Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? We met with Jamie Brighton, at Adobe Summit 2023*. Jamie is Product Marketing Director for the Adobe Digital Experience business. His answer to the above question is a blatant No! He sees AI as being a co-pilot of marketers in their daily tasks. A set of tools to bridge the gap between creativity and marketing ROI. To put it in a few words, marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs. On the contrary, they should look at AI as a great opportunity to make their jobs more creative and interesting. Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? The answer is No! Jamie Brighton, Director of Product Marketing EMEA, marketers should not be afraid to lose their jobs to AI. Picture: Jamie at the Adobe Summit 2023 in London on June 9, 2023 *Disclosure: Visionary Marketing is an #Adobepartner and Adobe is our client So far, marketers have had to put up with a lot of issues in the way they are dealing with their marketing assets for their campaigns. Such assets are volatile. They keep being sent back and forth between members of the marketing teams as well as agencies. And multiple copies are being kept in various places… In a nutshell, the ‘content supply chain process’ is broken. However, announcements made by Adobe and Publicis at Adobe Summit 2023 last week are aiming at resolving that issue.  Marketers are under pressure for creating personalised content at scale ‘It’s been fantastic to hear customers getting so excited about some of the things that we’ve been working on and announcing,’ the director of product marketing in the Adobe Digital Experience business said. Marketers need to produce more personalized content at scale. AI will enable them to do just that. We generated this Image with Adobe Firefly at firefly.adobe.com What Adobe did is ‘very much about the bringing together of the creative cloud and the marketing cloud, the experience cloud. And we’ve been infusing AI and generative AI capabilities across all those products’. And it’s not just about the integration of Firefly in many parts of Adobe’s creative suite. ‘We’ve also been working on having AI capabilities built directly into things like the Experience Manager and Adobe Journey Optimiser, which is our omnichannel tool. So, these are fantastic ways for marketers to be creative. And more efficient, and to meet the kind of ever-expanding demands that are on them for producing high-quality content at scale.’ CX— shaping tools: the best of both worlds All organizations need to be able to plan, create, deliver, and ultimately analyze the content that they’re producing. ‘In order to do that, they need to think about a content supply chain which goes from the ideation, thinking about the campaign, the brief, bringing together everything that you need in order to understand what you’re trying to achieve from this creative campaign,’ Jamie Brighton added. Our Firefly prompt was ‘marketing cloud and creative cloud, seamless’ vibrant colors, flat colors, concept art. Very neat result. And let’s mention the Adobe Firefly watermark on the bottom left-hand side which is a major step forward in the implementation of transparency in Gen AI. Most of the design journey begins with tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. ‘One of the historic challenges has been that if you need to do some sort of approval or create the asset and upload it somewhere for somebody to look at, you must go out of your workflow that you’re comfortable with,’ the Director of Product Marketing went on. ‘That’s approval processes that would typically happen in a workflow tool like Workfront can happen directly within the panels of the Photoshop interface and having the various renditions of an asset approved and ready to go live on a website again, can all happen directly within the creative cloud through the Photoshop on the desktop.’ This new way of working is bridging the gap between the two parts of the marketing organization. It is definitely a major step forward. A seamless journey Things are moving towards a genuinely seamless integration. Even though we are in the middle of a long ‘journey, which can never be finished’. ‘We designed this seamless integration to take away the cognitive load on the creatives around where to store the assets and enable them to build great marketing assets. Without having to even think about where it’s posted or where the approval process happens.’ Does that mean one will be able to launch campaigns at the touch of a button? The idea of launching a campaign based on the single press of a button is a pie in the sky according to Jamie Brighton. There will always be some work to do for marketers. To a large extent, AI-driven creativity tools and this seamless process will bestow more power on marketers. Which they shall use to be more creative. ‘There will still be a place for creativity in this whole process. Once you have simplified the admin element of the creative process, we are just left with the creative process,’ Jamie added. We see AI as a co-pilot and being a co-pilot indicates that there are two people, and two entities involved in this process. So much for those who think that marketers will be replaced by ChatGPT. If anything, our jobs will even become more interesting and more creative because AI will have taken care of all the useless and frustrating repetitive tasks. Will Marketing Jobs Be Killed by AI? As a result, Jamie thinks that marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs to AI. Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? We asked Firefly to turn a computer into Frankenstein and even though the answer is quite compelling, Jamie thinks there’s no reason to be afraid. As a matter of fact, we do agree with him too. One Should Absolutely Not be afraid of AI People have had to come to grips with generative AI. ‘Now, they are starting to understand the impact rather than just thinking it’s just another buzzword. I know that there are people fear-mongering about what the potential impact of AI. But we’ve been talking about the potential impacts of it for a number of years now. I was at one of the big analyst conferences in 2018, and the entire keynote was about “Will AI take away X types of different jobs?”’ Let’s be realistic, though, some of the roles will go. ‘But actually, where they go, there will be a greater opportunity in other areas to create models in the first place, to build tools that enable people to interact with AI as a co-pilot. The likes of Microsoft and Accenture are all talking about this concept of AI as a co-pilot. You will always need a human in that marketing process. What we have to do is look at where the opportunities to streamline our processes and look at where the potential opportunities are for AI to just make us happier in our jobs, basically by removing some of that mundanity, removing some of the boring stuff,’ explained Jamie. Marketing Jobs: AI Will be Our Co-pilot In conclusion, we marketers should not be afraid of AI. At the same time, we should prepare ourselves for many changes. If we only take things positively, such changes will be exciting opportunities to make our jobs even more interesting. The post Marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs to AI appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? We met with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiebrighton/?originalSubdomain=uk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jamie Brighton</a>, at <a href="https://business.adobe.com/summit/adobe-summit.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Adobe Summit 2023</a>*. Jamie is Product Marketing Director for the Adobe Digital Experience business. His answer to the above question is a blatant No! He sees AI as being a co-pilot of marketers in their daily tasks. A set of tools to bridge the gap between creativity and marketing ROI. To put it in a few words, marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs. On the contrary, they should look at AI as a great opportunity to make their jobs more creative and interesting. <h2>Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? The answer is No!</h2> Jamie Brighton, Director of Product Marketing EMEA, marketers should not be afraid to lose their jobs to AI. Picture: Jamie at the Adobe Summit 2023 in London on June 9, 2023 *Disclosure: Visionary Marketing is an #Adobepartner and Adobe is our client So far, marketers have had to put up with a lot of issues in the way they are dealing with their marketing assets for their campaigns. Such assets are volatile. They keep being sent back and forth between members of the marketing teams as well as agencies. And multiple copies are being kept in various places… In a nutshell, the ‘content supply chain process’ is broken. However, <a href="https://www.publicisgroupe.com/sites/default/files/press-releases/2023-06/PUBLICIS%20GROUPE%20LAUNCHES%20PX%20END-TO-END%20CONTENT%20PLATFORM%2C%20POWERED%20BY%20ADOBE’S%20CONTENT%20SUPPLY%20CHAIN%20SOLUTION.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">announcements</a> made by Adobe and Publicis at Adobe Summit 2023 last week are aiming at resolving that issue. <h3>Marketers are under pressure for creating personalised content at scale</h3> ‘It’s been fantastic to hear customers getting so excited about some of the things that we’ve been working on and announcing,’ the director of product marketing in the Adobe Digital Experience business said. Marketers need to produce more personalized content at scale. AI will enable them to do just that. We generated this Image with Adobe Firefly at <a href="https://firefly.adobe.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">firefly.adobe.com</a> What Adobe did is ‘very much about the bringing together of the creative cloud and the marketing cloud, the experience cloud. And we’ve been infusing AI and <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/06/evolution-of-marketing/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">generative AI</a> capabilities across all those products’. And it’s not just about the integration of <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/06/introducing-adobe-firefly-at-adobe-summit-2023/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Firefly</a> in many parts of Adobe’s creative suite. ‘We’ve also been working on having AI capabilities built directly into things like the Experience Manager and Adobe Journey Optimiser, which is our omnichannel tool. So, these are fantastic ways for marketers to be creative. And more efficient, and to meet the kind of ever-expanding demands that are on them for producing high-quality content at scale.’ <h3>CX— shaping tools: the best of both worlds</h3> All organizations need to be able to plan, create, deliver, and ultimately analyze the content that they’re producing. ‘In order to do that, they need to think about a content supply chain which goes from the ideation, thinking about the campaign, the brief, bringing together everything that you need in order to understand what you’re trying to achieve from this creative campaign,’ Jamie Brighton added. Our Firefly prompt was ‘marketing cloud and creative cloud, seamless’ vibrant colors, flat colors, concept art. Very neat result. And let’s mention the Adobe Firefly watermark on the bottom left-hand side which is a major step forward in the implementation of transparency in Gen AI. Most of the design journey begins with tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. ‘One of the historic challenges has been that if you need to do some sort of approval or create the asset and upload it somewhere for somebody to look at, you must go out of your workflow that you’re comfortable with,’ the Director of Product Marketing went on. ‘That’s approval processes that would typically happen in a workflow tool like Workfront can happen directly within the panels of the Photoshop interface and having the various renditions of an asset approved and ready to go live on a website again, can all happen directly within the creative cloud through the Photoshop on the desktop.’ This new way of working is bridging the gap between the two parts of the marketing organization. It is definitely a major step forward. <h3>A seamless journey</h3> Things are moving towards a genuinely seamless integration. Even though we are in the middle of a long ‘journey, which can never be finished’. ‘We designed this seamless integration to take away the cognitive load on the creatives around where to store the assets and enable them to build great marketing assets. Without having to even think about where it’s posted or where the approval process happens.’ <h3>Does that mean one will be able to launch campaigns at the touch of a button?</h3> The idea of launching a campaign based on the single press of a button is a pie in the sky according to Jamie Brighton. There will always be some work to do for marketers. To a large extent, AI-driven creativity tools and this seamless process will bestow more power on marketers. Which they shall use to be more creative. ‘There will still be a place for creativity in this whole process. Once you have simplified the admin element of the creative process, we are just left with the creative process,’ Jamie added. We see AI as a co-pilot and being a co-pilot indicates that there are two people, and two entities involved in this process. So much for those who think that marketers will be replaced by ChatGPT. If anything, our jobs will even become more interesting and more creative because AI will have taken care of all the useless and frustrating repetitive tasks. <h3>Will Marketing Jobs Be Killed by AI?</h3> As a result, Jamie thinks that marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs to AI. Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? We asked Firefly to turn a computer into Frankenstein and even though the answer is quite compelling, Jamie thinks there’s no reason to be afraid. As a matter of fact, we do agree with him too. <blockquote>One Should Absolutely Not be afraid of AI</blockquote> People have had to come to grips with generative AI. ‘Now, they are starting to understand the impact rather than just thinking it’s just another buzzword. I know that there are people fear-mongering about what the potential impact of AI. But we’ve been talking about the potential impacts of it for a number of years now. I was at one of the big analyst conferences in 2018, and the entire keynote was about “Will AI take away X types of different jobs?”’ Let’s be realistic, though, some of the roles will go. ‘But actually, where they go, there will be a greater opportunity in other areas to create models in the first place, to build tools that enable people to interact with AI as a co-pilot. The likes of Microsoft and Accenture are all talking about this concept of AI as a co-pilot. You will always need a human in that marketing process. What we have to do is look at where the opportunities to streamline our processes and look at where the potential opportunities are for AI to just make us happier in our jobs, basically by removing some of that mundanity, removing some of the boring stuff,’ explained Jamie. <h3>Marketing Jobs: AI Will be Our Co-pilot</h3> In conclusion, we marketers should not be afraid of AI. At the same time, we should prepare ourselves for many changes. If we only take things positively, such changes will be exciting opportunities to make our jobs even more interesting. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/06/will-marketing-jobs-be-killed-by-ai/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs to AI</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Marketers should not be afraid of losing their jobs to AI

It’s this time of year, Adobe summit 2023 is taking place on June, 8–9 in London and Visionary Marketing will be there as #adobepartner (disclosure*). After a few years where the event only took place online (check our coverage here). It’s now a hybrid event, which is taking place both online and offline. As we are packing our bags for the event, complete with gimbal, digital camera, iPad, iPhone and personal computer, we are thrilled to be sharing some of the things we are most excited about this event.  Making Preparations for Adobe Summit 2023Adobe Summit 2023 – online* Disclosure, Adobe is a client of Visionary Marketing Live reporting from London on the Adobe Summit 2023 This year, we will be reporting live from the event in London with social media and video snippets. They will be posted online on Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms. And, of course, this very blog. You should therefore expect some live reports from us online on the summit at our dedicated Adobe page at vismktg.info/adobe23. The Adobe Summit 2023 Event Page We are very excited at Visionary Marketing. This is one of these moments when we are going to be able to talk and exchange with some of the most brilliant people in the industry. There’s no way one can avoid it. This year is going to be the year of generative AI. And Adobe is also a major player in this arena. A lot more cautious than others, but the headway shown in the past few weeks have been amazing. Content Production in Businesses, a New Perspective Here, I’m talking about the use of these new technologies with regards to contact production. Tomorrow, I will be publishing a demonstration of Adobe firefly and the firefly integration within Photoshop/These are the most stunning things that I have ever seen in the past 10 years.  These tools aren’t mere features within the existing Adobe suite. They give more creative powers to marketers who want to spruce up their content with relevant, impactful images. The use of generative AI to produce images has already impacted content production too, in a big way. And businesses aren’t immune to it. If we look at it positively, we believe that generative AI for image production, when used positively, responsively and creatively, can be a means for marketers to create more impactful and exciting experiences for their customers. At Visionary Marketing, we have already resorted to various AI generated image tools to populate our blogs in the past few months. There are limitations to this, though. Copyright Issues to start with. A Few Issues and the Way Forward Generative AI is using pre-training (hence the PT in chatG”PT’) and such training takes place from a given database (and very soon the database which is the current copy of the web retained by search engines). Even though those images are not exactly copied from the original, they are indeed inspired by them. This has triggered many issues from a legal point of view, and a couple of lawsuits as well.Mes points — a priori — les plus intéressantsAdobe has followed a different route. The company released a new application within its creative suite which is now currently available as a beta version. It’s called firefly and those who want to try it can go to firefly.adobe.com. The Adobe Summit 2023 will be a great way for us to rub shoulders with those who shape our industry and the future of our marketing teams and the overall profession. Content creation will be challenged in an incredible way now and in the years to come. If we embrace these technologies and use them responsibly, there will be huge opportunities for us, for creativity, for reinventing content marketing. This event is a great opportunity for us to understand what trends are in the works in the marketing industry. We will namely be talking with Luc Damann, President of EMEA and Jamie Brighton, Director of product marketing digital experience and we will be attending many live sessions. We will attend press meetings as well regarding the ‘immersive retail experience’. Last but not least, the Adobe sneaks is a very exciting part of the Adobe Summit. Stay tuned and register now for this amazing event.    The post Making Preparations for Adobe Summit 2023 appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

It’s this time of year, Adobe summit 2023 is taking place on June, 8–9 in London and Visionary Marketing will be there as #adobepartner (disclosure*). After a few years where the event only took place online (check our <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/category/digital-marketing/adobe-marketing-en/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">coverage here</a>). It’s now a hybrid event, which is taking place both online and offline. As we are packing our bags for the event, complete with gimbal, digital camera, iPad, iPhone and personal computer, we are thrilled to be sharing some of the things we are most excited about this event. <h2>Making Preparations for Adobe Summit 2023</h2>Adobe Summit 2023 – online * Disclosure, Adobe is a client of Visionary Marketing <h3>Live reporting from London on the Adobe Summit 2023</h3> This year, we will be reporting live from the event in London with social media and video snippets. They will be posted online on Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms. And, of course, this very blog. You should therefore expect some live reports from us online on the summit at our dedicated Adobe page at <a href="https://vismktg.info/adobe23" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">vismktg.info/adobe23</a>. <a href="http://adobe.ly/43K31Zp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Adobe Summit 2023 <a href="http://adobe.ly/43K31Zp" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Event Page</a> We are very excited at Visionary Marketing. This is one of these moments when we are going to be able to talk and exchange with some of the most brilliant people in the industry. There’s no way one can avoid it. This year is going to be the year of generative AI. And Adobe is also a major player in this arena. A lot more cautious than others, but the headway shown in the past few weeks have been amazing. <h3>Content Production in Businesses, a New Perspective</h3> Here, I’m talking about the use of these new technologies with regards to contact production. Tomorrow, I will be publishing a demonstration of Adobe firefly and the firefly integration within Photoshop/These are the most stunning things that I have ever seen in the past 10 years. These tools aren’t mere features within the existing Adobe suite. They give more creative powers to marketers who want to spruce up their content with relevant, impactful images. The use of generative AI to produce images has already impacted content production too, in a big way. And businesses aren’t immune to it. If we look at it positively, we believe that generative AI for image production, when used positively, responsively and creatively, can be a means for marketers to create more impactful and exciting experiences for their customers. At Visionary Marketing, we have already resorted to <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/11/dall-e-2-ai-redesign-for-companies/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">various AI generated image</a> tools to populate our blogs in the past few months. There are limitations to this, though. Copyright Issues to start with. <h3>A Few Issues and the Way Forward</h3> Generative AI is using pre-training (hence the PT in chatG”PT’) and such training takes place from a given database (and very soon the database which is the current copy of the web retained by search engines). Even though those images are not exactly copied from the original, they are indeed inspired by them. This has triggered many issues from a legal point of view, and a couple of lawsuits as well.Mes points — a priori — les plus intéressants Adobe has followed a different route. The company released a new application within its creative suite which is now currently available as a beta version. It’s called firefly and those who want to try it can go to <a href="http://firefly.adobe.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">firefly.adobe.com</a>. The Adobe Summit 2023 will be a great way for us to rub shoulders with those who shape our industry and the future of our marketing teams and the overall profession. Content creation will be challenged in an incredible way now and in the years to come. If we embrace these technologies and use them responsibly, there will be huge opportunities for us, for creativity, for reinventing content marketing. This event is a great opportunity for us to understand what trends are in the works in the marketing industry. We will namely be talking with Luc Damann, President of EMEA and Jamie Brighton, Director of product marketing digital experience and we will be attending many live sessions. We will attend press meetings as well regarding the ‘immersive retail experience’. Last but not least, the <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/03/rise-of-digital/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Adobe sneaks</a> is a very exciting part of the Adobe Summit. Stay tuned and register now for this amazing event. <a href="http://adobe.ly/43K31Zp" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a> The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/06/adobe-summit-2023/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Making Preparations for Adobe Summit 2023</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Making Preparations for Adobe Summit 2023

