fortune 500, on the Nasdaq, etc. are now gone. It’s scary. The book takes a look at how many were because of bad management or digital disruption. Digital disruption companies had one thing in common. All of their boards had the opportunity to do something to stop their demise and they didn’t. Kodak had the patents for the digital camera. Now a Kodak moment means to fail to recognize a consumer change. Today companies are built around quarterly value and they make decisions based on that short-sighted view.


People at companies don’t make new/innovative decisions because of a lot of human reasons – fear, self-preservation, etc. To be innovative, people need to be safe and empowered. And most people aren’t, companies are actually very risk averse. In an effort to change this many companies are opening innovation centers to get people out of the normal work environment and to think differently.


Sephora just opened an innovation center because they discovered the way the digital generation buys make-up is totally different than their parents. At Birchbox, they try to lead the customer and design experiences that they don’t know they want yet.


 


Notes via Katie Lamkin


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Published on August 11, 2015 12:07

August 3, 2015

Why Marketers Should Care About Millennials and Anyone Living a Digital Lifestyle

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What is a Millennial, and why should a marketer care? That was the question Adobe’s Simon Nicholson asked me during Adobe Summit EMEA in London earlier this year.


I joined Simon in a live chat on the topic and have included the fun, casual yet informative conversation below…


Let’s start with this, the definition of Millennials is imprecise, with the consensus being they’re aged around 18-34. But one of the key points that I emphasized in our discussion is that marketers shouldn’t think of Millennials as a generation based on age, but on living a connected lifestyle.


I introduced the audience to the term Generation C (for connected). This would include ‘Millennials’ who have grown up pinching their screens, but also the older generations that have adapted from the heavy bricks with buttons to the connected lifestyle enabled by modern technologies. It’s an important distinction because as a marketer you may be creating your campaigns around mobile and tablet usage, but your target demographic might be older.


I see brands getting into trouble because they don’t make the time to explore this critical distinction, and have started trying to act cool without regard to whether it’s appropriate for their audience. I mentioned ‘Brands Saying Bae’ as an example of this, and it’s certainly worth a look. Sometimes brand try to hard without actually trying.


In our discussion, we also review whether brands need Millennials on their marketing team, how brands are adapting their campaigns to suit Millennials, and how marketers can succeed if they’re not from the Millennial generation.


You can watch a video of the live chat below.



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Published on August 03, 2015 05:52

July 27, 2015

Like Every Business, We Too Stand on the Path of Disruption

Disrupt You on fire


Guest post by Jay Samit (@jaysamit), a serial entrepreneur and author of the bestselling book Disrupt You!


Your career is going to be disrupted.  I guarantee it.  Office automation is expected to make 40% of the current workforce obsolete by 2020.  3D printing is anticipated to eliminate 320 manufacturing jobs; further impacting the millions of truck drivers replaced by autonomous vehicles.  We are now living in an era of endless innovation where technology continues accelerating exponentially while businesses struggle to adapt arithmetically.  And for all of you who feel secure in a large multinational corporation, consider this: of the original largest Fortune 500 companies named in 1955 only 57 are still on the list.  Yet, for those who see every obstacle in life as an opportunity in disguise, now is the greatest time in history to be a tech entrepreneur.


The self-made billionaire in his twenties, an unheard-of possibility a decade ago, now happens with regular frequency.  The startup with little funding and a small staff, displaces hundred-year-old companies with billions in revenues virtually overnight.  The consultant, with no background in technology, makes millions of dollars from teaching a course online. The Arab Spring which peacefully overthrew long-standing governments in Bahrain, Tunisia and Yemen, is able to successfully force rulers from power without weapons or international support.  What did all of these disruptions have in common?  They were led by people who understood how to leverage their talents and the advancements in mobile, social, and communications technology to find opportunities for disruption.


