I played Nostradamus earlier this year and predicted that four Cs will have a significant impact on the evolution of digital marketing and commerce – Customer, Community, Cellphones and Cross-channel. I said earlier this year that
Emphasis on all things related to customer – Experience, Engagement and Data – will tip the scales.
Consumer engagement through multiple channels, some times as part of a single transaction, will gain momentum.
There has been a phenomenal growth, progress, change or whatever you want to call it in those four areas during the course of this year.
Consumers are connecting and sharing with people like never before: One billion monthly active users on Facebook, that’s one in every seven people in the world posting 3.2 billion likes and comments daily and making 125 billion friendships. On an average, there are 190 million tweets per day, and 3,000 images are uploaded to Flickr every minute.
Customer data is no longer confined to the four walls of the enterprise. Retailers are starting to take advantage of the social data in a variety of ways. Smart retailers are now introducing new technologies that make sense of the billions of social data points found on social networks, to turn them into profitable insights for their business. Recently, Amazon announced a new feature called Friends and Family Gifting, aimed at helping consumers better organise their gift lists and gift ideas for others, generate Facebook-enabled gift suggestions, receive reminders, and share their gift lists via email or social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Customer experience was brought to the front and centre of business. Forrester released a report earlier this year that concluded that there is a strong correlation between customer experience and loyalty and that better customer experience can be worth millions in revenue. Essentially, it concluded that experience drives commerce. A recent CX (Customer Experience) Index Report by Oracle validated that assertion – 81 per cent of the consumers are willing to pay more for better customer service. John Lewis, a prominent retailer in the UK, attributes much of its continued financial success to its renowned focus on customer needs and experience.
Customers are more connected than they have ever been – connected to each other, connected to their devices and connected to brands. Consumer engagement through multiple channels, sometimes as part of a single transaction, has gained momentum. In fact, there is a new kind of behaviour amongst consumers – multi-screen behaviour. One may see a TV commercial for a new car and then use a mobile phone or a tablet to search for the specifications, look up user reviews or locate the nearest dealer to fix a test drive appointment. A recent study by Google found that nine out of ten people use multiple screens sequentially and that smartphones are by far the most common starting point. For marketers, this combination of device usage and spur-of-the-moment usage means there are more opportunities to connect with consumers, so retailers are investing in optimising their presence across multiple screens.
Progress in mobile devices has been beyond imagination. It changed our lives in every conceivable way. There has been a near 100 per cent increase in the tablet sales and nearly 85 per cent of the mobile devices will be Web-enabled in less than a year. Add to that, 49 per cent of the retailers polled said that the average order value when accessed through a tablet is higher than the order from the Web site.
Retailers took note of this transformation by making the mobile device a part of their digital strategy. In fact, a number of retailers are combining social and mobile in innovative ways to engage their consumers on the go. Best Buy, a leader in consumer electronics, is working on a new geo-fencing mobile effort that rewards when consumers participate. Geo-fencing is a great way for retailers to drive in-store traffic and drive deeper engagement.
Finally, one trend we do not talk about as much is how technology is changing marketing. It is not only giving people new ways to do things but also gives way to a whole new way of thinking. Technology has empowered consumers and disrupted everything around us to the extent that Gartner predicts that the Chief Marketing Officer of an organisation will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017. In this new normal world of marketing, you are more likely to encounter technologists than marketers in the marketing function.
In conclusion, 2012 has been a year of phenomenal growth and innovation in digital marketing and commerce, driven by technology.
Now that 2013 is almost upon us, I take my crystal ball out this time and gaze to come up with my predictions:
Store: The retail establishment that sells items to consumers will be redefined forever. Digitisation of stores and consumer experiences within the stores will reach a crescendo.
Social Inference: Businesses all around the world will invest in new technologies that will help them to predict consumer propensity toward a set of actions that result in attraction, engagement or commerce.
Beyond Big Data: There is a ton of hype around Big Data and the Vs that define it – Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity. Business will sift through the noise and focus on the fifth ‘V’ that no one talks about today – Value. Businesses will invest in realising the value of the data they are sitting on instead of focusing on whether they are big or small.
(Prabhu Kannan is Director, Sapient Nitro)