Are digital experiences getting in the way of customers’ experiences? We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joseph Pine, author of the article titled ‘Are Your Digital Tools Wasting Your Customers’ Time?” Having previously interviewed him, we knew he had an interesting perspective on the matter. He takes a close look at the way in which the economy is working with technology in order to change the way people interact with businesses. In his mind, digital experiences go way beyond the interaction of humans and screens. He also debunks myths regarding customer experience and how it is not always better to go digital. In fact, companies often try to eradicate human interaction thinking it will be beneficial when it actually does the opposite.  Is digital wasting your customer’s time? Joe Pine is the author of ‘Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want’ as well as multiple other books and he talked to us here at Visionary Marketing about digital experiences. No one wants digital tools that waste their time. What everyone wants are digital experiences that offer time well spent One of the key things to understanding the nature of life is that the most precious resource on the planet is the time of individual human beings.  As a consequence, the worst thing companies can do is waste their customers’ time. Yet, that’s what companies do all the time by asking for things that they already know. Businesses make customers go through procedures that they have defined as important, but that aren’t really to the end user.  ‘We increasingly want our time to be saved around any type of service, digital or not, so that we can spend that time on experiences that we value,’ Joe said.  Digital experiences don’t always equate to good experiences: people are frustrated when their digital experience is not up to their standards. Image generated by Midjourney Digital Experiences Don’t Always Mean Good Experiences People usually assume that going digital is going to improve customer experience. However, that is not always the case. A lot of great experiences come from interactions with other people. Indeed, many companies try to eliminate such exchanges by going fully digital without realising that people want to interact and connect with companies and vice versa. Some of these reasons are valid, but more often than not, it’s wasted time because when we try to artificially create these moments they get in the way of daily communication. Why are companies doing this? What are they doing wrong? A key impetus for it is that it’s going to save companies a lot of money so that we don’t need customer-facing people. Instead of recognising again, that’s where much of the value comes in. When consumers go digital, it doesn’t mean they want less human interaction. In fact, it is the other way around, they want faster and better human interactions. Moreover, such businesses are very product-centric instead of customer-centric. Instead of understanding the customer and what it is that they’re trying to accomplish right now, they want the customer to follow the journey that they’ve laid out in advance. Then again, that’s not the journey that the customer wants to follow. ‘Perhaps this is happening because businesses have too few people who care about gaining customer insight,’ Joe assumed. Myth: Building frictionless digital experiences will increase engagement People engage when smart tools understand them, but what is a smart tool? A smart tool is one that is using data. The data that it learns from you individually to be able to address your needs. So it’s a matter of sensing and responding. Then such a smart tool can understand what it is that customers want at this moment and it can act accordingly. For instance, think of smart thermostats that learn when you get up, or what kind of temperature the home owner likes in the winter.  Myth: Creating more ‘moments’ for customers will lead to more value. In fact, ‘moments’ are fairly product-centric. They’re what we want our customers to do and how we want them to engage with us. Whereas ‘modes’, are what the individual customer wants to accomplish. What is digital context? Digital context is just a great term that my co-author of the HBR article, Dave Naughton, came up with. The digital context is really about understanding, ‘What it is that I’m trying to accomplish right now, and it requires access to all of the digital data that is out there that will explain what mode a business can use to enhance its experience in banking or e-shopping, for instance’. The problem with most businesses is that they have no data. And they can’t provide any experience without digital context. A good example is my client Carnival Corporation. They make good use of digital contexts. The cruise company created a digital tool called the Ocean Medallion. A device that allows them to understand the digital context that you are in while on the cruise ship. They can recognise every individual. Every employee has a tablet with them that when you get close, your device pops your picture and information up so they can greet you by name. It also has past interactions, your itinerary, what you’re trying to do, where you’re going and so forth. Smart Digital Experiences vs Genius Digital Experiences Genius experiences are the ones that understand everything that’s going on. They understand the ecosystem and grab all that digital context to anticipate what mode you’re in and then vastly multiply the number of jobs that it can do for you. That means they customise and individualise to you as well as being responsive. For example, Alexa or Google Home. They have access to all your information. The genius level is, for instance, when you say ‘Alexa play some music’ they will play music based on what mood you’re in, who you’re with, what time of day it is, what you’re doing and trying to accomplish because it understands all of that.  ‘Alexa or Google Home can reach genius level because they have access to all our information’ [Image Google Chrome dinosaur by Jumpstory]Although, when we reach these genius experiences, there is always the possibility that people will start to find it as too much and even a little ‘creepy’. For this reason, it is important to resort to genius experiences only when the person wants and how the person wants it done. As opposed to bringing in things that maybe it should not know about the customer until you opt in. At one point it will be necessary to stop and ask yourself whether you still want to continue or make changes. Machines are taking over and it is evident more and more each day, which is why is important to work with them and craft better digital experiences for ourselves as well as our customers. More on Joe Pine with Visionary Marketing: Experience Economy: Great Experiences Begin with Great Service Amazon’s Author Joe Pine’s Page here   The post Are Digital Experiences Hampering Customer Experiences? appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Are digital experiences getting in the way of customers’ experiences? We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Joseph Pine, author of the article titled <a href="https://vismktg.info/40E6mrg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">‘Are Your Digital Tools Wasting Your Customers’ Time?”</a> Having previously interviewed him, we knew he had an interesting perspective on the matter. He takes a close look at the way in which the economy is working with technology in order to change the way people interact with businesses. In his mind, digital experiences go way beyond the interaction of humans and screens. He also debunks myths regarding customer experience and how it is not always better to go digital. In fact, companies often try to eradicate human interaction thinking it will be beneficial when it actually does the opposite.  Is digital wasting your customer’s time? Joe Pine is the author of ‘Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want’ as well as multiple other books and he talked to us here at Visionary Marketing about digital experiences. <blockquote>No one wants digital tools that waste their time. What everyone wants are digital experiences that offer time well spent</blockquote> One of the key things to understanding the nature of life is that the most precious resource on the planet is the time of individual human beings. As a consequence, the worst thing companies can do is waste their customers’ time. Yet, that’s what companies do all the time by asking for things that they already know. Businesses make customers go through procedures that they have defined as important, but that aren’t really to the end user. ‘We increasingly want our time to be saved around any type of service, digital or not, so that we can spend that time on experiences that we value,’ Joe said.  Digital experiences don’t always equate to good experiences: people are frustrated when their digital experience is not up to their standards. Image generated by Midjourney <h3>Digital Experiences Don’t Always Mean Good Experiences</h3> People usually assume that going digital is going to improve customer experience. However, that is not always the case. A lot of great experiences come from interactions with other people. Indeed, many companies try to eliminate such exchanges by going fully digital without realising that people want to interact and connect with companies and vice versa. Some of these reasons are valid, but more often than not, it’s wasted time because when we try to artificially create these moments they get in the way of daily communication. <h3>Why are companies doing this? What are they doing wrong?</h3> A key impetus for it is that it’s going to save companies a lot of money so that we don’t need customer-facing people. Instead of recognising again, that’s where much of the value comes in. When consumers go digital, it doesn’t mean they want less human interaction. In fact, it is the other way around, they want faster and better human interactions. Moreover, such businesses are very product-centric instead of customer-centric. Instead of understanding the customer and what it is that they’re trying to accomplish right now, they want the customer to follow the journey that they’ve laid out in advance. Then again, that’s not the journey that the customer wants to follow. ‘Perhaps this is happening because businesses have too few people who care about gaining customer insight,’ Joe assumed. <blockquote>Myth: Building frictionless digital experiences will increase engagement</blockquote> <h3>People engage when smart tools understand them, but what is a smart tool?</h3> A smart tool is one that is using data. The data that it learns from you individually to be able to address your needs. So it’s a matter of sensing and responding. Then such a smart tool can understand what it is that customers want at this moment and it can act accordingly. For instance, think of smart thermostats that learn when you get up, or what kind of temperature the home owner likes in the winter. <blockquote>Myth: Creating more ‘moments’ for customers will lead to more value. In fact, ‘moments’ are fairly product-centric. They’re what we want our customers to do and how we want them to engage with us. Whereas ‘modes’, are what the individual customer wants to accomplish.</blockquote> What is digital context? Digital context is just a great term that my co-author of the HBR article, Dave Naughton, came up with. The digital context is really about understanding, ‘What it is that I’m trying to accomplish right now, and it requires access to all of the digital data that is out there that will explain what mode a business can use to enhance its experience in banking or e-shopping, for instance’. The problem with most businesses is that they have no data. And they can’t provide any experience without digital context. A good example is my client Carnival Corporation. They make good use of digital contexts. The cruise company created a digital tool called the Ocean Medallion. A device that allows them to understand the digital context that you are in while on the cruise ship. They can recognise every individual. Every employee has a tablet with them that when you get close, your device pops your picture and information up so they can greet you by name. It also has past interactions, your itinerary, what you’re trying to do, where you’re going and so forth. <h3>Smart Digital Experiences vs Genius Digital Experiences</h3> Genius experiences are the ones that understand everything that’s going on. They understand the ecosystem and grab all that digital context to anticipate what mode you’re in and then vastly multiply the number of jobs that it can do for you. That means they customise and individualise to you as well as being responsive. For example, Alexa or Google Home. They have access to all your information. The genius level is, for instance, when you say ‘Alexa play some music’ they will play music based on what mood you’re in, who you’re with, what time of day it is, what you’re doing and trying to accomplish because it understands all of that.  ‘Alexa or Google Home can reach genius level because they have access to all our information’ [Image Google Chrome dinosaur by Jumpstory]Although, when we reach these genius experiences, there is always the possibility that people will start to find it as too much and even a little ‘creepy’. For this reason, it is important to resort to genius experiences only when the person wants and how the person wants it done. As opposed to bringing in things that maybe it should not know about the customer until you opt in. At one point it will be necessary to stop and ask yourself whether you still want to continue or make changes. Machines are taking over and it is evident more and more each day, which is why is important to work with them and craft better digital experiences for ourselves as well as our customers. More on Joe Pine with Visionary Marketing: <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2017/12/experience-economy-joe-pine/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Experience Economy: Great Experiences Begin with Great Service</a> Amazon’s Author Joe Pine’s Page <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/B.-Joseph-Pine/author/B001JP9UY2?ref=ap_rdr&amp;store_ref=ap_rdr&amp;isDramIntegrated=true&amp;shoppingPortalEnabled=true" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a> The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/04/digital-experiences/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Are Digital Experiences Hampering Customer Experiences?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Are Digital Experiences Hampering Customer Experiences?

Could one reduce the carbon footprint of digital advertising? When it comes to carbon emissions, digital is often criticised, and programmatic advertising in particular. How big is that footprint? And how could one minimise it? How are advertisers reacting? A recent Scope3 study sheds light on this subject. It shows that the digital marketing industry can also contribute to the common effort. This is what Fabien Omont, a representative of Adform, a Danish provider of solutions for digital advertising, told me when I interviewed him. Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Digital Advertising Isn’t Mission ImpossibleScope3 has just released a 2023 brief that makes the case for a more responsible digital advertising industry. The link to the study is at the end of the post.Disclosure: This podcast was produced in partnership with Ecran mobile on behalf of Adform, an Adtech provider. We have written this post with our usual objective of independence and authenticity.  Fabien Omont is Product Marketing Director at Adform. The Adtech company works with Scope3. The latter has just published its report on the State of Sustainable Advertising. By their own admission, Scope3 is ‘the only company to measure end-to-end emissions from across the media and advertising supply chain’. The Carbon Footprint of Digital Advertising Scope3 has estimated the CO2 emissions from programmatic advertising at 215,000 metric tonnes of CO2 per month in 5 countries alone. These are Australia, France, Great Britain, Germany and the USA. The US Alone Accounts for Nearly Half of These Emissions Scope3’s measurement of the carbon footprint of digital advertising shows that it emits 215,000 tonnes of CO2 every month in 5 countries (Australia, France, the UK, Germany and the US). This would correspond to the consumption of nearly 24 million gallons of gasoline (91 million litres of petrol) each month. Click the picture to enlargeIn the UK only, each month programmatic advertising emits 30.6k metric tonnes of CO2 ‘Digital advertising has become widespread,’ explains Fabien. The Internet amounts to 65.15% of the overall advertising expenditure for a worldwide  total of over US$550 billion. This is indeed considerable.   ‘But beyond these figures, it is important to understand the main factors behind the carbon footprint of digital advertising,’ Fabien went on. 4 top drivers of digital advertising’s carbon footprint  Driver number one is the consumption of the terminals that Internet users are resorting to. The second driver is how publishers will distribute content around the world. When a person reads an article, questions arise: where and how was it loaded? How was it distributed through the networks up to the user’s terminal? The third driver is the creative distribution. Has it been optimised and what is its impact on bandwidth usage? Over the years, as bandwidth has improved, the visuals have become bulkier. This has an undeniable ecological knock-on effect. The fourth and final driver is ad selection. This is the process that is put in place for the Internet user to receive an ad.  Advertising Selection Is Singled Out The ad selection criterion is the number one driver in the carbon footprint of digital ads. This is what the Scope3 report says. Click to enlarge the picture.‘Ad selection definitely is the main driver behind carbon emissions of digital advertising. It weighs a lot more than terminal usage of even media distribution,’ Fabien explained. 60% of the carbon footprint of programmatic advertising is due to ad selectionProgrammatic advertising is not only complex, it is also resource intensive. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce this carbon footprint.‘The reality of digital advertising,’ explains Fabien, ‘is that the practice of header bidding has become almost universal amongst publishers.Header-bidding infographic by Sortable Multiplying advertising calls “This is a practice which, to put it simply, consists in increasing the amount of advertising calls to optimise monetisation, i.e. generating double or triple bids, which will inflate the price of the winning bid and therefore make more money in the end.” This approach is quite commendable from the point of view of monetisation and optimisation of the publisher’s income, Fabien explained, but its impact on carbon footprint is huge. Advertisers are paying attention However, advertisers are aware of the problem. This is a good sign Fabien Omont said. Advertisers’ attitudes are changing and that’s good news “Advertisers are very curious about what’s going on and the initiatives taken by start-ups like Scope3 and other tech players like Adform,” explains Fabien. “Above all, advertising associations and media agencies have done a fantastic job of raising awareness amongst advertisers.” In addition, legislation shall be enforced in the near future. The publication of carbon footprint numbers for digital advertising is indeed likely to become a regulatory requirement. Getting Results Isn’t That Hard “We have developed a solution for optimising the reduction of the carbon footprint of digital advertising,” Fabien Omont went on. “And the good news is that getting some good results is quite easy.” Carbon emissions from digital advertising can very easily be cut in half “The range of the impact of advertisers’ carbon footprint is very broad. The most virtuous advertisers will emit 55 grams of CO2 per thousand impressions,” explains Fabien, “the highest threshold, goes up to 4,782 grams. However, Adform has noticed that the vast majority of publishers are well below these extremes, Fabien said. Decarbonising programmatic advertising ‘If we tackle the top 10% of CO2 emitters, we will soon see a total reduction of 40–50% of carbon emissions due to digital advertising.’ In conclusion, the problem isn’t hopeless. Just by improving practices on the ground, one could achieve satisfactory results.  Important Notice on the Weight of Digital within the World’s Carbon Emissions It’s worthy of note that, according to the World Economic Forum, “Studies estimate that digital technologies already contribute between 1.4% to 5.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions”. Digital technology isn’t therefore responsible for the majority of our carbon footprint, far from that.  It is far less to blame than the usual suspects, namely transportation, the manufacturing industry and agriculture, as well as central heating. It should also be noted that carbon emissions are the most significant cause of the pollution we are witnessing but its far from being the only one. In any case, every effort counts. And those made by the digital industry are to be welcomed and encouraged. The post Reducing the carbon footprint of digital advertising appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Could one reduce the carbon footprint of digital advertising? When it comes to carbon emissions, digital is often criticised, and programmatic advertising in particular. How big is that footprint? And how could one minimise it? How are advertisers reacting? A recent Scope3 study sheds light on this subject. It shows that the digital marketing industry can also contribute to the common effort. This is what Fabien Omont, a representative of Adform, a Danish provider of solutions for digital advertising, told me when I interviewed him. <h2>Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Digital Advertising Isn’t Mission Impossible</h2>Scope3 has just released a 2023 brief that makes the case for a more responsible digital advertising industry. The link to the study is at the end of the post. Disclosure: This podcast was produced in partnership with Ecran mobile on behalf of <a href="https://adform.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Adform</a>, an Adtech provider. We have written this post with our usual objective of independence and authenticity. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabienomont/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Fabien Omont</a> is Product Marketing Director at Adform. The Adtech company works with Scope3. The latter has just published its report on the State of Sustainable Advertising. By their own admission, <a href="https://www.scope3.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Scope3</a> is ‘the only company to measure end-to-end emissions from across the media and advertising supply chain’. <h3>The Carbon Footprint of Digital Advertising</h3> Scope3 has estimated the CO2 emissions from programmatic advertising at 215,000 metric tonnes of CO2 per month in 5 countries alone. These are Australia, France, Great Britain, Germany and the USA. <blockquote>The US Alone Accounts for Nearly Half of These Emissions</blockquote> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/screenshot-2023-04-24-at-082009.png" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Scope3’s measurement of the carbon footprint of digital advertising shows that it emits 215,000 tonnes of CO2 every month in 5 countries (Australia, France, the UK, Germany and the US). This would correspond to the consumption of nearly 24 million gallons of gasoline (91 million litres of petrol) each month. Click the picture to enlarge <blockquote>In the UK only, each month programmatic advertising emits 30.6k metric tonnes of CO2</blockquote> ‘Digital advertising has become widespread,’ explains Fabien. The Internet amounts to 65.15% of the overall advertising expenditure for a worldwide  total of over US$550 billion. This is indeed considerable. <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/04/digital-advertising-carbon-footprint/statistic-id275806-programmatic-ad-spend-worldwide-2017-2026/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/04/digital-advertising-carbon-footprint/statistic-id269333-distribution-of-global-advertising-spending-2024-by-medium/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> ‘But beyond these figures, it is important to understand the main factors behind the carbon footprint of digital advertising,’ Fabien went on. <h3>4 top drivers of digital advertising’s carbon footprint</h3> <ol> <li>Driver number one is the consumption of the terminals that Internet users are resorting to.</li> <li>The second driver is how publishers will distribute content around the world. When a person reads an article, questions arise: where and how was it loaded? How was it distributed through the networks up to the user’s terminal?</li> <li>The third driver is the creative distribution. Has it been optimised and what is its impact on bandwidth usage? Over the years, as bandwidth has improved, the visuals have become bulkier. This has an undeniable ecological knock-on effect.</li> <li>The fourth and final driver is ad selection. This is the process that is put in place for the Internet user to receive an ad.</li> </ol> <h3>Advertising Selection Is Singled Out</h3> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/screenshot-2023-04-24-at-085139.png" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The ad selection criterion is the number one driver in the carbon footprint of digital ads. This is what the Scope3 report says. Click to enlarge the picture. ‘Ad selection definitely is the main driver behind carbon emissions of digital advertising. It weighs a lot more than terminal usage of even media distribution,’ Fabien explained. <blockquote>60% of the carbon footprint of programmatic advertising is due to ad selection</blockquote>Programmatic advertising is not only complex, it is also resource intensive. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce this carbon footprint. ‘The reality of digital advertising,’ explains Fabien, ‘is that the practice of header bidding has become almost universal amongst publishers.Header-bidding infographic by <a href="https://sortable.com/ad-ops/what-you-need-to-know-about-header-bidding/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Sortable</a> <h3>Multiplying advertising calls</h3> “This is a practice which, to put it simply, consists in increasing the amount of advertising calls to optimise monetisation, i.e. generating double or triple bids, which will inflate the price of the winning bid and therefore make more money in the end.” This approach is quite commendable from the point of view of monetisation and optimisation of the publisher’s income, Fabien explained, but its impact on carbon footprint is huge. <h3>Advertisers are paying attention</h3> However, advertisers are aware of the problem. This is a good sign Fabien Omont said. <blockquote>Advertisers’ attitudes are changing and that’s good news</blockquote> “Advertisers are very curious about what’s going on and the initiatives taken by start-ups like Scope3 and other tech players like Adform,” explains Fabien. “Above all, advertising associations and media agencies have done a fantastic job of raising awareness amongst advertisers.” In addition, legislation shall be enforced in the near future. The publication of carbon footprint numbers for digital advertising is indeed likely to become a regulatory requirement. <h3>Getting Results Isn’t That Hard</h3> “We have developed a solution for optimising the reduction of the carbon footprint of digital advertising,” Fabien Omont went on. “And the good news is that getting some good results is quite easy.” <blockquote>Carbon emissions from digital advertising can very easily be cut in half</blockquote> “The range of the impact of advertisers’ carbon footprint is very broad. The most virtuous advertisers will emit 55 grams of CO2 per thousand impressions,” explains Fabien, “the highest threshold, goes up to 4,782 grams. However, Adform has noticed that the vast majority of publishers are well below these extremes, Fabien said. <h3>Decarbonising programmatic advertising</h3> ‘If we tackle the top 10% of CO2 emitters, we will soon see a total reduction of 40–50% of carbon emissions due to digital advertising.’ In conclusion, the problem isn’t hopeless. Just by improving practices on the ground, one could achieve satisfactory results. <a href="https://h6w3mw87iyl.typeform.com/to/z0pJTDXU?typeform-source=www.scope3.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <h4>Important Notice on the Weight of Digital within the World’s Carbon Emissions</h4> It’s worthy of note that, according to the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/coronavirus-pandemic-streaming-video-calls-data-environment-emissions/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">World Economic Forum</a>, “Studies estimate that digital technologies already contribute between 1.4% to 5.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions”. Digital technology isn’t therefore responsible for the majority of our carbon footprint, far from that.  It is far less to blame than the usual suspects, namely transportation, the manufacturing industry and agriculture, as well as central heating. It should also be noted that carbon emissions are the most significant cause of the pollution we are witnessing but its far from being the only one. In any case, every effort counts. And those made by the digital industry are to be welcomed and encouraged. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/04/digital-advertising-carbon-footprint/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Reducing the carbon footprint of digital advertising</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Reducing the carbon footprint of digital advertising