With six billion consumers now just a click away on a smartphone, today’s entrepreneurs can reinvent themselves and the world faster with less capital than ever before.  Today, there are 50 times more people on the Internet than in the year 2000 and they are connected at speeds 180 times faster.  Entrepreneurs no longer need to own the technological infrastructure to reach the always-on consumer. The same cloud and big data used by international oligopolies is now universally available to those wanting to plot their own destinies at a fraction of the cost off a decade ago.  Risk capital, which was once controlled by large banks and private equity firms, is aggregated directly by crowdfunding and micro-lending sites.  In 2015, crowdfunding sites will deploy twice as much funds as venture capital firms and for a fraction of the equity. Bitcoin and blockchain technology now empowers ideas and capital to flow seamlessly across borders and trade barriers.  Disruption isn’t about what happens to you, it’s about how you respond to what happens to you.


With so much innovation, startup founders and existing corporations can no longer survive by just adding new features or marketing product extensions. In today’s business climate, incremental innovation is like walking on quicksand – it will keep you busy, but you won’t get very far. To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection. Instead of focusing the traditional planning cycles where companies benchmark their businesses against existing competitors, teams need to be developed to foster internal change and disruption. Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel. Apple and Google continue to expand and dominate new industries because they strive to create a culture of risk taking, self-disruption and experimentation. Would anyone have predicted ten years ago that either of these companies would be going into the auto industry? Does anyone today doubt that they will be successful?


A half a millennia ago, Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli said that entrepreneurs are “simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage. Today’s 2.3 billion millennials have a choice: Disrupt yourself or let others disrupt you.


There is no middle ground.


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Published on July 27, 2015 07:50

July 21, 2015

Creating Truly Personal Omni-Channel Customer Experiences

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During a recent trip to London, I spent time with the Smart Focus team to discuss the promise and shortcomings of omni-channel strategies. It was a pretty productive collaboration resulting in a video that explores the new digital customer, an ebook focused on omni-channel experiences and a webinar on the future of marketing.


Customers are more connected and more informed than ever. Digital marketers now need an entirely fresh perspective to succeed in a world where customers and prospects experience their brand in multiple ways – online ads, websites, mobile, social, email, call center (help us), web chat, instant messaging and more. Sometimes we even have to talk to people in real life.


Too often though, there is little consistency across these experiences. Too many brands, despite paying lip service to multi-channel marketing, still operate web, email, social, mobile CX, et al., independently (and politically). In a twist of modern marketing, customers might click on a link in an email and be taken to a landing page with a very different look, feel and story. Surprise! Multi-channel marketing for many simply means promoting their eCommerce channels via broadcast or spammy approaches that minimize efforts across critical channels and thus fragmenting critical customer experiences.


The reality is that most brands are still on the starting blocks when it comes to true omni-channel marketing. It’s not just another way of saying multi-channel – it’s a whole new approach, encompassing technology, marketing, perspective and a radical shift in company philosophy and culture.



Customers and potential customers share some common desires – they want to be valued and validated, they need engagement to be efficient and consistent, they want to be able to trust your business and to be in control of their experiences.


But there is an increasing realization that people are individuals – and we all do things differently than you.  Imagine that! We’re all human. Well some of us at least. In another words, its futile (and lame) to have one sweeping, scalable marketing strategy. Empathy and understanding serve as the foundation or engagement.


Everything in business is about people. The more we can study who they are, what they like and they don’t like, the better we can build personal journeys that matter.


‘Creating Truly Personal Omni-Channel Customer Experiences’, explains how to build those journeys and develop an omni-channel marketing strategy that appeals to each and every customer and prospect in the way that works for them. The eBook includes exclusive video insights from yours truly and covers subjects such as:


What is omni-channel marketing and why is it important?


1) Being human and staying tech savvy


2) Social media – the moment of truth


3) Why email marketing is more important than ever


4) Using your customer date to create meaningful experiences that matter


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Watch the video interview here.


Visit Flickr to see behind-the-scenes pictures from this dynamic session.