Platform business models facilitate the exchange of goods and services between two or more interdependent groups, often producers and consumers. They are responsible for totally new ways of doing business. In our interview with Benoît Reillier from Launchworks.co, we discuss his book entitled Platform Strategy, from which he derived a cartoon version. In this book he delivers his predictions on the future of platform business. To him, platform business models will not replace all kinds of traditional business. They should inspire rather than scare, as they offer boundless opportunities for mixed business models in the future. Platform Business Models Today and in the FuturePlatform Business Models, beautifully illustrated by Louise Plantin is also available as a full-fledged book.Understanding Platform Business Models According to Benoît, some examples of companies that follow the Platform Business model are Airbnb, Uber, Google, and online marketplaces such as eBay, and Amazon. However, as the age of social media progresses, content from companies such as YouTube, TikTok, and other social platforms is now making up a sizeable part of the platform business.Uber is the epitome of platform business models but there are many more of that ilk.Looking at consumer behaviour, there are different ways platform businesses can be deemed successful. Depending on how they fulfil the different needs and wants of a customer. This includes travel websites like Expedia which make it easier to book an entire trip on one website or others like Tinder when one is looking for a romantic partner. Benoît explained that platform business might not be seen as a straightforward concept, as it may have multiple definitions. What makes that kind of business different from other types of businesses is that their organisations are entirely built around a business model that attracts participants, matches them, connects them, and enables them to transact. Benoît Reillier added, ‘Marketplaces create value by allowing people to be connected.’ Now thanks to Benoît we have a much clearer definition of what Platform business is. Platform business model means no Value Chain As depicted in Benoît’s Platform Strategy cartoon opus, platform businesses do not derive their competitive advantage from the quality of their value chain like traditional business ventures.The business model of platforms is definitely different from that of value chainsThis is because traditional firm dynamics starts with buying material things and adding value to them. An example he gave, is that of a car manufacturer that builds and creates a car out of raw materials or semi-finished goods. Traditional business models are based on linear processes that are resulting from their internal abilities to turn these manufacturing processes into value for the benefit of their customers. Platform businesses are entirely different, Benoît Reillier stressed, since they, ‘are merely orchestrating their ecosystems’.We’ve asked Midjourney to/imagine the difference between traditional and Plaftorm-based shopping and it came up with that…Platform businesses do not have to worry about inventories. They aren’t buying anything from anyone. All they do is connecting people who own something with people who want to buy it. Platform Business models are underpinned by principles that are not applicable to traditional businesses, Benoît Reillier found out. There are two main rules, the network effect and price elasticity. The Network Effect ‘Networks are characterised by positive externalities. All the members of the network benefit from it. The more there are new members joining that network, the bigger its value for all its members.’ That’s what Benoît calls the network effect. A major underlying principle that confers value on the platform. ‘At the outset, it’s very hard to convince new people to join a new network,’ he added. If there is a network with just the two of us, it won’t fare very well. We’ll then have to recruit new members, relentlessly. ‘Yet, once you’ve reached a certain critical mass, maybe thousands of members, what happens is that people will start to spot that network and its value, and it will then start to grow organically.’ Price Elasticity It may appear to some that setting prices may be easier for platforms than traditional businesses. This is because they are masters of their own ecosystem, or so it seems. However, Benoît warns us that appearances may be deceptive. ‘Even though they seem to have full control over their pricing structures,’ Benoît added, ‘platforms are walking on eggs when they decide to change them. Because these network ecosystems are complex systems, changing the way you charge one of your members may have a serious impact on all the others.’ In other words, if a platform business is a tad too inconsiderate when changing its pricing structure, it can start losing members. ‘If your platform business creates too much friction, it might become less attractive to newcomers,’ Benoît emphasised. ‘Traditional firms do not give too much thought to price elasticity. But platforms need to be more circumspect in that regard.’ The Future of Platform Business As platforms gain ever more popularity, there have been concerns about platform business models taking over traditional business models and disrupting the economy. Thus, Airbnb has attracted much criticism about its disturbance of the hospitality business in many places. It happened in New York, London or Paris for instance. There are many other examples such as Amazon. The Seattle Internet company has raised fears of disruption of retail business by ecommerce. And more recently, the foray of the retail behemoth (now employing over 1.2 million staffers worldwide) into food retailing has triggered even more concerns. However, Benoît doesn’t believe that platforms will be the terminators of traditional shopping. Platform strategy by Laure Claire and Benoît Reillier – Routledge – 2017‘In the future, many organisations will mix different types of business models. Value chains will still be around in 30 years’ time, and platform business models too. Businesses will undoubtedly combine several business models. Depending on the industry and the product, platforms will be the preferred business model, and for other industries or products, value chains will still be instrumental in organising the business.’  Maybe some companies will conduct part of their business in the Metaverse, but other more traditional business models will persist  ‘Considering all the technologies that are cropping up now,’ Benoît concluded, ‘including Web3 and the immersive Web, this mix of different business models will enable us to manage distributed organisations in a much better way, through the combination of all these business models.’ Fears that Uber and other platforms will do away with any other types of businesses, as we thought barely 10 years ago, were probably exaggerated. Platform business models could on the contrary be one more string to the bows of traditional businesses who had better think how they could reinvent themselves. Major platform business best practices should inspire rather than scare you.  You may download the illustrated version of the book from the Launchworks.co website. The post Understanding Platform Business Models Now and in the Future appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Platform business models facilitate the exchange of goods and services between two or more interdependent groups, often producers and consumers. They are responsible for totally new ways of doing business. In our interview with Benoît Reillier from <a href="http://Launchworks.co" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Launchworks.co</a>, we discuss his book entitled Platform Strategy, from which he derived a cartoon version. In this book he delivers his predictions on the future of platform business. To him, platform business models will not replace all kinds of traditional business. They should inspire rather than scare, as they offer boundless opportunities for mixed business models in the future. <h2>Platform Business Models Today and in the Future</h2>Platform Business Models, beautifully illustrated by Louise Plantin is also available as a full-fledged book. <h3>Understanding Platform Business Models</h3> According to Benoît, some examples of companies that follow the Platform Business model are Airbnb, Uber, Google, and online marketplaces such as eBay, and Amazon. However, as the age of social media progresses, content from companies such as YouTube, TikTok, and other social platforms is now making up a sizeable part of the platform business.Uber is the epitome of platform business models but there are many more of that ilk. Looking at consumer behaviour, there are different ways platform businesses can be deemed successful. Depending on how they fulfil the different needs and wants of a customer. This includes travel websites like Expedia which make it easier to book an entire trip on one website or others like Tinder when one is looking for a romantic partner. Benoît explained that platform business might not be seen as a straightforward concept, as it may have multiple definitions. What makes that kind of business different from other types of businesses is that their organisations are entirely built around a business model that attracts participants, matches them, connects them, and enables them to transact. Benoît Reillier added, ‘Marketplaces create value by allowing people to be connected.’ Now thanks to Benoît we have a much clearer definition of what Platform business is. <h3>Platform business model means no Value Chain</h3> As depicted in Benoît’s Platform Strategy cartoon opus, platform businesses do not derive their competitive advantage from the quality of their value chain like traditional business ventures.The business model of platforms is definitely different from that of value chains This is because traditional firm dynamics starts with buying material things and adding value to them. An example he gave, is that of a car manufacturer that builds and creates a car out of raw materials or semi-finished goods. Traditional business models are based on linear processes that are resulting from their internal abilities to turn these manufacturing processes into value for the benefit of their customers. Platform businesses are entirely different, Benoît Reillier stressed, since they, ‘are merely orchestrating their ecosystems’.We’ve asked Midjourney to/imagine the difference between traditional and Plaftorm-based shopping and it came up with that… Platform businesses do not have to worry about inventories. They aren’t buying anything from anyone. All they do is connecting people who own something with people who want to buy it. Platform Business models are underpinned by principles that are not applicable to traditional businesses, Benoît Reillier found out. There are two main rules, the network effect and price elasticity. <h3>The Network Effect</h3> ‘Networks are characterised by positive externalities. All the members of the network benefit from it. The more there are new members joining that network, the bigger its value for all its members.’ That’s what Benoît calls the network effect. A major underlying principle that confers value on the platform. ‘At the outset, it’s very hard to convince new people to join a new network,’ he added. If there is a network with just the two of us, it won’t fare very well. We’ll then have to recruit new members, relentlessly. ‘Yet, once you’ve reached a certain critical mass, maybe thousands of members, what happens is that people will start to spot that network and its value, and it will then start to grow organically.’ <h3>Price Elasticity</h3> It may appear to some that setting prices may be easier for platforms than traditional businesses. This is because they are masters of their own ecosystem, or so it seems. However, Benoît warns us that appearances may be deceptive. ‘Even though they seem to have full control over their pricing structures,’ Benoît added, ‘platforms are walking on eggs when they decide to change them. Because these network ecosystems are complex systems, changing the way you charge one of your members may have a serious impact on all the others.’ In other words, if a platform business is a tad too inconsiderate when changing its pricing structure, it can start losing members. ‘If your platform business creates too much friction, it might become less attractive to newcomers,’ Benoît emphasised. ‘Traditional firms do not give too much thought to price elasticity. But platforms need to be more circumspect in that regard.’ <h3>The Future of Platform Business</h3> As platforms gain ever more popularity, there have been concerns about platform business models taking over traditional business models and disrupting the economy. Thus, Airbnb has attracted much criticism about its disturbance of the hospitality business in many places. It happened in New York, London or Paris for instance. There are many other examples such as Amazon. The Seattle Internet company has raised fears of disruption of retail business by ecommerce. And more recently, the foray of the retail behemoth (now employing over 1.2 million staffers worldwide) into food retailing has triggered even more concerns. However, Benoît doesn’t believe that platforms will be the terminators of traditional shopping. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Strategy-Communities-Networks-Business/dp/1472480244/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GTPS2LONZOTI&amp;keywords=platform+strategy&amp;qid=1678994331&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=platform+strategy%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C151&amp;sr=1-1&amp;asin=1472480244&amp;revisionId=&amp;format=4&amp;depth=1" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Platform strategy</a> by Laure Claire and Benoît Reillier – Routledge – 2017 ‘In the future, many organisations will mix different types of business models. Value chains will still be around in 30 years’ time, and platform business models too. Businesses will undoubtedly combine several business models. Depending on the industry and the product, platforms will be the preferred business model, and for other industries or products, value chains will still be instrumental in organising the business.’ <blockquote> Maybe some companies will conduct part of their business in the Metaverse, but other more traditional business models will persist </blockquote> ‘Considering all the technologies that are cropping up now,’ Benoît concluded, ‘including Web3 and the immersive Web, this mix of different business models will enable us to manage distributed organisations in a much better way, through the combination of all these business models.’ Fears that Uber and other platforms will do away with any other types of businesses, as we thought barely 10 years ago, were probably exaggerated. Platform business models could on the contrary be one more string to the bows of traditional businesses who had better think how they could reinvent themselves. Major platform business best practices should inspire rather than scare you. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Strategy-Communities-Networks-Business/dp/1472480244/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GTPS2LONZOTI&amp;keywords=platform+strategy&amp;qid=1678994331&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=platform+strategy%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C151&amp;sr=1-1" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a> You may download the illustrated version of the book <a href="https://www.launchworks.co/platform-strategy-illustrated/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">from the Launchworks.co</a> website. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/03/platform-business-models/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Understanding Platform Business Models Now and in the Future</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Understanding Platform Business Models Now and in the Future

Social media requires proper and effective visuals for your posts to be more impactful. Any first-grade student knows that. Seasoned marketers do too. That said, a recent study by Vistacreate and the Content Marketing Institute showed that there is room for improvement in that area. In this report, CMI’s Robert Rose, founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for Content Marketing, urged marketers to better test their assumptions. The report also provides in-depth insights regarding social media visuals and how to use them effectively. How to Use Social Media Visuals More EffectivelySocial Media Visuals are important CMI and Vista create conclude in a 2023 study. Nonetheless, marketers should be spending a little more time testing rather than creating visuals for themselves  –  This is a Midjourney-generated image of a painter crafting a social media visual for Twitter.The Current State of Social Media Visuals We all know, at least intuitively that social media visuals are important. A recent survey by CMI and Vista Create is bringing evidence that our gut feeling is true. It also points out that marketers should test their visuals more carefully. A 2023 Social Media Visuals study by CMI and Vistacreate.The survey results in a nutshell CMI selected a sample of marketers for this survey. 167 respondents were qualified for analysis and they answered the institute’s questions in June 2022. Here is a visual representation of the sample with a slide taken from the report.  Worthy of note is the fact that B2B and B2B+B2C add up to 69% of the total sample. The survey is mostly geared towards business-to-business. B2C, other and not-for-profit make up the remaining 31% of the survey respondents. The survey was essentially carried out in the US (68% of respondents).The survey results in a nutshellCMI have derived five major insights from their survey Insight number one: test your assumptions The authors of the report insist that too many marketers are behaving according to their own tastes rather than testing how effective their visuals are. This is the main finding of the report. Whereas marketing is about measuring customer response and the effectiveness of one’s messages and campaigns, it seems that most marketers are instead relying on their own tastes.Social media visuals designed by Leonardo da Vinci? Anything is possible with Midjourney, but not sure it’s a good thing, though.It might be a good idea if your brand is a trendsetter like Apple or Gucci. When Android released its new flat design look and feel with its 4.0 Icecream sandwich version, it set a new trend for all to follow. Apple followed in their footsteps in 2013. At the time, most of us found flat design awful and too minimalistic. After a little while our tastes changed and we became used to it.Marketers have this tendency to craft beautiful images that they like rather than pictures that are either effective or appeal to their audiences. Whereas this might be a good idea if you are Apple or Gucci, it may not if your brand is not a luxury or a beloved brand. The above picture is a Midjourney-generated image. A painter is creating a huge social media visual for Twitter with a paintbrush.This happened because every one of us had an Android or Apple iPhone in our pockets. In fact, we didn’t have a choice. For visual social ads, audiences do have a choice to click or not to click. The perspective is very different. Hence the testing. Insight number 2: look at visual social media as a platform The authors are claiming that visual content creation for social media is moving in-house.Nearly 50% of brands don’t have a separate budget for social media visual content. Yet, creating social media-friendly visuals is a job in its own right and a budget should be allocated to this.60% of marketers said they create visual content themselves, 56% have in-house professional designers, and only 28% use freelance designers (the overlap is because some respondents indicated all three options) What is strange though is that the authors of the report found out that ‘counter-intuitively, small businesses are more likely to have a separate budget for visual social content, as compared to larger companies (47% vs. 22%)’. The authors claim that this is a good thing, but that brands need to have a least a small budget for content creation. After all, content creation is a job, not a hobby. Insight number 3: build repeatable processes When looking at what kinds of visuals are more successful than others, CMI’s survey consistently highlighted 3 main content types:  Video content Custom photos (as opposed to stock images) Infographics     Instagram’s top three are a bit different with ‘stories’ coming third. Reels on Facebook didn’t seem to catch up, though. Videos are often quoted as being the top performers. That said, very few marketers manage to make their videos viral without paid social media ads. We definitely recommend brands to work on their word-of-mouth strategies before moving to ad-driven social activation. Insight number 4: match those processes with a documented and formal budget As to effectiveness, LinkedIn is definitely most brands’ pet social platform. LinkedIn scored the highest at 56% (rating it as extremely or very effective), followed by Facebook (38%), and Instagram (31%) These results are most probably due to the strong B2B bias in the survey sample.  Insight number 5: empower visual content creators to tell stories The fifth insight is probably the most interesting one. CMI tested 5 different social media visuals with marketers and non-marketers. The results were completely different according to the audience.Social media visuals should be tested with your audiences. CMI showed that the green visual was ranked highest by marketers and one of the least effective by non-marketers. QED.Content creators know that by heart. As the name goes, they bet on creativity and inventiveness and come up with great concepts. But here comes the Corporate Marketing Officer who starts shouting at you by stating you’re ‘not on brand’. Next thing you know, the content creator in question is so crestfallen that she or he – reluctantly – opens the boring brand guidelines once more and produces a clone of all other social media visuals. So much so that all the brand’s social media posts and ads look the same. Marketers are too self-obsessed and they value their brand guidelines too much. Whereas brand guidelines are, in general, a good thing, they also tend to make all your content uniform and bland. Try and work with third-party content creators and external media partners to generate more diverse and more social media-friendly visuals that appeal to your audiences. This is a trick we have often implemented while working as a social media director as well as with our customers. About the authors of the reportThe authors of the social media visuals study report Important notice: our most observant readers will have noticed that we like to produce our own creative visuals without testing them. This is because we have been trendsetters for nearly thirty years 😉 The post How to use social media visuals more effectively appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Social media requires proper and effective visuals for your posts to be more impactful. Any first-grade student knows that. Seasoned marketers do too. That said, a recent study by <a href="https://create.vista.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Vistacreate</a> and the <a href="https://contentmarketinginstitute.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Content Marketing Institute</a> showed that there is room for improvement in that area. In this report, CMI’s <a href="https://robertrose.net" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Robert Rose</a>, founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for Content Marketing, urged marketers to better test their assumptions. The report also provides in-depth insights regarding social media visuals and how to use them effectively. <h2>How to Use Social Media Visuals More Effectively</h2>Social Media Visuals are important CMI and Vista create conclude in a 2023 study. Nonetheless, marketers should be spending a little more time testing rather than creating visuals for themselves  –  This is a Midjourney-generated image of a painter crafting a social media visual for Twitter. <h3>The Current State of Social Media Visuals</h3> We all know, at least intuitively that social media visuals are important. A recent survey by <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2020/07/future-content-marketing-2020/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CMI</a> and Vista Create is bringing evidence that our gut feeling is true. It also points out that marketers should test their visuals more carefully. A 2023 Social Media Visuals study by CMI and <a href="https://create.vista.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Vistacreate</a>. <h3>The survey results in a nutshell</h3> CMI selected a sample of marketers for this survey. 167 respondents were qualified for analysis and they answered the institute’s questions in June 2022. Here is a visual representation of the sample with a slide taken from the report. Worthy of note is the fact that B2B and B2B+B2C add up to 69% of the total sample. The survey is mostly geared towards business-to-business. B2C, other and not-for-profit make up the remaining 31% of the survey respondents. The survey was essentially carried out in the US (68% of respondents).The survey results in a nutshell <h3>CMI have derived five major insights from their survey</h3> <h4>Insight number one: test your assumptions</h4> The authors of the report insist that too many marketers are behaving according to their own tastes rather than testing how effective their visuals are. This is the main finding of the report. Whereas marketing is about measuring customer response and the effectiveness of one’s messages and campaigns, it seems that most marketers are instead relying on their own tastes.Social media visuals designed by Leonardo da Vinci? Anything is possible with Midjourney, but not sure it’s a good thing, though. It might be a good idea if your brand is a trendsetter like Apple or Gucci. When Android released its new flat design look and feel with its 4.0 Icecream sandwich version, it set a new trend for all to follow. Apple followed in their footsteps in 2013. At the time, most of us found flat design awful and too minimalistic. After a little while our tastes changed and we became used to it.Marketers have this tendency to craft beautiful images that they like rather than pictures that are either effective or appeal to their audiences. Whereas this might be a good idea if you are Apple or Gucci, it may not if your brand is not a luxury or a beloved brand. The above picture is a Midjourney-generated image. A painter is creating a huge social media visual for Twitter with a paintbrush. This happened because every one of us had an Android or Apple iPhone in our pockets. In fact, we didn’t have a choice. For visual social ads, audiences do have a choice to click or not to click. The perspective is very different. Hence the testing. <h4>Insight number 2: look at visual social media as a platform</h4> The authors are claiming that visual content creation for social media is moving in-house.Nearly 50% of brands don’t have a separate budget for social media visual content. Yet, creating social media-friendly visuals is a job in its own right and a budget should be allocated to this. <blockquote>60% of marketers said they create visual content themselves, 56% have in-house professional designers, and only 28% use freelance designers (the overlap is because some respondents indicated all three options)</blockquote> What is strange though is that the authors of the report found out that ‘counter-intuitively, small businesses are more likely to have a separate budget for visual social content, as compared to larger companies (47% vs. 22%)’. The authors claim that this is a good thing, but that brands need to have a least a small budget for content creation. After all, content creation is a job, not a hobby. <h4>Insight number 3: build repeatable processes</h4> When looking at what kinds of visuals are more successful than others, CMI’s survey consistently highlighted 3 main content types: <ol> <li>Video content</li> <li>Custom photos (as opposed to stock images)</li> <li>Infographics</li> </ol> Instagram’s top three are a bit different with ‘stories’ coming third. Reels on Facebook didn’t seem to catch up, though. Videos are often quoted as being the top performers. That said, very few marketers manage to make their videos viral without paid social media ads. We definitely recommend brands to work on their word-of-mouth strategies before moving to ad-driven social activation. <h4>Insight number 4: match those processes with a documented and formal budget</h4> As to effectiveness, LinkedIn is definitely most brands’ pet social platform. <blockquote>LinkedIn scored the highest at 56% (rating it as extremely or very effective), followed by Facebook (38%), and Instagram (31%)</blockquote> These results are most probably due to the strong B2B bias in the survey sample. <h4></h4> <h4>Insight number 5: empower visual content creators to tell stories</h4> The fifth insight is probably the most interesting one. CMI tested 5 different social media visuals with marketers and non-marketers. The results were completely different according to the audience.Social media visuals should be tested with your audiences. CMI showed that the green visual was ranked highest by marketers and one of the least effective by non-marketers. QED. Content creators know that by heart. As the name goes, they bet on creativity and inventiveness and come up with great concepts. But here comes the Corporate Marketing Officer who starts shouting at you by stating you’re ‘not on brand’. Next thing you know, the content creator in question is so crestfallen that she or he – reluctantly – opens the boring brand guidelines once more and produces a clone of all other social media visuals. So much so that all the brand’s social media posts and ads look the same. Marketers are too self-obsessed and they value their brand guidelines too much. Whereas brand guidelines are, in general, a good thing, they also tend to make all your content uniform and bland. Try and work with third-party content creators and external media partners to generate more diverse and more social media-friendly visuals that appeal to your audiences. This is a trick we have often implemented while working as a social media director as well as with our customers. <h3>About the authors of the report</h3>The authors of the social media visuals study report <a href="https://create.vista.com/pro/effective-social-media-content/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a> Important notice: our most observant readers will have noticed that we like to produce our own creative visuals without testing them. This is because we have been trendsetters for nearly thirty years 😉 The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/03/social-media-visuals/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How to use social media visuals more effectively</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

How to use social media visuals more effectively

How do consumers form their perceived value of a product or service? This is the question that Bain &amp; Company has attempted to answer in a very noteworthy brief published by Harvard Business Review. It opens up a new perspective on perceived customer value, beyond the hackneyed Maslow pyramid. This is the subject of today’s news flash.  Perceived Value: How Customers Rate a Product or Service What makes customer value? Bain offers a dossier on this subject – image made with Midjourney. Going beyond Maslow’s pyramid According to the Harvard Business Review in which this unique article was published: “Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led the authors—all with Bain &amp; Company—to identify 30, ‘elements of value’.”  Maslow’s pyramid reviewed “Their model traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers: describing their behaviour around products and services.” Too much is made of the idea that a consumer’s relationship with his or her product is limited to the price. It is true that it depends on the product – image made with Midjourney. The beginning of the article points out that companies often focus on price, omitting other factors. This seems like an easy way out, as “raising prices directly increases profits”. That being said, price management involves many different tactics, as the authors emphasise. Price is not the only element of customer value A few years ago, Byron Sharp pointed out the propensity of brands to focus on lowering prices through a never-ending chain of promotions, a harmful strategy in his view, as it leads to margin loss. However, there are many more things on Heaven and Earth than price, to be accounted for behind this notion of product or service value. What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)? To that end, Bains’s consultants and authors propose a useful infographic. A clearer, dynamic version can be found on their own website. Bain &amp; Company’s Elements of Perceived Value Pyramid Perceived customer value is not just about price, the authors argue. Their proposed elements of value hierarchy from 2015 and 2016 were published in HBR in the same period. A more elaborate interactive version of this pyramid is available on the Bain website The interactive version of the perceived customer value pyramid Click on the thumbnail to see the interactive version of this customer value pyramid We can summarise the different components of value as follows:   The elements of perceived customer value that are related to the product’s features. These are the most obvious benefits (a product, a washing machine for instance, relieves you from a chore or another allows you to earn money…). Let’s take the purchase of a folding bike as an example. It has an obvious functional value. In the city, it is the fastest way to get around. Count approximately 12 mph on average for a bike, and 7 mph for a motor car. The emotional part of perceived customer value. A product will remind you of your childhood or reduce your stress. Or make you feel better or healthier. Buying a bike to stretch the old legs after work will make you feel great and eliminate unnecessary fat;  Changing Your Life  Yet, your bike purchase could also be a life-changing experience. As it did for me. I ride 3,200 miles per annum and this bike positively changed the way I experience the city. I no longer hesitate to ride across the whole of Paris to go on an errand, if only for the pleasure of getting a bit of exercise. I no longer forbid myself a long detour to go to my favourite shops. Many subcategories exist within this category. Finally, a pinch of social impact on perceived customer value. While I’m pedalling away on my Brommie, I also feel that I’m working for future generations and helping to provide them with a more pleasant, less noisy and above all less polluted environment. Well, there’s still work to be done in that department! With my folding bike, I can also travel anywhere in the region and even further afield by putting my bike on the train.   The Influence of Context and Industries Through this wee example, we better understand what the perceived value of a product or service is. We can also relate it to the transformative value described by Joe Pine, he who coined the phrase ‘customer experience’, in our video interview.  And Now, the Ball’s in Your Court Elements of perceived customer value vary according to the product or service or the industry concerned. Buying a financial product has an impact not just on you but on your whole family. When you pass over, someone will inherit your savings, hopefully. This impact is far greater than that of buying a folding bike. Even though I’m sure your faithful Brompton will be handed to someone else in the family, eventually. And now, the ball’s in your court. All that’s left to do is to use this canvas to build a proper strategy for your products and services. One that is based on perceived customer value rather than sand. The post Perceived value: how customers rate a product or service appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

How do consumers form their perceived value of a product or service? This is the question that <a href="https://www.bain.com/insights/the-elements-of-value-hbr/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Bain &amp; Company</a> has attempted to answer in a very noteworthy brief published by Harvard Business Review. It opens up a new perspective on perceived customer value, beyond the hackneyed Maslow pyramid. This is the subject of today’s news flash. <h2>Perceived Value: How Customers Rate a Product or Service</h2> What makes customer value? Bain offers a dossier on this subject – image made with Midjourney. <h3>Going beyond Maslow’s pyramid</h3> According to the Harvard Business Review in which this unique article was <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">published:</a> “Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led the authors—all with Bain &amp; Company—to identify 30, ‘elements of value’.” <h3>Maslow’s pyramid reviewed</h3> “Their model traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers: describing their behaviour around products and services.” Too much is made of the idea that a consumer’s relationship with his or her product is limited to the price. It is true that it depends on the product – image made with Midjourney. The beginning of the article points out that companies often focus on price, omitting other factors. This seems like an easy way out, as “raising prices directly increases profits”. That being said, price management involves many different tactics, as the authors emphasise. <h3>Price is not the only element of customer value</h3> A few years ago, Byron Sharp pointed out the propensity of brands to focus on lowering prices through a never-ending chain of promotions, a harmful strategy in his view, as it leads to margin loss. However, there are many more things on Heaven and Earth than price, to be accounted for behind this notion of product or service value. <blockquote>What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)?</blockquote> To that end, Bains’s consultants and authors propose a useful infographic. A clearer, dynamic version can be found on their own website. <h3>Bain &amp; Company’s Elements of Perceived Value Pyramid</h3> Perceived customer value is not just about price, the authors argue. Their proposed elements of value hierarchy from 2015 and 2016 were published in HBR in the same period. A more elaborate interactive version of this pyramid is available on the Bain website <h3>The interactive version of the perceived customer value pyramid</h3> <a href="https://www.bain.com/insights/elements-of-value-interactive/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Click on the thumbnail to see the <a href="https://www.bain.com/insights/elements-of-value-interactive/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">interactive version</a> of this customer value pyramid We can summarise the different components of value as follows: <ol> <li>The elements of perceived customer value that are related to the product’s features. These are the most obvious benefits (a product, a washing machine for instance, relieves you from a chore or another allows you to earn money…). Let’s take the purchase of a folding bike as an example. It has an obvious functional value. In the city, it is the fastest way to get around. Count approximately 12 mph on average for a bike, and 7 mph for a motor car.</li> <li>The emotional part of perceived customer value. A product will remind you of your childhood or reduce your stress. Or make you feel better or healthier. Buying a bike to stretch the old legs after work will make you feel great and eliminate unnecessary fat; <h4></h4> <h4>Changing Your Life</h4> </li> <li>Yet, your bike purchase could also be a life-changing experience. As it did for me. I ride 3,200 miles per annum and this bike positively changed the way I experience the city. I no longer hesitate to ride across the whole of Paris to go on an errand, if only for the pleasure of getting a bit of exercise. I no longer forbid myself a long detour to go to my favourite shops. Many subcategories exist within this category.</li> <li>Finally, a pinch of social impact on perceived customer value. While I’m pedalling away on my <a href="https://brompton.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Brommie</a>, I also feel that I’m working for future generations and helping to provide them with a more pleasant, less noisy and above all less polluted environment. Well, there’s still work to be done in that department! With my folding bike, I can also travel anywhere in the region and even further afield by putting my bike on the train.</li> </ol> <h3>The Influence of Context and Industries</h3> Through this wee example, we better understand what the perceived value of a product or service is. We can also relate it to the transformative value described by <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/fr/2020/11/economie-d-experience/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Joe Pine</a>, he who coined the phrase ‘customer experience’, in our video interview. <h3>And Now, the Ball’s in Your Court</h3> Elements of perceived customer value vary according to the product or service or the industry concerned. Buying a financial product has an impact not just on you but on your whole family. When you pass over, someone will inherit your savings, hopefully. This impact is far greater than that of buying a folding bike. Even though I’m sure your faithful Brompton will be handed to someone else in the family, eventually. And now, the ball’s in your court. All that’s left to do is to use this canvas to build a proper strategy for your products and services. One that is based on perceived customer value rather than sand. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/02/perceived-value/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Perceived value: how customers rate a product or service</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Perceived value: how customers rate a product or service

This morning’s newsflash was inspired by a tweet and refers to the recent Tech layoffs in Silicon Valley, no longer deemed the greatest place to work in Tech. Other posts tell stories of employees disappointed that they can no longer indulge in free pizza in the cafeteria before going to meetings in the “confetti room”. In short, it all sounds like a love story gone wrong. The main question emphasised by one of the sources I read this morning: is coddling your employees a good idea? Tech layoffs and disillusionment in Silicon ValleyHere’s how Midjourney, as always very”creative”, sees Tech layoffs in Silicon ValleyTech layoffs in Silicon Valley: deja vu First in the 1990s (the great IT crisis), then in the 2000s (the Internet bubble). These periods are engraved in my memory. No doubt the big IT company I worked for in the 90s was not as “cool” as Meta or Google, but we were fond of it and rightly so. We learned a lot over there, roamed the world and the work was creative and exciting. A whole new era of work was then invented. Certainly much more creative than selling CPCs for a search engine.Tech layoffs: absolutely hilarious, here’s how Midjourney interprets “fired”A sector of the future I was caught off guard in those years and for good reason. As a newcomer to the world of IT, coming from the ill-fated household appliance industry, the future was bright. “This is the industry of the future,” I was told. And it was true, real-time computing changed the lives of all employees worldwide, not just a few. The same is probably true of the technologies developed in Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, I have seen all the big tech companies disappear: DEC, Control Data, Data General, ICL, Compaq and so on. Anticipation of the 2002 purge In 2001-2 a new purge was on its way, but this time I wasn’t taken unawares. In a few months, the work of 4 years was kicked to the curb. A colleague came with a van to put the servers in the boot. A nuclear IT winter began.A brief search for Silicon Valley layoffs in the Wall Street Journal There is no doubt that the approach to work in these modern tech companies and what we knew in the prehistoric times of the beginning of real-time computing have nothing in common. No entertainment nor treats In those days, there was no entertainment, no candy, no confetti room, and even less TikTok to post videos of your workplace.    UPDATE SHE JUST GOT FIRED $GOOGL $GOOG pic.twitter.com/xms1PSaRxe — GURGAVIN (@gurgavin) January 23, 2023  It’s true that I don’t eat sweets, I watch my weight and I haven’t played table football since I left school. Overly “coddled” employees I recommend Marketplace‘s post on the subject which made me think about this situation. Certainly, there is a situation that seems unfair and even incomprehensible. The current period has nothing to do with the great Internet crisis of the 2000s. There is no collapse, no reversal of fortunes and even some of the companies that are being thrashed on the stock market are growing by… 12% (unbelievable but true). So, there is something seemingly irrational about this (here’s the explanation). But beyond these sad facts, the questions posed by the Marketplace article are worthy of note.  First there is a generation of employees who have been “coddled” and are coming to terms with the harsh reality of a ruthless working world Then there are employees who live and breathe their work, a phenomenon that is particularly acute in the US.  Excerpt and food for thought “I’m not rooting for anyone to lose their jobs. But I think there’s a big reckoning happening right now with employee expectations,” said Nolan Church, who is now a tech recruiting consultant and previously worked with DoorDash and Google. Over the last decade, he said, there was a combination of easy money and hard-to-find talent in tech. That spurred a kind of arms race to be known as the best place to work. “But in hindsight, this created a generation of employees who expect to be coddled,” he added. “Now, employees are candidly shocked that their jobs are no longer safe, that the perks and amenities that they once had are evaporating quite fast.” [Source] I always wondered about these “great places to work”, because every time I saw the label awarded I wondered what was behind it. Since I have been self-employed, I no longer wonder whether my job will be cut. Strangely enough, I have zero job security and I’ve never felt more secure. Maybe because I can only count on myself to get out of difficult situations when there are any. Being “coddled” may not protect, it may even make you more vulnerable. The post Tech layoffs and disillusionment in Silicon Valley appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