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Published on July 21, 2015 05:40

July 16, 2015

The New Marketing Contract and Why Context is the Future of Marketing

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We live in a time of great technology evolution and revolution. Innovation is not only upon us; it affects, even disrupts, us as marketers and as consumers of other businesses. Your customers are more connected than ever before and they’re always on. The number of touchpoints between businesses and customers has exploded. Technology is everywhere and something new is always on the horizon. Wearables. Smart watches. The Internet of Things. Everything is changing.


Indeed, today’s consumers are more empowered than any other generation to engage with brands on their own terms. They have higher expectations for the experiences delivered by their favorite brands. As a result, marketing is no longer what it used to be.


In order to maintain engagement with this new breed of connected consumers, brands need to leverage real-time contextual data to better understand, engage and deliver value at the moment of interaction. People just want to feel like brands get them. To do so requires technology to enliven the “audience” and shift from trying to convert eyeballs, clicks and conversions to investing in context to earn attention, make engagement relevant and value-added and build relationships that matter.


It’s time for businesses to establish a new marketing contract with customers


Digital marketing is at a crossroads, and it’s the brands that understand the role of context in delivering customer value that will excel in this new era of connectivity. Context creates a return on all things that add value to you and your customers. It’s mutually beneficial at every step. Context sets in motion an entirely new value cycle that with investment only expands in reach and relevance.


With all the data streams available today and technology to understand and act on it, marketers have no excuse for keeping up with the status quo. And, they need to because connected customers expect a new marketing contract.


What’s the new marketing contract? I partnered with StrongView, a leading provider of contextual marketing solutions, to specifically answer that question in detail. The result is a 13-page ebook that explores the market conditions, consumer behaviors and emerging technologies that are enabling brands to better engage customers with contextually relevant messages.


Additionally, we review…


Why today’s connected consumers expect inspired brand engagements.


How technology plus empathy create contextually relevant communications.


A step-by-step breakdown of real-world contextual brand engagements that help inspire new, contextually-driven strategies.


It’s available for free here (email gate).


Indeed, a new marketing contract is needed to capture the attention of your connected customers. You must earn it. And, once you have their attention, you must promise to do something meaningful and personal with it. Context is at the center of new engagement. It is the new minimum required for them to, in turn, engage with you.


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Published on July 16, 2015 05:13

July 13, 2015

Today’s Digital Video Revolution & The Future of Brands

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Guest post by Brendan Gahan (@BrendanGahan), a YouTube marketing expert helping Fortune 500 brands with their YouTube influencer and community building campaigns. He was named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising and one of the 25 Top YouTube Business Power Players for 2013.


The past month there’s been a wealth of speculation in the blogosphere regarding livestreaming services Periscope and Meerkat.


Who is going to win?


Which platform will crush the other?


Which app is the future of livestreaming?


But… who cares?


These ongoing debates remind me of the Vine vs Instagram video conversations of two years ago; undoubtedly, in another two years, more speculation will rage on around some other new set of video services.


These debates focus on the trees, and not the forest. The real battleground is around text vs digital video.


Digital video is quickly becoming the de facto form of communication.


Since the introduction of YouTube ten years ago, digital video has been wildly disruptive, upending the traditional advertising, celebrity, and production processes. People embraced YouTube like a fish to water.


Everyone my age (I’m 32) grew up with dial up internet where the bandwidth barely supported text, let alone video. As a result our early days online, and even today, are largely centered around the written word. We eagerly connected with friends on AIM, or made crappy GeoCities sites in the late 90’s. And, now in adulthood I spend an excessive amount of time reading blogs like Gawker and Buzzfeed.


However, this text centric digital world has disappeared for younger audiences.


Teens don’t read.


A survey of High School seniors in 2014 found that they don’t read top websites (73 percent don’t read Buzzfeed, 96 percent don’t read Gawker or Mashable). They were obsessed with video, with 65 percent of the seniors participating in the survey using SnapChat and 97 percent using YouTube.