This morning’s newsflash was inspired by a tweet and refers to the recent Tech layoffs in Silicon Valley, <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/silicon-valley-dethroned-hottest-tech-job-market-following-layoffs-report" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">no longer deemed the greatest place to work</a> in Tech. <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/tech-layoffs-can-trigger-an-identity-crisis-for-workers-who-are-let-go/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Other posts</a> tell stories of employees disappointed that they can no longer indulge in free pizza in the cafeteria before going to meetings in the “confetti room”. In short, it all sounds like a love story gone wrong. The main question emphasised by one of the sources I read this morning: is coddling your employees a good idea? <h2>Tech layoffs and disillusionment in Silicon Valley</h2>Here’s how Midjourney, as always very”creative”, sees Tech layoffs in Silicon Valley <h3>Tech layoffs in Silicon Valley: deja vu</h3> First in the 1990s (the great IT crisis), then in the 2000s (the Internet bubble). These periods are engraved in my memory. No doubt the big IT company I worked for in the 90s was not as “cool” as Meta or Google, but we were fond of it and rightly so. We learned a lot over there, roamed the world and the work was creative and exciting. A whole new era of work was then invented. Certainly much more creative than selling CPCs for a search engine.Tech layoffs: absolutely hilarious, here’s how Midjourney interprets “fired” <h4>A sector of the future</h4> I was caught off guard in those years and for good reason. As a newcomer to the world of IT, coming from the ill-fated household appliance industry, the future was bright. “This is the industry of the future,” I was told. And it was true, real-time computing changed the lives of all employees worldwide, not just a few. The same is probably true of the technologies developed in Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, I have seen all the big tech companies disappear: DEC, Control Data, Data General, ICL, Compaq and so on. <h4>Anticipation of the 2002 purge</h4> In 2001-2 a new purge was on its way, but this time I wasn’t taken unawares. In a few months, the work of 4 years was kicked to the curb. A colleague came with a van to put the servers in the boot. A nuclear IT winter began.A brief search for Silicon Valley layoffs in the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/search?query=Tech%20layoffs" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal</a> There is no doubt that the approach to work in these modern tech companies and what we knew in the prehistoric times of the beginning of real-time computing have nothing in common. <h4>No entertainment nor treats</h4> In those days, there was no entertainment, no candy, no confetti room, and even less TikTok to post videos of your workplace. <blockquote> UPDATE SHE JUST GOT FIRED <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24GOOGL&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">$GOOGL</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24GOOG&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">$GOOG</a> <a href="https://t.co/xms1PSaRxe" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/xms1PSaRxe</a> — GURGAVIN (@gurgavin) <a href="https://twitter.com/gurgavin/status/1617330841457414144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">January 23, 2023</a></blockquote> It’s true that I don’t eat sweets, I watch my weight and I haven’t played table football since I left school. <h3>Overly “coddled” employees</h3> I recommend <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/tech-layoffs-can-trigger-an-identity-crisis-for-workers-who-are-let-go/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Marketplace</a>‘s post on the subject which made me think about this situation. Certainly, there is a situation that seems unfair and even incomprehensible. The current period has nothing to do with the great Internet crisis of the 2000s. There is no collapse, no reversal of fortunes and even some of the <a href="https://keyt.com/news/2023/01/31/snap-stock-plunges-15-as-revenue-growth-stalls/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">companies that are being thrashed on the stock market are growing by… 12%</a> (unbelievable but true). So, there is something seemingly irrational about this (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-layoffs-meta-alphabet-wall-street-2022-11?op=1&amp;r=US&amp;IR=T" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">here’s the explanation</a>). But beyond these sad facts, the questions posed by the Marketplace article are worthy of note. <ul> <li>First there is a generation of employees who have been “coddled” and are coming to terms with the harsh reality of a ruthless working world</li> <li>Then there are employees who live and breathe their work, a phenomenon that is particularly acute in the US.</li> </ul> <h3>Excerpt and food for thought</h3> “I’m not rooting for anyone to lose their jobs. But I think there’s a big reckoning happening right now with employee expectations,” said Nolan Church, who is now a tech recruiting consultant and previously worked with DoorDash and Google. Over the last decade, he said, there was a combination of easy money and hard-to-find talent in tech. That spurred a kind of arms race to be known as the best place to work. “But in hindsight, this created a generation of employees who expect to be coddled,” he added. “Now, employees are candidly shocked that their jobs are no longer safe, that the perks and amenities that they once had are evaporating quite fast.” [<a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/tech-layoffs-can-trigger-an-identity-crisis-for-workers-who-are-let-go/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Source</a>] I always wondered about these “great places to work”, because every time I saw the label awarded I wondered what was behind it. Since I have been self-employed, I no longer wonder whether my job will be cut. Strangely enough, I have zero job security and I’ve never felt more secure. Maybe because I can only count on myself to get out of difficult situations when there are any. Being “coddled” may not protect, it may even make you more vulnerable. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/02/tech-layoffs-and-disillusionment-in-silicon-valley/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tech layoffs and disillusionment in Silicon Valley</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Tech layoffs and disillusionment in Silicon Valley

Digital marketing is going through a shift, and it’s app-driven product-led marketing more than digital advertising and sales as a 2022 Amplitude report shows. In our interview with Adam Greco, who a product evangelist at Amplitude, we discussed this new groundbreaking trend and the reallocation of marketing dollars towards apps to generate more growth. App-driven product-led marketing is the new coolProduct-led marketing is the new cool, Amplitude report states — image generated with Midjourney.The Amplitude report of August 2022 During the COVID pandemic, there was tremendous growth in the usage of apps. Amplitude published its first report right after that. The August 2022 report is their second one.  “We were curious to see what the growth pattern would look like as the pandemic tapered down. We analysed industry trends across our 2000 customers,” Adam Greco said. In the past, SaaS businesses invested a lot in sales and marketing. Nowadays, instead of hiring hundreds of salespeople, they favour product-led marketing growth   “The methodology of our study entailed looking at a bunch of industries over a year. The apps that we studied had to have at least 10,000 monthly active users in order to get rid of the outliers. We also interviewed over 200 business leaders from marketing and product to get their insights of what’s happening.” For the different industries, we analysed key countries across APAC, North America and Europe. Product-led growth with apps is for all countries, not just the US — click picture to enlarge.The study covered different kinds of web applications, both social and transactional, with a focus on B2B, eCommerce, consumer tech, FinTech, wellness, etc. We saw a lot of situations where new, small businesses are getting started because of the fears of a recession or some of the impacts of a potential recession. So, a lot of things we are curious about is how does the potential economic downturn or coming out of the pandemic impact app usage. Global product usage grew by a massive 16% year-over-year Our previous report showed an amazing amount of growth in hundreds of percent. We went into this one expecting that there would be almost like negative product growth, but we were surprised that product growth increased year-over-year, with some ups and downs, from August 21 to August 22. There was 16% growth showing that even during tumultuous economic times, there’s still massive investment in product-led marketing and apps as its key driver Growth across different countries and geographies Singapore witnessed the highest growth out of all, 43%, and their economy seems to be doing really well. Germany was at 38%, and then France at 32% growth. These are significantly high numbers. I just spent a month in Europe, and it’s interesting to witness that it has started to become a powerhouse of start-ups. A lot of these start-ups are using some kind of product teams and product methodology to differentiate themselves in the market. It is said that whenever you have potential economic downturns, it’s actually the best time to start new companies. We’re definitely seeing that. What’s interesting is the largest product-led marketing growth that we saw was a social media app called BeReal. Their numbers were just through the roof. Interestingly, the CEO told us they use Amplitude to track growth. He mentioned when he meets his investors, instead of showing them a pitch deck, he’s just showing them the growth data in Amplitude because it’s more impactful and it lets them see what’s happening.French app Bereal was created by Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau and it’s one of the best examples of product-led marketing Greco explainsWe saw some massive growth in the travel sector in Europe since the restrictions have been lifted. One company based in the Netherlands was up 324%, another in Spain was up by 253%, and a UK-based firm scaled by 164%. It’s great to see how much the travel sector has kicked back after the pandemic. Different Geographies Showed Growth in Different IndustriesAdam Greco talked to us about product led marketingIn Europe, we saw maximum growth in the travel sector, while in North America a large growth could be observed in SaaS, and health and wellness apps. I think a lot of people want to get back in shape after sitting around for a couple of years in the pandemic. FinTech has been huge as well. In France, two companies stood out. One is Qonto, a Paris-based financial company that helps with payments, expense management, and accounting solutions. They registered 75% year-over-year growth. Then there is Luko, which is an insurance tech company focusing on transparency and an open model to let its users understand where their money is going. They had 119% growth. So, it’s all over the board, different companies in different regions with a lot of them being pandemic upstarts. Growth Across Staffing &amp; Job Search and FinTech Industries This one was really fascinating because everyone had talked about the great resignation. People worried about losing their jobs because of recession. But during the pandemic, people felt empowered as they could find another job any time they want. Overall, we saw that this industry had 118% year-over-year growth. What we’re seeing is people flocking to job-related apps and products and trying to use them to figure out multiple job options that exist out there. Also, a lot of that has to do with networking with peers about finding jobs. When it comes to staffing, especially as you’re thinking about a downturn and recession, you thought maybe that would be an area that would go down, but it actually increased pretty significantly. Crypto has been in the news lately and the whole crypto market has definitely lost a lot of steam. What’s interesting, though, and this may just be timing of when our product report ended in August, we saw about a 26% year-over-year growth in crypto apps. So I think there may be a little bit of a news story hype that makes it seem like crypto is going down a lot more than it actually is. We definitely see it in the news and the whole debacle, but we’re seeing still a lot of usage in crypto apps and it’ll be interesting to see in our next year’s report if all the news actually does have an impact on app usage. SaaS market: valuations versus product usage Our stats showed that growth in SaaS was up on average about 25%. It seems like nowadays many B2B apps are SaaS apps. Talking about the valuation of SaaS companies, definitely, the stock prices have gone down, but it has not impacted product usage. So we look at product usage as a fascinating indicator. It may be that the market valuation of companies versus the actual usage of these products is kind of misaligned. Our assumption is that if SaaS app usage continues to stay strong, once the economy turns around, the valuations will probably go back up. You’d think that if the stock prices were down, the usage of these apps would be way down. But that hasn’t been the case as per our data. Product-Led Marketing Is the New Cool I believe firmly in product-led marketing growth. For those who aren’t familiar with product-led growth, the idea is that companies have to decide where they want to spend their money. In the past, a lot of money was spent in sales and marketing. If you’re a SaaS company, you might hire hundreds of salespeople. At the moment, product-led growth has really taken off owing to a couple of reasons. Companies are deciding to spend more money on their digital products instead of buying advertisements or hiring salespeople. It’s backed by the fact that if you have a really good digital app, the word will spread and people will tell their friends, family, and more people will come onboard. Hence, the way you could best differentiate yourself in the market is to have the best product and invest in it. In a lot of companies like ours, we have an offering where people can try the product for free. Once they like it, it becomes a habit for them. Then they hit certain limits and have to pay. You’ll see that across the board. Products like calendar, where people use it to schedule meetings and then later they have to pay for it. This whole concept of product-led growth has really gained steam because in marketing it’s becoming increasingly difficult to show your return on investment these days as privacy policies are becoming strict and cookies are starting to be deleted. Thus, a lot of the ways in which people would show their ROI or return on ad spend are becoming more difficult. Companies are realising that one of the best ways they could spend their money is to invest in the product where they can make sure that people are having really good product experiences. Marketing Based on Product, Recommendations and Word of Mouth There is a shift to a different type of marketing. It could be that ten years from now, people decide to move the other way and do a lot more of advertising. But right now, we just happen to see a massive change of where the dollars are going. Suddenly, we’re also witnessing that the CTO, which is the chief product officer at many organisations and a role that didn’t even exist many years ago, is starting to become very prevalent. On the other hand, the Chief Marketing Officer role is somewhat ceding a little bit of budget and power over to the Chief Product Officer.  But it doesn’t have to be confrontational. Some of the leading companies are starting to realise that marketing and product should start to work together and almost join forces because the customer doesn’t care whether they’re interacting with the marketing or the product department. They just want to come to a website or an app and have a good experience. They want to have a good product that they can use and get value from. How they get to the product isn’t as critical as they continue to use it week over week, month over month. The smartest companies are getting the marketing and product departments to acknowledge the need to work together because it’s the customer who is important, not their internal departmental hierarchy. The Future May Come With Reduced Digital Advertising Spends That’s what we believe and are starting to see. A lot of organisations are questioning the value they’re getting out of spending in digital advertising. If you spend €50,000 a month on digital advertising, you’re definitely going to get some impact. But you’re going to have to keep spending €50,000 every month to realise similar results. It doesn’t really have a compounding effect. Companies are telling us that the investments they’re making in the product is actually having a multiplier effect because it does get more people to join, to use the product and become loyal customers. They feel like they almost get two, three or €4 per euro spent when they invest in the product, but it’s a 1 to 1 when they spend it in marketing. It is certainly going to be interesting to discover how focusing more on product instead of advertisements will unlock value for B2B marketers.  Click to download the report The post App-driven product-led marketing is the new growth hack appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Digital marketing is going through a shift, and it’s app-driven product-led marketing more than digital advertising and sales as a 2022 Amplitude report shows. In our interview with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamgreco" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Adam Greco</a>, who a product evangelist at <a href="https://amplitude.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Amplitude</a>, we discussed this new groundbreaking trend and the reallocation of marketing dollars towards apps to generate more growth. <h2>App-driven product-led marketing is the new cool</h2>Product-led marketing is the new cool, Amplitude report states — image generated with Midjourney. <h2>The Amplitude report of August 2022</h2> During the COVID pandemic, there was tremendous growth in the usage of apps. Amplitude published its first report right after that. <a href="https://amplitude.com/product-report-2022" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The August 2022 report</a> is their second one. “We were curious to see what the growth pattern would look like as the pandemic tapered down. We analysed industry trends across our 2000 customers,” Adam Greco said. <blockquote>In the past, SaaS businesses invested a lot in sales and marketing. Nowadays, instead of hiring hundreds of salespeople, they favour product-led marketing growth</blockquote> <a href="https://amplitude.com/product-report-2022" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a> “The methodology of our study entailed looking at a bunch of industries over a year. The apps that we studied had to have at least 10,000 monthly active users in order to get rid of the outliers. We also interviewed over 200 business leaders from marketing and product to get their insights of what’s happening.” For the different industries, we analysed key countries across APAC, North America and Europe. <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/screenshot-2023-02-08-at-065000.png" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Product-led growth with apps is for all countries, not just the US — click picture to enlarge. The study covered different kinds of web applications, both social and transactional, with a focus on B2B, eCommerce, consumer tech, <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fintech.asp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">FinTech</a>, wellness, etc. We saw a lot of situations where new, small businesses are getting started because of the fears of a recession or some of the impacts of a potential recession. So, a lot of things we are curious about is how does the potential economic downturn or coming out of the pandemic impact app usage. <h2>Global product usage grew by a massive 16% year-over-year</h2> Our previous report showed an amazing amount of growth in hundreds of percent. We went into this one expecting that there would be almost like negative product growth, but we were surprised that product growth increased year-over-year, with some ups and downs, from August 21 to August 22. <blockquote>There was 16% growth showing that even during tumultuous economic times, there’s still massive investment in product-led marketing and apps as its key driver</blockquote> <h2>Growth across different countries and geographies</h2> Singapore witnessed the highest growth out of all, 43%, and their economy seems to be doing really well. Germany was at 38%, and then France at 32% growth. These are significantly high numbers. I just spent a month in Europe, and it’s interesting to witness that it has started to become a powerhouse of start-ups. A lot of these start-ups are using some kind of product teams and product methodology to differentiate themselves in the market. It is said that whenever you have potential economic downturns, it’s actually the best time to start new companies. We’re definitely seeing that. What’s interesting is the largest product-led marketing growth that we saw was a social media app called <a href="https://bere.al/en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">BeReal</a>. Their numbers were just through the roof. Interestingly, the CEO told us they use Amplitude to track growth. He mentioned when he meets his investors, instead of showing them a pitch deck, he’s just showing them the growth data in Amplitude because it’s more impactful and it lets them see what’s happening.French app <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeReal" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Bereal</a> was created by Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau and it’s one of the best examples of product-led marketing Greco explains We saw some massive growth in the travel sector in Europe since the restrictions have been lifted. One company based in the Netherlands was up 324%, another in Spain was up by 253%, and a UK-based firm scaled by 164%. It’s great to see how much the travel sector has kicked back after the pandemic. <h2>Different Geographies Showed Growth in Different Industries</h2>Adam Greco talked to us about product led marketing In Europe, we saw maximum growth in the travel sector, while in North America a large growth could be observed in <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Software-as-a-Service" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">SaaS</a>, and health and wellness apps. I think a lot of people want to get back in shape after sitting around for a couple of years in the pandemic. FinTech has been huge as well. In France, two companies stood out. One is <a href="https://qonto.com/en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Qonto</a>, a Paris-based financial company that helps with payments, expense management, and accounting solutions. They registered 75% year-over-year growth. Then there is <a href="https://fr.luko.eu/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Luko</a>, which is an insurance tech company focusing on transparency and an open model to let its users understand where their money is going. They had 119% growth. So, it’s all over the board, different companies in different regions with a lot of them being pandemic upstarts. <h2>Growth Across Staffing &amp; Job Search and FinTech Industries</h2> This one was really fascinating because everyone had talked about the great resignation. People worried about losing their jobs because of recession. But during the pandemic, people felt empowered as they could find another job any time they want. Overall, we saw that this industry had 118% year-over-year growth. What we’re seeing is people flocking to job-related apps and products and trying to use them to figure out multiple job options that exist out there. Also, a lot of that has to do with networking with peers about finding jobs. When it comes to staffing, especially as you’re thinking about a downturn and recession, you thought maybe that would be an area that would go down, but it actually increased pretty significantly. <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2021/07/future-of-cryptocurrencies/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Crypto</a> has been in the news lately and the whole crypto market has definitely lost a lot of steam. What’s interesting, though, and this may just be timing of when our product report ended in August, we saw about a 26% year-over-year growth in crypto apps. So I think there may be a little bit of a news story hype that makes it seem like crypto is going down a lot more than it actually is. We definitely see it in the news and the whole debacle, but we’re seeing still a lot of usage in crypto apps and it’ll be interesting to see in our next year’s report if all the news actually does have an impact on app usage. <h2>SaaS market: valuations versus product usage</h2> Our stats showed that growth in SaaS was up on average about 25%. It seems like nowadays many B2B apps are SaaS apps. Talking about the valuation of SaaS companies, definitely, the stock prices have gone down, but it has not impacted product usage. So we look at product usage as a fascinating indicator. It may be that the market valuation of companies versus the actual usage of these products is kind of misaligned. Our assumption is that if SaaS app usage continues to stay strong, once the economy turns around, the valuations will probably go back up. You’d think that if the stock prices were down, the usage of these apps would be way down. But that hasn’t been the case as per our data. <h2>Product-Led Marketing Is the New Cool</h2> I believe firmly in product-led marketing growth. For those who aren’t familiar with product-led growth, the idea is that companies have to decide where they want to spend their money. In the past, a lot of money was spent in sales and marketing. If you’re a SaaS company, you might hire hundreds of salespeople. At the moment, product-led growth has really taken off owing to a couple of reasons. <blockquote>Companies are deciding to spend more money on their digital products instead of buying advertisements or hiring salespeople. It’s backed by the fact that if you have a really good digital app, the word will spread and people will tell their friends, family, and more people will come onboard.</blockquote> Hence, the way you could best differentiate yourself in the market is to have the best product and invest in it. In a lot of companies like ours, we have an offering where people can try the product for free. Once they like it, it becomes a habit for them. Then they hit certain limits and have to pay. You’ll see that across the board. Products like calendar, where people use it to schedule meetings and then later they have to pay for it. This whole concept of product-led growth has really gained steam because in marketing it’s becoming increasingly difficult to show your return on investment these days as privacy policies are becoming strict and cookies are starting to be deleted. Thus, a lot of the ways in which people would show their ROI or <a href="https://www.singular.net/glossary/return-on-ad-spend-roas/#:~:text=Return%20on%20ad%20spend%20(ROAS)%20is%20a%20marketing%20metric%20that,money%20invested%20into%20digital%20advertising." rel="nofollow" target="_blank">return on ad spend</a> are becoming more difficult. Companies are realising that one of the best ways they could spend their money is to invest in the product where they can make sure that people are having really good product experiences. <h2>Marketing Based on Product, Recommendations and Word of Mouth</h2> There is a shift to a different type of marketing. It could be that ten years from now, people decide to move the other way and do a lot more of advertising. But right now, we just happen to see a massive change of where the dollars are going. <blockquote>Suddenly, we’re also witnessing that the CTO, which is the chief product officer at many organisations and a role that didn’t even exist many years ago, is starting to become very prevalent. On the other hand, the Chief Marketing Officer role is somewhat ceding a little bit of budget and power over to the Chief Product Officer. </blockquote> But it doesn’t have to be confrontational. Some of the leading companies are starting to realise that marketing and product should start to work together and almost join forces because the customer doesn’t care whether they’re interacting with the marketing or the product department. They just want to come to a website or an app and have a good experience. They want to have a good product that they can use and get value from. How they get to the product isn’t as critical as they continue to use it week over week, month over month. The smartest companies are getting the marketing and product departments to acknowledge the need to work together because it’s the customer who is important, not their internal departmental hierarchy. <h2>The Future May Come With Reduced Digital Advertising Spends</h2> That’s what we believe and are starting to see. A lot of organisations are questioning the value they’re getting out of spending in digital advertising. If you spend €50,000 a month on digital advertising, you’re definitely going to get some impact. But you’re going to have to keep spending €50,000 every month to realise similar results. It doesn’t really have a compounding effect. <blockquote>Companies are telling us that the investments they’re making in the product is actually having a multiplier effect because it does get more people to join, to use the product and become loyal customers.</blockquote> They feel like they almost get two, three or €4 per euro spent when they invest in the product, but it’s a 1 to 1 when they spend it in marketing. It is certainly going to be interesting to discover how focusing more on product instead of advertisements will unlock value for B2B marketers.  <a href="https://amplitude.com/product-report-2022" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://amplitude.com/product-report-2022" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Click to download the report</a> The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/02/product-led-marketing/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">App-driven product-led marketing is the new growth hack</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