It’s no coincidence that Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook have all added video to their platforms recently. None of them want to be irrelevant as content consumption changes with younger audiences.


But why is video so successful?


The introduction of new technology does not mean its adoption.


There’s something emotionally spectacular about video. When our brains recognize the human form, they release chemicals, such as dopamine-which is often associated with love, motivation, sexual gratification, and addiction, which drive emotional connection.


Having this level of neurological engagement in mind, anything a brand does that falls short of our expectations for a seemingly-human online interaction.


However, as a brand, how do you regularly produce stimulating content across multiple platforms and adapt to a generation whose media habits are foreign to you?


Today kids come home from school and jump on YouTube to catch up with their favorite vloggers and send Snapchats to friends. Twenty years ago, they would go home and call their friends with a rotary phone, flip through a magazine, and watch TV.


These changes pose challenges to brands who are unable to translate their message to YouTube, the oldest digital video platform of all. Few have been able to bring to life their brand in a compelling way in digital video, in fact there’s not a single brand in the top 100 most subscribed YouTube channels.  And, while major advertisers and brands are still in the very early stages of adoption – they’ll have to adapt faster or risk disappearing entirely as new platforms emerge.


Throughout history, the most successful brands adopted and embraced new mediums, while those who failed disappeared.


This happened with radio, when it was popularized in the 20’s, and the brands who survived (and thrived) during this massive adoption were automobile, oil industries and consumer goods (Ford,Tidewater Oil, and Pepsodent). With the introduction of TV in the 50’s, Brands like Tidewater and Studebaker failed to adapt and died off, while Ford, Chrysler, GE and Kraft thrived as they jumped on to the platform.


In the 60’s a brand could spend months on a TV spot. The commercials were highly controlled and analyzed piece of content to ensure they represented the brand, each frame could be analyzed and thought out before ever being shown to the public. This level of control is impossible today.


It used to be YouTube was the dominant digital video platform, but just in the last three years we’ve seen an explosion of additional services such as Vine, Snapchat, Instagram video, Facebook video, Twitter video, Tumblr Video, Periscope and Meerkat.


As a result, the amount of video created has increased dramatically while brand content hasn’t scaled with consumption.


Things are going to continue to change, and that rate of change is going to speed up (Moore’s law) and video will be at the center of communication and content.


Kodak became irrelevant by failing to adopt digital cameras. The largest cab company in the world, Uber, doesn’t own a single car because of its adoption of mobile technology. Brands will be invisible if they fail to translate their message to the incoming digital video mediums.


If the last ten years are any indication, most brands had their Kodak moment years ago and are gradually trudging ahead toward irrelevancy by failing to translate their brands into the digital video mediums of the future.


Image Source: EmpowHER


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Published on July 13, 2015 05:37

July 9, 2015

The Moment of Truth: Connected Customers and How to Re-Imagine Customer Experiences


And then one day, it happened. Customers changed. How they make decisions changed. What they value and how they want to do business changed. The funny thing is…we didn’t. Now we can and a new generation of technologies and services make it possible to not only react but lead customer experiences moving forward.


To effectively compete in the digital economy, you are left with no choice; become customer-obsessed or lose! Every moment-of-truth counts when it comes to customer loyalty. For some, this paradigm shift will be easy. For many, you will have to re-think your business model.


#AdaptorDie


I was invited to present at PegaWorld in front of 3,000 (gulp) technology and business leaders in Orlando to share views on how customers have changed and are changing. But that was just the beginning. I also broke things down to show how technology, and our own biases and processes, got in the way of evolution and innovation. Sometimes all we need to do is take a step back to see new ways to adapt and thrive.


I hope this helps presentation helps you…



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Published on July 09, 2015 05:29

July 8, 2015

Using Big Data to Understand Small Moments of Truth

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Guest post by Gib Bassett (@gibbassett), gib.bassett@oracle.com


“Businesses today must invest in experiences because that’s what people want.” – Brian Solis


So says Brian in this recent post. He goes on to qualify this statement further, saying people today simply don’t care about products, services or offers. What they desire and what they respond to with regularity are superior experiences. I don’t think this is limited to Millennials either – we are all being conditioned to have affinities for businesses that deliver superior customer experiences.