App-driven product-led marketing is the new growth hack

Customer communities aren’t for every brand. Yet, facilitating communities with your customers could supercharge your marketing. This is, in essence, what Sanjay d’Humières explained to us in this interview. Sanjay is the founder of RTCX (Real-Time Community Experience), a consultancy supporting businesses with their community marketing. He reminded us, lest we forget, we should always work with our customers to drive a successful marketing strategy. In doing so, Sanjay rightly reminds us, like Jonah Berger (Contagious), that social media makes up only a small portion of word of mouth. Supercharge Your Marketing With Customer Communities“Brands fear unhappy customers,” Sanjay d’Humières tells us, and they are wrong. I asked Midjourney to show me a crowd of smiling customers raising their hands, but it seems that for AI, customers are necessarily grumpy. Yet it is possible to bring a community of customers together and turn it into something positive. Brands Must Focus Their Attention on Their Loyal Consumers Like it or not, the process of creating a new marketing strategy necessarily involves customers, Sanjay reminds us. Often, we interview them, which is a very important part of the process of creating new offers and new services.Marketing to customer communities means bringing together engaged consumers around a brand or product, Sanjay d’Humières explains. Sanjay is the founder of RTCX, a “startup specialising in stakeholder listening dedicated to companies and communities”.“Brands shouldn’t make assumptions on behalf of their customers, they should value their opinion, then make strategic decisions based on hard facts. That’s how a significant ROI for the brand is obtained,” explains Sanjay d’Humières. Involving consumers in the marketing process “Consumers must be involved in the whole marketing process,” says Sanjay. Seeking your customers’ opinions allows them to take ownership of the brand It is crucial to establish contact between customers and the human beings behind the logos. This is how customers take ownership of the discussion. Often, they do express pride in having contributed to the creation of a product or service.With a little time and effort – as we spent with Midjourney – you’ll manage to make your customers smile too. So work with your customer communities and thank them for their commitment to your brand!“Involving customers in our marketing approach is the basis of our discipline, but a lot of brands are afraid of hearing what they have to say,” Sanjay points out. However, unhappy customers also have important opinions that must be taken into account. Customer feedback is often focusing on heated discussions on social networks. They only represent 20% of the iceberg, though. Eighty per cent of customer reviews remain hidden. These people would like to give their opinion but do not know how to do it. Social media does not represent the entirety of word of mouth “Many companies rely solely on semantic analysis of social interactions and forget that there are many people who don’t know how to use social networks,” Sanjay points out. Marketers thus form an idea from what a minority of customers have written or said. It is crucial marketers did away with this approach. If you don’t communicate properly with your customers, they then vent their anger on social networks, sometimes for no valid reason. [Jonah Berger, like Sanjay, is convinced that word of mouth doesn’t stop with social media and he gives evidence of that in his book]. How to build Customer communities “Step one is to define what you want to do with this community,” says Sanjay. The methodology for creating an online community is to recruit people through social networks, using specific keywords related to your brand and service. Then, the facilitation of this community can be performed in Facebook groups, closed or open depending on the needs. This makes it possible to collect and analyse comments and quotes. For face-to-face communities and clubs, recruitment is also carried out on social networks, and then brands can gather the participants and explain what they are trying to achieve. Subsequently, participants make observations, negative, positive or neutral. Proposals are built. Lastly, the brand will decide whether to implement the suggestions from its customers. If a brand does not implement suggestions from its customers, it should explain why If it does implement a customer’s suggestion, it must give a deadline and communicate with the participants afterwards. This is how a brand can create a bond with its customers. Is working with customer communities risky? “Companies that do without these communities will miss out on vibrant and valuable consumer insights,” insists Sanjay. Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding of the brands they trust. Disregarding customer communities is a strategic pitfall There is more and more talk about purpose and sustainability. Consumers are aware of this and all stakeholders need to be involved in the brand’s marketing process. Does community marketing pay off? Developing brand awareness and images can be very expensive and time-consuming. Communities allow you to develop your reputation at a lower cost. A pool of ambassadors will speak positively about your brand without you having to invest huge marketing budgets Word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. This also makes it possible to onboard new members. Committed participants who enjoy coming to co-creation workshops will spread the word to others. This will allow new participants to join in. Why aren’t more companies developing customer communities? The main reason is that instant ROI doesn’t exist with word-of-mouth marketing. What really matters is the quality of exchanges and insights. Do less, but do better “Covid has made things happen,” Sanjay says. 2023 has a lot of surprises in store for us with regard to marketing and mass markets. The energy crisis and inflation will also have an impact on the way consumers buy, and the way they express themselves. We need to capture all this. Marketers must understand that they need to do perhaps a little less but to do it better. The post Supercharge your marketing with customer communities appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Customer communities aren’t for every brand. Yet, <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2015/01/community-marketing-2/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">facilitating</a> communities with your customers could supercharge your marketing. This is, in essence, what <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaydhumieres/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Sanjay d’Humières</a> explained to us in this interview. Sanjay is the founder of <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/rtcx/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">RTCX</a> (Real-Time Community Experience), a consultancy supporting businesses with their community marketing. He reminded us, lest we forget, we should always work with our customers to drive a successful marketing strategy. In doing so, Sanjay rightly reminds us, like Jonah Berger (<a href="https://jonahberger.com/books/contagious/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Contagious</a>), that social media makes up only a small portion of word of mouth. <h2>Supercharge Your Marketing With Customer Communities</h2>“Brands fear unhappy customers,” Sanjay d’Humières tells us, and they are wrong. I asked Midjourney to show me a crowd of smiling customers raising their hands, but it seems that for AI, customers are necessarily grumpy. Yet it is possible to bring a community of customers together and turn it into something positive. <blockquote>Brands Must Focus Their Attention on Their Loyal Consumers</blockquote> Like it or not, the process of creating a new marketing strategy necessarily involves customers, Sanjay reminds us. Often, we interview them, which is a very important part of the process of creating new offers and new services.Marketing to customer communities means bringing together engaged consumers around a brand or product, Sanjay d’Humières explains. Sanjay is the founder of <a href="https://rtcx.io" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">RTCX</a>, a “startup specialising in stakeholder listening dedicated to companies and communities”. “Brands shouldn’t make assumptions on behalf of their customers, they should value their opinion, then make strategic decisions based on hard facts. That’s how a significant ROI for the brand is obtained,” explains Sanjay d’Humières. <h3>Involving consumers in the marketing process</h3> “Consumers must be involved in the whole marketing process,” says Sanjay. <blockquote>Seeking your customers’ opinions allows them to take ownership of the brand</blockquote> It is crucial to establish contact between customers and the human beings behind the logos. This is how customers take ownership of the discussion. Often, they do express pride in having contributed to the creation of a product or service.With a little time and effort – as we spent with Midjourney – you’ll manage to make your customers smile too. So work with your customer communities and thank them for their commitment to your brand! “Involving customers in our marketing approach is the basis of our discipline, but a lot of brands are afraid of hearing what they have to say,” Sanjay points out. However, unhappy customers also have important opinions that must be taken into account. Customer feedback is often focusing on heated discussions on social networks. They only represent 20% of the iceberg, though. Eighty per cent of customer reviews remain hidden. These people would like to give their opinion but do not know how to do it. <blockquote>Social media does not represent the entirety of word of mouth</blockquote> “Many companies rely solely on semantic analysis of social interactions and forget that there are many people who don’t know how to use social networks,” Sanjay points out. Marketers thus form an idea from what a minority of customers have written or said. It is crucial marketers did away with this approach. If you don’t communicate properly with your customers, they then vent their anger on social networks, sometimes for no valid reason. [Jonah Berger, like Sanjay, is convinced that word of mouth doesn’t stop with social media and he gives evidence of that in his book]. <h3>How to build Customer communities</h3> “Step one is to define what you want to do with this community,” says Sanjay. The methodology for creating an online community is to recruit people through social networks, using specific keywords related to your brand and service. Then, the facilitation of this community can be performed in Facebook groups, closed or open depending on the needs. This makes it possible to collect and analyse comments and quotes. For face-to-face communities and clubs, recruitment is also carried out on social networks, and then brands can gather the participants and explain what they are trying to achieve. Subsequently, participants make observations, negative, positive or neutral. Proposals are built. Lastly, the brand will decide whether to implement the suggestions from its customers. <blockquote>If a brand does not implement suggestions from its customers, it should explain why</blockquote> If it does implement a customer’s suggestion, it must give a deadline and communicate with the participants afterwards. This is how a brand can create a bond with its customers. <h3>Is working with customer communities risky?</h3> “Companies that do without these communities will miss out on vibrant and valuable consumer insights,” insists Sanjay. Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding of the brands they trust. <blockquote>Disregarding customer communities is a strategic pitfall</blockquote> There is more and more talk about purpose and sustainability. Consumers are aware of this and all stakeholders need to be involved in the brand’s marketing process. <h3>Does community marketing pay off?</h3> Developing brand awareness and images can be very expensive and time-consuming. Communities allow you to develop your reputation at a lower cost. <blockquote>A pool of ambassadors will speak positively about your brand without you having to invest huge marketing budgets</blockquote> Word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. This also makes it possible to onboard new members. Committed participants who enjoy coming to co-creation workshops will spread the word to others. This will allow new participants to join in. <h3>Why aren’t more companies developing customer communities?</h3> The main reason is that instant ROI doesn’t exist with word-of-mouth marketing. What really matters is the quality of exchanges and insights. <blockquote>Do less, but do better</blockquote> “Covid has made things happen,” Sanjay says. 2023 has a lot of surprises in store for us with regard to marketing and mass markets. The energy crisis and inflation will also have an impact on the way consumers buy, and the way they express themselves. We need to capture all this. Marketers must understand that they need to do perhaps a little less but to do it better. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/01/customer-communities/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Supercharge your marketing with customer communities</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Supercharge your marketing with customer communities