For marketers in industries like retail and consumer products, this is a bitter pill to swallow. Think about it: so much attention around digital marketing is focused on targeting and incentivizing consumers to transact with a particular brand. Changing course almost takes a complete re-thinking of brand and retail business norms; similar to what I’ve written about tracking consumer behavior along the purchase path and re-imagining traditional business models.


The big idea embedded in Brian’s words is that consumers trust most what others report of their experience with your brand – an “ultimate moment of truth.”


This implies that your targeting, offer and communication strategy will forever struggle against something beyond your control – which is true! You cannot control what your customers say about your brand. What you can control is the responsiveness, convenience and quality of the experience you provide your customer.


Small Moments along the Purchase Path


To this end, it’s helpful to think about the activities each of your consumers uniquely engage in throughout the purchase journey. Most of these are shifting to digital, even in the store when you consider beacons, interactive displays and RFID tags on products themselves.


Both retailers and consumer goods companies engage in numerous activities to create, fulfill and spur repeat demand in a marketplace that’s no longer online or offline – it’s simply about how the customer wants to buy.


Multiple functions line up to influence and serve customers in the pre-shop, active shopping and post-shop consumption phases. Their actions all often happen apart one another with little right time coordination. This, and a lack of common understanding, greatly contribute to the challenges these industries have with sales growth and differentiation.


Decades of technology investments in silos and the disruption caused by online channels, mobile and social media have created a cobbled-together infrastructure ill-suited to a harmonized view of the customer experience. When faced with the reality that pushing product messages, promotions and transaction-centric communications on your customers are ineffective, it’s difficult to imagine how to develop the right insight necessary to change course.


As Brain also points out, “Customers aren’t following the customer journey you designed because they’re too busy hacking it.” The moment of truth is in constant motion and varies by person.


Understanding the many small moments that individual consumers face when approaching a purchase decision is a good place to start – no matter if you work in marketing, sales, customer service, supply chain or manufacturing. Everyone has a mandate to execute against such an understanding.


Cloud Innovation and Speed


Advances in cloud computing and analytics have the potential to transform the way consumer-facing businesses think about their customer relationships. The ability to ingest and analyze data from any source means business leaders can begin to ask questions of their business that traditional business intelligence doesn’t account for – questions which can illuminate the ways you delight or frustrate your most valuable assets, your customers. This is how you learn to succeed through differentiation.


The most progressive retail and consumer goods organizations are staffed with data scientists seeking to work with data driven managers to partner with on really hard business problems. If you work for one of these companies, you should reach out to your analytics teams to talk about a project to understand how well your function is meeting the needs of your consumer. Multiple data sources, different analytical methods, and iteration will most certainly yield insights that you didn’t expect – and make a difference you can measure.


If you work in the many thousands of less progressive companies yet to embrace data science and advanced analytics as a core competency, all is not lost. These companies are starting to carve out small teams of analytically minded people from IT and other areas, and giving them a mandate and small budget to explore how new forms of analytics can unlock new forms of value. They are hungry to demonstrate value, so if you lead a team aligned to any stage of the consumer’s journey, reach out to scope out a project.


It’s only through proactive efforts by business leaders that analytics will succeed in helping retail and consumer products industries adapt to an almost constantly-changing consumer landscape. Cloud computing and ever-better analytical tools are making it increasingly easier for business leaders to tap into the insights embedded in the many small moments that make up a delightful customer experience.


 


 


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Published on July 08, 2015 06:48

July 7, 2015

State of Mobile Commerce: An Evening in San Francisco with Criteo


I recently had the opportunity to co-host an event in San Francisco with Jonathan Wolf of Criteo to discuss the past and future of retail and mobile commerce. That evening celebrated the release of the company’s quarterly State of Mobile Commerce Report, based on its pool of online shopping data covering more than a billion transactions totaling over $130Bn of annual sales.