What is the current state of Sales Enablement in Europe and especially in the UK? A recent Seismic–LXA survey carried out amongst 1,000 UK, German and French professionals produced some very useful insights regarding the current transformation of the sales process. It shows how sales are becoming increasingly complex and how organisations are adapting to the new situation. Sales Enablement is more than ever at the heart of these changes. Here are my five takeaways from this very noteworthy report. #Disclosure: Visionary Marketing worked with Seismic in 2022. 5 takeaways from the 2023 Seismic-LXA State of Sales Enablement reportThe state of Sales Enablement in 2023. S.E. can turn your average salesperson into a superhero, but many businesses have to overcome a few challenges before they get there — image generated with Midjourney.State of Sales Enablement: A Survey of 1,000 European Professionals  LXA conducted this survey in Europe and focused mostly on the UK (72% of the 1,000 respondents), with a smaller proportion of answers from France and Germany. It allows some sort of comparison between countries with a little bias on the UK, though. Continental Europe is far less advanced in terms of Sales Enablement adoption, this nuance is somewhat important.The state of sales enablement report by LXA is adamant: all respondents in the UK have a Sales Enablement Function.Most respondents are working in sales, with a fair proportion of managers and top managers. This is a fine sample and the insights we can derive from that survey are extremely newsworthy. LXA evaluates the Sales Enablement market at $508.9 billion in their report. This number encompasses both SalesTech and MarTech. Sales Enablement is indeed a very broad subject, and one must take this into account. My commentary is summarised in this post. You will find an unabridged version in the enclosed Loom video. Often, we will abbreviate Sales Enablement as S.E., for convenience. Exec summary of my 5 takeaways from the 2023 Seismic Sales Enablement reportThe State of sales enablement report puts numbers on our impressions from the field: Clients are becoming more and more demanding and sales are becoming increasingly complexMy five takeaways from the report are the following.  Selling is getting harder. It takes more steps for you to get customers to come to a decision. And it makes sense in that context that Sales Enablement finds its place within organisations. That said, we still found 32% who are not entirely convinced that Sales Enablement means better performance. And I found this rather baffling. All respondents believe that S.E. is effective, but there is room for maturity improvement. Let us stress again that the survey is mostly focused on the UK. Sales Enablement is not as developed on the continent and especially in France. Over there it only came to the agenda — if one excludes international businesses — a year ago or so. It may have preexisted but neither with this name nor with a proper S.E. philosophy. Often, there is no such thing as a Sales Enablement Function to start with. A recent interview we carried out on behalf of Sparklane with S.E. professionals in French (including a Seismic representative) confirmed this. Respondents declare that sales and marketing alignment is a reality. But they keep contradicting themselves. Sales and marketing are increasingly aligned, that’s the good news. When I looked into the details, in the light of other surveys that we have analysed, I had my doubts and questions. S.E. deployment is suffering from a lack of “sales professionals and necessary data skills, content sales, operation skills and knowledge…”. I wondered whether such people exist or whether the crux of the problem isn’t the collaboration between teams. As well as the way one has designed and implemented sales organisations. Lastly, most respondents concur that processes and tools to drive their content strategy effectively are in place (but are content strategies implemented effectively?)  Clients are becoming increasingly demanding, and the sales process has changed and become more complex Sixty-eight per cent of respondents agree that Sales Enablement is “key to driving business performance”’. But at the same time, one still finds 16% who strongly disagree and another 16% who feel “neutral” regarding that statement. And 32% still makes up one third of the total population. Does this opinion relate to the tool itself or to how it was implemented? We witnessed similar reactions with CRM implementations, some 30 years ago. Worthy of note is the fact that clients are becoming increasingly demanding as 47% think that it takes 10+ interactions with the average customer before they land a deal. It is an undeniable sign that sales are becoming increasingly complex and that complex selling is becoming the norm. This is very consistent with what we see happening in the field. Changing the way one engages with customers The way you engage with customers has changed. Customers want to be challenged, and they’re also keen to learn from you as a supplier. You need to be seen as an expert – they want facts and credibility and expect you to know about them before you even pick up the phone. The planning, investigation and discovery that you do as a seller is probably one of the most important aspects of any customer engagement Liz Waugh, Global Director of Sales Enablement, Crayon The change in buyer behaviour has an undeniable impact on the discovery phase. This is probably where modern-day salespeople have the greatest shortcomings. We see a lot of sales reps who are feeling incredibly helpless regarding this changing sales process. They know that they have to work differently and stop pushing their products and understand the customers better before they try to sell and close. They understand all the words but it’s very hard for them to put this new vision into practice. A matter of education Sales Enablement can help but it’s mostly an educational issue with the overall approach of sales. One needs to change the way one does sales and turn the process on its head.  The Sales Enablement landscape is more mature in the UK than on the continent. Still, none of LXA’s 5 Ps gets a 5/5 mark. S.E. contributes to all the stages of the sales process and nearly 30% of respondents stress a split of responsibility between sales and marketing. This still leaves 70% of respondents where it’s not the case. Sales and Marketing alignment: the good and the bad Sales and marketing alignment has been on the agenda for so long that the fact it is still on the agenda shows clearly that there is still a problem. Where does alignment fit in a Sales Enablement deployment strategy? Well, that item is very confusing. About sales and marketing alignment 80% of respondents declare that sales and marketing alignment is a reality. When we look at the ownership of the S.E. function, though, this is a very different kettle of fish. Most of that ownership seems to be in the hands of the sales function and marketing is only marginally in charge. Marketing, therefore, is kept on the side even though 30% of them are sharing the “responsibility for managing sales enablement” with sales. I would like to see marketing a lot more involved in such projects and even possibly the merger of the two functions. Beyond this, Liz Waugh has another good point. Sales enablement doesn’t just land within sales. It should thoroughly involve the whole business. Everyone should be able to have a high-level discussion on what sales enablement does and the impact it makes. If you’ve made sure that there is consistency between sales and marketing, then everybody can land the right message Liz Waugh, Global Director of Sales Enablement, Crayon It’s not even a matter of sales and marketing alignment. That’s probably where it starts, but it’s a matter of really aligning the entirety of the company and focusing on customers’ needs and satisfaction. Customer Success We hear a  lot about this new “customer success” function, yet we still have a long way to go before customer success is sales’ primary aim. As it should be. Thus, I think it is high time that marketers change the way that they work, and it’s high time that sales started working better with marketing too. Maybe it would be a good idea to stop calling them marketing and sales, to start with. Should we call them Smarketing from now on? ABM and Sales Enablement All of that is the essence of ABM — Account-Based Marketing — an area where marketers and sales are heavily focusing on deals and account planning together, not as separate entities trying to align with each other. Now, despite all the talking, the way that sales have developed in the past decade has been going backwards in my honest opinion. Inbound and lead gen on one side, inside sales on another, Business development elsewhere, product development working separately, and yet another function, customer success, to patch things up. Rethinking the way sales and marketing are run It’s probably time to rethink the way that sales and marketing organisations are run, one cannot split all functions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, talk about “alignment”. This doesn’t make sense and organisations should be simplified and made leaner for the sake of customers and sales efficiency. Talent issue? On another level, 72% of responding organisations strongly agree with the fact that the market is lacking “sales professionals with the necessary SalesTech, data, sales content or sales operations skills and knowledge…”  This is consistent with what Tony Hughes describes in “Tech-Powered Sales”. My experience in that area is somewhat different, though. Such full-stack marketers/sellers exist, and I’m probably one of them, but I doubt that this is replicable on a large scale. Sales and content Let’s take the example of sales content only. Certainly, far easier than mastering SalesTech and data management and other technical things. Despite my efforts and the fact that I managed to implement large organisation-wide UGC-based content teams in many countries, the only population I’ve never been able to convince was sales. I think that getting sales to contribute to a blog is understandably more difficult. For one, it’s harder to ask them to concentrate on chasing new deals and be in the field and ask them to sit at their desk writing content. This is something that we knowledge workers and consultants do all the time. It’s part of our job and taking hindsight and writing is part of our selling process and skills. It’s not naturally so for salespeople. I know that Tony Hughes disagrees, but I’ve tried too many times to bring salespeople to the water and I couldn’t make them drink. So, what if one tried, once more, to work as a team rather than ask people to do other people’s jobs? Upskilling the sales force Now, when it comes to upskilling the sales force, it seems that respondents primarily focus on personal selling skills like deal closing and negotiation. Obviously, one needs to learn and master selling skills. Yet, the fact that the respondents place “understanding customers, ICPs and personas” second seems to me to be the crux of the problem. Indeed, as the sales process is getting increasingly challenging, salespeople have to convince prospective customers differently and stop pushing their products and features. A new requirement for sales teams Hence, what used to be a nice-to-have for upper-level KAM in large organisations such as value selling and solution selling is now becoming a must-have in this world where every sale is complex. It seems to me that this is the area where salespeople must improve the most and where they feel awfully isolated. Therefore, they need a lot of coaching in this domain, and this is particularly where marketing can help.  Sales reps must learn to focus a lot more on their customers and targeted industries’ pain points and how to solve them. They must become trusted advisers, to put it in David Maister’s words. This is no small task. It seems to me a lot more important than becoming a SalesTech wizard or a content specialist. For these last two items, I think it’s a lot more effective and scalable for businesses to rely on the help of marketers whom they should include in their account-management teams. The commissioning process To this end, I also think that beyond the rethink of the sales organisation, one needs to re-engineer the commissioning process to encompass marketing. How can you call for more marketing and sales alignment and not compensate them when they play a major role in identifying new deals and even more, closing sales? It happened to me a few times in the past when I was playing a major role in an account team in paving the way to success for a large multimillion-dollar deal. At the end of the process, only the salesperson was raking in the money. I always found this unfair and not conducive to inciting marketers to join the account teams. Certainly, a lot of people disagree with that and think even that compensation should be taken out purely and simply. And I often hear that you do not need to be compensated to be motivated to sell. But I’m rather sceptical about this and it doesn’t fit with my field experience. I believe on the contrary that this is a major trigger for motivation in sales and it is a good thing that marketers learn to work in that way as well. A helpful survey for understanding the state of Sales Enablement To conclude with this analysis, this survey was incredibly helpful in showing the progress made with Sales Enablement deployment. It also highlighted the areas where there is room for improvement in sales and marketing alignment. There is undoubtedly a huge gap between the US and the UK, and continental Europe, though. One would have welcomed a more thorough comparison with other European countries and maybe Seismic will deliver this soon.State of Sales Enablement report: download the entire pdf presentation A more in-depth analysis is available in the recording which I have included hereafter. The post 5 takeaways on the current state of Sales Enablement appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

What is the current state of Sales Enablement in Europe and especially in the UK? A recent <a href="https://Seismic.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Seismic</a>–<a href="https://www.lxahub.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">LXA</a> survey carried out amongst 1,000 UK, German and French professionals produced some very useful insights regarding the current transformation of the sales process. It shows how sales are becoming increasingly complex and how organisations are adapting to the new situation. Sales Enablement is more than ever at the heart of these changes. Here are my five takeaways from this very noteworthy report. #Disclosure: Visionary Marketing worked with Seismic in 2022. <h2>5 takeaways from the 2023 Seismic-LXA State of Sales Enablement report</h2>The state of Sales Enablement in 2023. S.E. can turn your average salesperson into a superhero, but many businesses have to overcome a few challenges before they get there — image generated with Midjourney. <h3>State of Sales Enablement: A Survey of 1,000 European Professionals</h3>  LXA conducted this survey in Europe and focused mostly on the UK (72% of the 1,000 respondents), with a smaller proportion of answers from France and Germany. It allows some sort of comparison between countries with a little bias on the UK, though. Continental Europe is far less advanced in terms of Sales Enablement adoption, this nuance is somewhat important.The state of sales enablement report by LXA is adamant: all respondents in the UK have a Sales Enablement Function. Most respondents are working in sales, with a fair proportion of managers and top managers. This is a fine sample and the insights we can derive from that survey are extremely newsworthy. LXA evaluates the Sales Enablement market at $508.9 billion in their report. This number encompasses both SalesTech and MarTech. Sales Enablement is indeed a very broad subject, and one must take this into account. My commentary is summarised in this post. You will find an unabridged version in the enclosed Loom video. Often, we will abbreviate Sales Enablement as S.E., for convenience. <h3>Exec summary of my 5 takeaways from the 2023 Seismic Sales Enablement report</h3>The State of sales enablement report puts numbers on our impressions from the field: Clients are becoming more and more demanding and sales are becoming increasingly complex My five takeaways from the report are the following. <ol> <li>Selling is getting harder. It takes more steps for you to get customers to come to a decision. And it makes sense in that context that Sales Enablement finds its place within organisations. That said, we still found 32% who are not entirely convinced that Sales Enablement means better performance. And I found this rather baffling.</li> <li>All respondents believe that S.E. is effective, but there is room for maturity improvement. Let us stress again that the survey is mostly focused on the UK. Sales Enablement is not as developed on the continent and especially in France. Over there it only came to the agenda — if one excludes international businesses — a year ago or so. It may have preexisted but neither with this name nor with a proper S.E. philosophy. Often, there is no such thing as a Sales Enablement Function to start with. A <a href="https://www.sparklane-group.com/fr/blog/sales-enablement/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">recent interview we carried out on behalf of Sparklane</a> with S.E. professionals in French (including a Seismic representative) confirmed this.</li> <li>Respondents declare that sales and marketing alignment is a reality. But they keep contradicting themselves. Sales and marketing are increasingly aligned, that’s the good news. When I looked into the details, in the light of other surveys that we have analysed, I had my doubts and questions.</li> <li>S.E. deployment is suffering from a lack of “sales professionals and necessary data skills, content sales, operation skills and knowledge…”. I wondered whether such people exist or whether the crux of the problem isn’t the collaboration between teams. As well as the way one has designed and implemented sales organisations.</li> <li>Lastly, most respondents concur that processes and tools to drive their content strategy effectively are in place (but are content strategies implemented effectively?)</li> </ol> <h3>Clients are becoming increasingly demanding, and the sales process has changed and become more complex</h3> Sixty-eight per cent of respondents agree that Sales Enablement is “key to driving business performance”’. But at the same time, one still finds 16% who strongly disagree and another 16% who feel “neutral” regarding that statement. And 32% still makes up one third of the total population. Does this opinion relate to the tool itself or to how it was implemented? We witnessed similar reactions with CRM implementations, some 30 years ago. Worthy of note is the fact that clients are becoming increasingly demanding as 47% think that it takes 10+ interactions with the average customer before they land a deal. It is an undeniable sign that sales are becoming increasingly complex and that complex selling is becoming the norm. This is very consistent with what we see happening in the field. <h4>Changing the way one engages with customers</h4> <blockquote>The way you engage with customers has changed. Customers want to be challenged, and they’re also keen to learn from you as a supplier. You need to be seen as an expert – they want facts and credibility and expect you to know about them before you even pick up the phone. The planning, investigation and discovery that you do as a seller is probably one of the most important aspects of any customer engagement Liz Waugh, Global Director of Sales Enablement, Crayon</blockquote> The change in buyer behaviour has an undeniable impact on the discovery phase. This is probably where modern-day salespeople have the greatest shortcomings. We see a lot of sales reps who are feeling incredibly helpless regarding this changing sales process. They know that they have to work differently and stop pushing their products and understand the customers better before they try to sell and close. They understand all the words but it’s very hard for them to put this new vision into practice. <h4>A matter of education</h4> Sales Enablement can help but it’s mostly an educational issue with the overall approach of sales. One needs to change the way one does sales and turn the process on its head. The Sales Enablement landscape is more mature in the UK than on the continent. Still, none of LXA’s 5 Ps gets a 5/5 mark. S.E. contributes to all the stages of the sales process and nearly 30% of respondents stress a split of responsibility between sales and marketing. This still leaves 70% of respondents where it’s not the case. <h3>Sales and Marketing alignment: the good and the bad</h3> Sales and marketing alignment has been on the agenda for so long that the fact it is still on the agenda shows clearly that there is still a problem. Where does alignment fit in a Sales Enablement deployment strategy? Well, that item is very confusing. <h4>About sales and marketing alignment</h4> 80% of respondents declare that sales and marketing alignment is a reality. When we look at the ownership of the S.E. function, though, this is a very different kettle of fish. Most of that ownership seems to be in the hands of the sales function and marketing is only marginally in charge. Marketing, therefore, is kept on the side even though 30% of them are sharing the “responsibility for managing sales enablement” with sales. I would like to see marketing a lot more involved in such projects and even possibly the merger of the two functions. Beyond this, Liz Waugh has another good point. <blockquote>Sales enablement doesn’t just land within sales. It should thoroughly involve the whole business. Everyone should be able to have a high-level discussion on what sales enablement does and the impact it makes. If you’ve made sure that there is consistency between sales and marketing, then everybody can land the right message Liz Waugh, Global Director of Sales Enablement, Crayon</blockquote> It’s not even a matter of sales and marketing alignment. That’s probably where it starts, but it’s a matter of really aligning the entirety of the company and focusing on customers’ needs and satisfaction. <h4>Customer Success</h4> We hear a  lot about this new “customer success” function, yet we still have a long way to go before customer success is sales’ primary aim. As it should be. Thus, I think it is high time that marketers change the way that they work, and it’s high time that sales started working better with marketing too. Maybe it would be a good idea to stop calling them marketing and sales, to start with. Should we call them Smarketing from now on? <h4>ABM and Sales Enablement</h4> All of that is the essence of ABM — Account-Based Marketing — an area where marketers and sales are heavily focusing on deals and account planning together, not as separate entities trying to align with each other. Now, despite all the talking, the way that sales have developed in the past decade has been going backwards in my honest opinion. Inbound and lead gen on one side, inside sales on another, Business development elsewhere, product development working separately, and yet another function, customer success, to patch things up. <h4>Rethinking the way sales and marketing are run</h4> It’s probably time to rethink the way that sales and marketing organisations are run, one cannot split all functions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, talk about “alignment”. This doesn’t make sense and organisations should be simplified and made leaner for the sake of customers and sales efficiency. <h3>Talent issue?</h3> On another level, 72% of responding organisations strongly agree with the fact that the market is lacking “sales professionals with the necessary SalesTech, data, sales content or sales operations skills and knowledge…” This is consistent with what Tony Hughes describes in “<a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2021/12/ai-is-the-future-of-sales/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tech-Powered Sales</a>”. My experience in that area is somewhat different, though. Such full-stack marketers/sellers exist, and I’m probably one of them, but I doubt that this is replicable on a large scale. <h4>Sales and content</h4> Let’s take the example of sales content only. Certainly, far easier than mastering SalesTech and data management and other technical things. Despite my efforts and the fact that I managed to implement large organisation-wide UGC-based content teams in many countries, the only population I’ve never been able to convince was sales. I think that getting sales to contribute to a blog is understandably more difficult. For one, it’s harder to ask them to concentrate on chasing new deals and be in the field and ask them to sit at their desk writing content. This is something that we knowledge workers and consultants do all the time. It’s part of our job and taking hindsight and writing is part of our selling process and skills. It’s not naturally so for salespeople. I know that Tony Hughes disagrees, but I’ve tried too many times to bring salespeople to the water and I couldn’t make them drink. So, what if one tried, once more, to work as a team rather than ask people to do other people’s jobs? <h3>Upskilling the sales force</h3> Now, when it comes to upskilling the sales force, it seems that respondents primarily focus on personal selling skills like deal closing and negotiation. Obviously, one needs to learn and master selling skills. Yet, the fact that the respondents place “understanding customers, ICPs and personas” second seems to me to be the crux of the problem. Indeed, as the sales process is getting increasingly challenging, salespeople have to convince prospective customers differently and stop pushing their products and features. <h4>A new requirement for sales teams</h4> Hence, what used to be a nice-to-have for upper-level KAM in large organisations such as value selling and solution selling is now becoming a must-have in this world where every sale is complex. It seems to me that this is the area where salespeople must improve the most and where they feel awfully isolated. Therefore, they need a lot of coaching in this domain, and this is particularly where marketing can help. Sales reps must learn to focus a lot more on their customers and targeted industries’ pain points and how to solve them. They must become trusted advisers, to put it in David Maister’s words. This is no small task. It seems to me a lot more important than becoming a SalesTech wizard or a content specialist. For these last two items, I think it’s a lot more effective and scalable for businesses to rely on the help of marketers whom they should include in their account-management teams. <h4>The commissioning process</h4> To this end, I also think that beyond the rethink of the sales organisation, one needs to re-engineer the commissioning process to encompass marketing. How can you call for more marketing and sales alignment and not compensate them when they play a major role in identifying new deals and even more, closing sales? It happened to me a few times in the past when I was playing a major role in an account team in paving the way to success for a large multimillion-dollar deal. At the end of the process, only the salesperson was raking in the money. I always found this unfair and not conducive to inciting marketers to join the account teams. Certainly, a lot of people disagree with that and think even that compensation should be taken out purely and simply. And I often hear that you do not need to be compensated to be motivated to sell. But I’m rather sceptical about this and it doesn’t fit with my field experience. I believe on the contrary that this is a major trigger for motivation in sales and it is a good thing that marketers learn to work in that way as well. <h3>A helpful survey for understanding the state of Sales Enablement</h3> To conclude with this analysis, this survey was incredibly helpful in showing the progress made with Sales Enablement deployment. It also highlighted the areas where there is room for improvement in sales and marketing alignment. There is undoubtedly a huge gap between the US and the UK, and continental Europe, though. One would have welcomed a more thorough comparison with other European countries and maybe Seismic will deliver this soon.State of Sales Enablement report: <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/sales-enablement-report-2023-seismic.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">download the entire pdf presentation</a> A more in-depth analysis is available in the recording which I have included hereafter. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/01/sate-of-sales-enablement/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">5 takeaways on the current state of Sales Enablement</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