That evening, we would entertain some of the most interesting people documenting or contributing to the future of ecommerce, etail and ad tech. Those who joined us included representatives from Google, Groupon, POPSUGAR, Rue La La, and Criteo of course. We were also joined by notable press covering the space such as Amir Efrati of The Information, Salvador Rodriguez of International Business Times, Rolfe Winkler and Deepa Seetharaman of The Wall Street Journal and Leslie Hook of Financial Times.



This year has been a pretty incredible year for mobile. Yet, it’s incredibly under appreciated by brands and retailers, especially in the U.S. In research I published earlier this year with good friend Jaimy Szymanski, we learned that to be success in mobile, businesses would have to devise both mobile-first and mobile-only strategies. Bolting mobile onto existing digital journeys isn’t a native or intuitive solution and only adds friction to the customer experience.



The bottom line is that mobile users expect a mobile experience. Sounds commonsensical but it’s not. Instead, today’s CX forces customers to endure desktop-like experiences on the small screen and/or pushes them to complete journeys or transactions across multiple devices. In fact, in my work with Google, I learned that mobile behaviors and expectations are outpacing the prowess, thinking and competence of many strategists as the journey fractures into “micro moments.”



In Criteo’s latest report, we learned of several trends that are pointing to mobile as the future of eCommerce. Following are key insights from the two reports, many of which will help you make the case for new investments in strategies and technology…


Globally, mobile now accounts for 30% of eCommerce transactions.


Mobile will be 50% of US eCommerce transactions as conversion rates reach those in Asia.


Mobile is now about purchasing, not just researching: Conversion rates are high, across all devices and retail categories.


Smartphones now generate more transactions than tablets.


A third of fashion transactions now come from mobile, with average order values close to desktop levels.


Top quartile US retailers generate almost 40% of their ecommerce transactions from mobile, against 27% for US overall.



It’s not just Apple: Android phones now generate a third of US smartphone shopping transactions, and much more internationally.


U.S. mobile transactions cross 30% share: And it’s much higher for top-quartile retailers.


Retailers who optimize their mobile sites generate many more mobile transactions than those who don’t: Optimized sites have a better conversion funnel at every stage.


Apps generated almost 50% of mobile transactions for retailers who have made their app experience a priority: Mobile apps perform better than any other channel, including desktop.


Cross-device usage is now enormous: Consumer use of multiple devices to make a single purchase makes up 40% of eCommerce transactions.


Conversion rates directly correlate with the quality of the site. The more optimized the site, the higher the conversion rate.For websites that are usable on mobile the conversion rate is 2.9%, versus1.6% for non-optimized sites.When a site is optimized, the conversion rate increases to 3.4%. This is exactly what Jaimy and I found in our research. Brands need to think mobile-first and mobile-only!


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Optimized sites see a larger share of mobile transactions than non-optimized sites.The difference is significant: non-optimized sites have 22% of their eCommerce transactions via mobile versus 31% for optimized sites.This represents a potential 41% opportunity for sites that are not optimized today.


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When done right, apps convert visits to sales better than desktop. The user experience of apps is better than desktop and browser but not just because it’s an “app.” Optimized apps are designed to focus tasks, transactions and desired behavior into desired outcomes. Additionally, apps are used by more loyal customers, leading to higher conversion rates. In retail, consumers using the app convert at a rate three times higher than those using a mobile browser. With travel, the conversion rate for apps is almost two times that of mobile browser.






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Asia and UK consumers continue to be the mobile leaders globally. mCommerce is now 34% of all eCommerce transactions globally — based on an accurate weighting of eCommerce market size by country.The U.S. is catching up with the global average, with 30% of eCommerce transactions coming from mobile devices.Growth rates are slower in Q2 as the holiday effect of new smartphone sales wears off.


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All in all, Criteo leaves us with four trends to watch and more so, to get in front of as a leader in mobile commerce…


One: Growth in mCommerce is unstoppable. By year-end, mobile share of eCommerce transactions is forecast to reach 33% in the U.S. and 40% globally.


Two: Smartphones will continue to displace slower-growing tablets due to larger available screens. Apple is gaining ground on Android, but both are winners vs. a shrinking desktop.


Three: Apps are the next frontier. Advertisers will start to significantly invest in their mobile app as a way to drive more conversions than desktop and engage with their loyal customers.


Four: Dealing with cross-device behavior is the biggest challenge and opportunity for marketers in 2015. With 40% of sales already cross- device, marketers have to talk to users and no longer to devices.



Here, I share highlights of the evening on video


Pictures from the event are on flickr


Download the report here


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Published on July 07, 2015 05:09

July 1, 2015

Internet of Things is Here: What’s Your IoT Strategy?

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is so much more than smart refrigerator that tell you when you need to go to the grocery store, wearables that track your steps or the smart watches you’re thinking about not getting. It’s the nervous system that sends and tracks important information between things, places and people.


From smarter industrial applications to cities to health care to home automation to automobiles and everything in between, IoT is changing not only your personal life, but offers great opportunities for innovation in business right now. In fact, by 2020, an estimated 50 billion devices around the globe will be connected to the Internet. Postscapes estimates the potential economic impact by 2020 will range from about US$2 trillion to more than $14 trillion. And, that’s just a few years away!


As you can see in the graph below, according to BI Intelligence, the Internet of Things will be the largest device market in the world. And, IoT will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019.


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Everything talks to everything and people learn about what was previously invisible or unattainable before. There’s much to learn in the process. But one of the areas of low hanging fruit for businesses in IoT is exploring how connected devices, people and processes can increase efficiency and lower costs within the home, city, and workplace.


According to Frank Burkitt writing for Strategy+Business, one in every six businesses will roll out an IoT-based product. Roughly 75% of them are currently exploring how to use the IoT to improve internal operations and services. More so, IoT is also set to revolution the customer experience by helping companies personalize or customize products and services based on data and behavior sent directly by customers by using connected products or wading through connected places.


The result is innovation across the board.


The question is, how will your company build value in this new world and what role will you play in its transformation?


For starters, let’s take a broad yet organized view of how the emerging landscape of IoT players. They tend to fall into one of three camps with each reflecting a different type of enterprise as Burkitt learned.


1) Enablers: Develop and implement the underlying technology. Enablers are primarily technology-oriented companies, such as Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, and Intel. These vendors essentially build and maintain the IoT infrastructure that enables Engagers to develop their own connected services.


2) Engagers: Design, create, integrate, and deliver IoT services to customers. Engagers offer the direct link between IoT and the market. They use the endpoint, hub, platform, and service offerings (the IoT infrastructure) created by the Enablers to produce services for consumers and businesses.


3) Enhancers: Devise their own value-added services, on top of the services provided by Engagers. These companies provide integrated services that reframe and repackage the products and services of the Engagers. Their value proposition stems from creating and extracting value from the data, relationships, and insights generated from IoT devices and activity.


As IoT grows, the implications for business model innovation are huge. But that’s just the beginning. Opportunities for innovation and optimization in customer and employee engagement, product development, services and overall experience design is largely unwritten and yours to define. All it takes is to not only explore where you want to be and what you want to do but also think shift your perspective to see it in two ways: 1) Where you add value and to whom and 2) Where and how can you capture value to improve company efficiencies, identify opportunities, and learn. Like with anything new, we can either innovate or embrace mediocrity. And as competitors explore these new horizons, your competitive advantage comes down not to technology but how you will employ it to improve what exists and introduce what has yet to be realized.


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IoT Photo Credit: Shutterstock


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Published on July 01, 2015 08:01