5 takeaways on the current state of Sales Enablement

Is Twitter still the right platform for advertisers? Twitter has been in the news lately for changes that have happened within the organisation as well as in its user policies. More recently, Musk even decided to ask Twitter users whether he should resign and it seems he didn’t quite like the answer. Journalists reporting on the whims of Mr Elon Musk are having good fun but what should advertisers do? Should they put Twitter on hold? To find out I interviewed Kelsey Chickering, Principal Analyst – CMO Practice at Forrester on how these changes are likely to impact brands and B2B marketers. Kelsey shed some light on where the platform is headed and what marketers should do. And her advice is clear: advertisers should put Twitter on the back-burner, both for ads and word of mouth. Let that sink in! Elon. Forrester Advises Brands to Put Twitter on the Back-BurnerIs Twitter still the proper platform for advertisers? Forrester’s Chickering’s answer to that question is a resounding no. Let that sink in, Elon! Twitter for advertisers: should brands pay attention to Twitter’s new boss’s whims? Kelsey Chickering: From the advertiser’s perspective, you have to pay attention to Elon’s whims, because at this point these are directing the future of Twitter, the way moderation is happening, and the new tools that are popping up. It’s a sound decision to pause your Twitter dollars for most advertisers as Elon Musks’s whims can change on a dime. They should keep a pulse check on what Musk is tweeting and indicating about the future of Twitter, while taking a conservative approach to spending on it. We don’t know the future, so let’s wait and see. I wouldn’t say take Twitter off your list forever. But it’s a sound idea to stop spending on it for the moment given the uncertainty associated with the platform. It’s proven in the last several weeks that it’s not really the safest place for brands to be. The Future of Twitter for AdvertisersShould advertisers still dish out their advertising dollars for Twitter visibility? Our once favourite blue bird is crying its heart out.Consumers are worried about the future of Twitter and what it might become. Will it be a place where they want to spend time, or a place that gets overrun by misinformation and disinformation? However, I think from an advertiser’s perspective, most brands don’t really need Twitter to meet their business goals in terms of advertising. It’s not as big of a concern since you can put your ad dollars where you can get mid to upper funnel results. Many brands weren’t using Twitter for lower funnel direct response activities. I reckon there’s minimal impact to your bottom line to move your ad spend elsewhere. There are, of course, exceptions to it.“Advertisers can find new avenues,” Forrester’s analyst warnsThus, for advertisers, they can find new avenues. For consumers, it’s a little different because Twitter is offering something that no one else is offering them right now. It is a place where people go to find information, get real-time updates, and see the news as it’s happening. That’s something you can’t necessarily find anywhere else at this point.  Kelsey Chickering kindly answered our questions – photo by Valerie Sarron Twitter for marketers is more of a use case than a must-have. There are certain use cases like customer service where Twitter becomes important and is a channel you manage. It might mean that you have to find new vehicles to handle customer service. Influencers and Twitter Twitter has certainly been a platform for the media and news reporting side. It’s a place where you can get seen and heard. All that said, there are new platforms popping up. TikTok, for example, is creator-born and a lot of creators are flocking to it. You might see more people on the news side spend time on it as well. Alternative Platforms for Twitter Advertisers and Marketers Two channels I believe are viable places for both creators and friends: TikTok and Reddit. Reddit is similar to Twitter where you can find very niche audiences. There are conversations about different and specific topics, a provision which Twitter had bestowed upon many communities. Major difference though is that Twitter is more real time and events-based. Then we have Bluesky by Jack Dorsey. It’s quite unclear though what Bluesky actually is, what it will be and whether it would be a replacement for Twitter. I haven’t yet seen anything that indicates if it would be a replacement. However, this landscape is ripe for a new platform that has similar functionality to Twitter with the safety and content moderation it offers. Verified Status or Paid StatusWelcome or Goodbye to Twitter advertisers? Whoever understands the current status of his or her verified account wins a free Twitter bird.Having a verified account on Twitter could actually be a good thing. It would be helpful for people to understand whether content is coming from a real person or a fake account. But unfortunately, the recent changes have made it easier for impersonators to get verified. So it had a bit of an inverse impact. All of the information that I’ve seen, it seems to be a back and forth from Twitter trying to figure out the right balance, while realising that there’s a problem if it’s accessible for everybody. Regrettably, verification meant impersonation instead of true verification, which implies it was hard to put more trust in information from such accounts. Current landscape and future of social media We are at a turning point for Meta. Suffice to say, social media advertising has struggled in the last year with Apple’s privacy changes. If you look at any report from Meta or in the more recent Forrester’s Ad forecasts that were released this November, social media advertising will decelerate to its slowest pace, rising only 7.4% this year. Hence, there is a slowdown in spending that we’re projecting over 2023. However, agency executives and brands are still seeing social media maintained over a year. They’re deliberating on how to continue maintaining those budgets, as the budget deployment avenues are changing. Meta is a channel that delivers on many different aspects of customer lifecycle, everything from discovering a new product all the way through to managing conversations with your current customers. It has certainly gained the lion’s share of media because on the lower funnel side, it’s actually proven very efficient for advertisers. It’s a way for them to get lower funnel media for a good price. New platforms emerge and you see consumers shift into new places like TikTok, for instance. We are beginning to see brands figure out how to shift their dollars into new modern spaces that people are spending time on. It presents a whole new set of challenges, especially from content creation perspective. In the foreseeable future, you’re going to see shifts out of legacy platforms like Meta into emerging ones like TikTok, and integrators that help you create the content for those platforms. Content Creation: Brands Versus Influencers We’re starting to see a trend toward brands and agencies hiring creators to make content for organic channels. That’s not just to gain influence from their followers, but also to make content for them to publish. I reckon they’re realising that when you enter a platform like TikTok, you can’t use the same old strategy. Their content teams probably don’t fully understand how to make compelling content for that platform. So they’re hiring creators and outside resources to either make their content or advise on it. Brands going back to work on their own content and channels You need to have your house in order while you’re advertising. Your owned properties are incredibly important because consumers are seamlessly moving from social media platforms to your website, back to something else, and on to the blog content you might create. It is natural and seamless for consumers at this point. So every touch point that you expect a consumer to have with you should reflect your brand and values. It should reflect your look and feel, and the experience that you want people to have with you. Regardless of social media, it’s crucial for brands to get their house in order and ensure that their own presence is good for consumers. What’s in Store for Twitter Advertisers and ConsumersThe Twitter verified account status saga was enough to get the entire planet completely confused over what should or shouldn’t be done. It sued to state that your verified account was worth bloody nothing and that it was just a legacy verified badge granted to someone who used to be known. It now points out that “this account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category”. Advertisers are now granted a yellow “This account is verified because it’s an official business on Twitter” badge. Heck! Isn’t all that utterly confusing. I will not make any comments on Musk’s management capabilities.Wait for a Few Months Forrester Analyst Says In the next several months, things will pave way for some clarity. You might see that consumers double down on Twitter and realise they can’t go anywhere else and this is where they love to spend time. Or there might be an exodus from the platform if it becomes a place that has a lot of unsavoury content or content that you don’t want to keep. Any of those two scenarios may happen with consumers, but I don’t see brands going back to Twitter in the next two quarters. This is based on the uncertainty with the platform combined with brands tightening their belts. Right now, we’re in a period of economic uncertainty where brands aren’t flushed with cash to spend on advertising. So they need to make hard choices about where to show up. The way the platform has manifested itself recently makes it a pretty easy choice for brands to decide where to cut or put money elsewhere. Organic Content on Twitter If you think the platform is not suitable for your ad dollars, it’s not suitable for your content at all. Removing your content from a platform because you feel it’s not safe, translates into your organic presence as well.  Here’s the result, cowboy. Let that sink in! https://t.co/H4Fq8xRLd6 — Yann Gourvennec (@ygourven) January 22, 2023  Forbes showed that the result of Musk’s new governance is pretty clear. It stressed a 50% drop in advertising volume in November 2022 alone. Kelsey’s advice must have been followed. For us on the B2B marketing side, it might be high time we start exploring other platforms. Not forgetting to spruce up our digital assets. The post Forrester advises advertisers to put Twitter on Back Burner appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Is Twitter still the right platform for advertisers? Twitter has been in the news lately for changes that have happened within the organisation as well as in its user policies. More recently, Musk even decided to ask Twitter users whether he should resign and it seems he didn’t quite like the answer. Journalists reporting on the whims of Mr Elon Musk are having good fun but what should advertisers do? Should they put Twitter on hold? To find out I interviewed <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelseylchickering/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kelsey Chickering</a>, Principal Analyst – CMO Practice at <a href="https://forrester.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Forrester</a> on how these changes are likely to impact brands and B2B marketers. Kelsey shed some light on where the platform is headed and what marketers should do. And her advice is clear: advertisers should put Twitter on the back-burner, both for ads and word of mouth. Let that sink in! Elon. <h2>Forrester Advises Brands to Put Twitter on the Back-Burner</h2>Is Twitter still the proper platform for advertisers? Forrester’s Chickering’s answer to that question is a resounding no. Let that sink in, Elon! <h3>Twitter for advertisers: should brands pay attention to Twitter’s new boss’s whims?</h3> Kelsey Chickering: From the advertiser’s perspective, you have to pay attention to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Elon’s</a> whims, because at this point these are directing the future of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter,</a> the way moderation is happening, and the new tools that are popping up. <blockquote>It’s a sound decision to pause your Twitter dollars for most advertisers as Elon Musks’s whims can change on a dime.</blockquote> They should keep a pulse check on what Musk is tweeting and indicating about the future of Twitter, while taking a conservative approach to spending on it. We don’t know the future, so let’s wait and see. I wouldn’t say take Twitter off your list forever. But it’s a sound idea to stop spending on it for the moment given the uncertainty associated with the platform. It’s proven in the last several weeks that it’s not really the safest place for brands to be. <h2>The Future of Twitter for Advertisers</h2>Should advertisers still dish out their advertising dollars for Twitter visibility? Our once favourite blue bird is crying its heart out. Consumers are worried about the future of Twitter and what it might become. Will it be a place where they want to spend time, or a place that gets overrun by misinformation and disinformation? However, I think from an advertiser’s perspective, most brands don’t really need Twitter to meet their business goals in terms of advertising. It’s not as big of a concern since you can put your ad dollars where you can get mid to upper funnel results. Many brands weren’t using Twitter for lower funnel direct response activities. I reckon there’s minimal impact to your bottom line to move your ad spend elsewhere. There are, of course, exceptions to it.“Advertisers can find new avenues,” Forrester’s analyst warns Thus, for advertisers, they can find new avenues. For consumers, it’s a little different because Twitter is offering something that no one else is offering them right now. <blockquote>It is a place where people go to find information, get real-time updates, and see the news as it’s happening. That’s something you can’t necessarily find anywhere else at this point. </blockquote> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2021/10/networking-and-building-your-b2b-business-on-linkedin/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelseylchickering/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Kelsey Chickering</a> kindly answered our questions – <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/valerie-sarron/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">photo by Valerie Sarron</a> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2021/10/networking-and-building-your-b2b-business-on-linkedin/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter for marketers</a> is more of a use case than a must-have. There are certain use cases like customer service where Twitter becomes important and is a channel you manage. It might mean that you have to find new vehicles to handle customer service. <h2>Influencers and Twitter</h2> Twitter has certainly been a platform for the media and news reporting side. It’s a place where you can get seen and heard. All that said, there are new platforms popping up. <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TikTok</a>, for example, is creator-born and a lot of creators are flocking to it. You might see more people on the news side spend time on it as well. <h2>Alternative Platforms for Twitter Advertisers and Marketers</h2> Two channels I believe are viable places for both creators and friends: TikTok and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Reddit</a>. Reddit is similar to Twitter where you can find very niche audiences. There are conversations about different and specific topics, a provision which Twitter had bestowed upon many communities. Major difference though is that Twitter is more real time and events-based. Then we have Bluesky by Jack Dorsey. It’s quite unclear though what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bluesky</a> actually is, what it will be and whether it would be a replacement for Twitter. I haven’t yet seen anything that indicates if it would be a replacement. However, this landscape is ripe for a new platform that has similar functionality to Twitter with the safety and content moderation it offers. <h2>Verified Status or Paid Status</h2>Welcome or Goodbye to Twitter advertisers? Whoever understands the current status of his or her verified account wins a free Twitter bird. Having a <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">verified account</a> on Twitter could actually be a good thing. It would be helpful for people to understand whether content is coming from a real person or a fake account. But unfortunately, the recent changes have made it easier for impersonators to get verified. So it had a bit of an inverse impact. All of the information that I’ve seen, it seems to be a back and forth from Twitter trying to figure out the right balance, while realising that there’s a problem if it’s accessible for everybody. Regrettably, verification meant impersonation instead of true verification, which implies it was hard to put more trust in information from such accounts. <h2>Current landscape and future of social media</h2> We are at a turning point for Meta. Suffice to say, social media advertising has struggled in the last year with Apple’s privacy changes. <blockquote>If you look at any report from Meta or in the more recent Forrester’s Ad forecasts that were released this November, social media advertising will decelerate to its slowest pace, rising only 7.4% this year.</blockquote> Hence, there is a slowdown in spending that we’re projecting over 2023. However, agency executives and brands are still seeing social media maintained over a year. They’re deliberating on how to continue maintaining those budgets, as the budget deployment avenues are changing. Meta is a channel that delivers on many different aspects of customer lifecycle, everything from discovering a new product all the way through to managing conversations with your current customers. It has certainly gained the lion’s share of media because on the lower funnel side, it’s actually proven very efficient for advertisers. It’s a way for them to get lower funnel media for a good price. New platforms emerge and you see consumers shift into new places like TikTok, for instance. We are beginning to see<a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/09/brands-and-social-media/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> brands figure out</a> how to shift their dollars into new modern spaces that people are spending time on. It presents a whole new set of challenges, especially from content creation perspective. In the foreseeable future, you’re going to see shifts out of legacy platforms like Meta into <a href="https://influencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-b2b-marketing/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">emerging ones like TikTok</a>, and integrators that help you create the content for those platforms. <h2>Content Creation: Brands Versus Influencers</h2> We’re starting to see a trend toward brands and agencies hiring creators to make content for organic channels. That’s not just to gain influence from their followers, but also to make content for them to publish. I reckon they’re realising that when you enter a platform like TikTok, you can’t use the same old strategy. Their content teams probably don’t fully understand how to make compelling content for that platform. So they’re hiring creators and <a href="https://www.upfluence.com/influencer-marketing/how-to-find-influencers-on-twitter" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">outside resources</a> to either make their content or advise on it. <h2>Brands going back to work on their own content and channels</h2> You need to have your house in order while you’re advertising. <blockquote>Your owned properties are incredibly important because consumers are seamlessly moving from social media platforms to your website, back to something else, and on to the blog content you might create.</blockquote> It is natural and seamless for consumers at this point. So every touch point that you expect a consumer to have with you should reflect your brand and values. It should reflect your look and feel, and the experience that you want people to have with you. Regardless of social media, it’s crucial for brands to get their house in order and ensure that their own presence is good for consumers. <h2>What’s in Store for Twitter Advertisers and Consumers</h2>The Twitter verified account status saga was enough to get the entire planet completely confused over what should or shouldn’t be done. It sued to state that your verified account was worth bloody nothing and that it was just a legacy verified badge granted to someone who used to be known. It now points out that “this account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category”. Advertisers are now granted a yellow “This account is verified because it’s an official business on Twitter” badge. Heck! Isn’t all that utterly confusing. I will not make any comments on Musk’s management capabilities. <h4>Wait for a Few Months Forrester Analyst Says</h4> In the next several months, things will pave way for some clarity. You might see that consumers double down on Twitter and realise they can’t go anywhere else and this is where they love to spend time. Or there might be an exodus from the platform if it becomes a place that has a lot of unsavoury content or content that you don’t want to keep. Any of those two scenarios may happen with consumers, but I don’t see <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/02/twitter_advertising_push/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">brands going back to Twitter</a> in the next two quarters. This is based on the uncertainty with the platform combined with brands tightening their belts. Right now, we’re in a period of economic uncertainty where brands aren’t flushed with cash to spend on advertising. So they need to make hard choices about where to show up. The way the platform has manifested itself recently makes it a pretty easy choice for brands to decide where to cut or put money elsewhere. <h2>Organic Content on Twitter</h2> If you think the platform is not suitable for your ad dollars, it’s not suitable for your content at all. Removing your content from a platform because you feel it’s not safe, translates into your organic presence as well. <blockquote> Here’s the result, cowboy. Let that sink in!<a href="https://t.co/H4Fq8xRLd6" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://t.co/H4Fq8xRLd6</a> — Yann Gourvennec (@ygourven) <a href="https://twitter.com/ygourven/status/1617175973388259330?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">January 22, 2023</a></blockquote> Forbes showed that the result of Musk’s new governance is pretty clear. It stressed a 50% drop in advertising volume in November 2022 alone. Kelsey’s advice must have been followed. For us on the B2B marketing side, it might be high time we start exploring other platforms. Not forgetting to spruce up our digital assets. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/01/twitter-for-advertisers/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Forrester advises advertisers to put Twitter on Back Burner</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Forrester advises advertisers to put Twitter on Back Burner

So you think your customers love your brand? Really?! Recently, I came across a motivational piece on Inc.com entitled: “People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likeable and Give Better Advice.” I am not usually interested in self development articles or books. However, I found these 3 questions useful to businesses if only you read them through the eyes of an entrepreneur. One may even venture to say that they are the very essence of marketing. Ask these 3 questions if you want your customers to love your brandSelf-development isn’t my cup of latte but asking these 3 questions taken from a motivational article in Inc.com will help you become more likeable and make your customers love your brand!Love thy customers and they will love thy brand! Self-development isn’t my cup of tea, yet it’s one of the most popular book categories amongst the general public. It is understandable, people need advice and are in search of simple if not simplistic recipes. They need them to survive in a world which is generally perceived, not always rightly, as hostile. When I came across that Inc.com piece, I found that I could turn it into a short bullet point list targeted at businesses and entrepreneurs. After all, those who can ask these three questions can get their customers to love their brand better. The piece is entitled “People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likeable and Give Better Advice”. Let us review these 3 questions and put them into a marketing and business context. I have therefore hacked this list to my liking. You can read the original Inc.com article afterwards if you feel you need to become a more likeable person too. [Businesses] like to be liked. It’s human nature: We crave connection and relationships, and we enjoy the affirmation and ego boost that results from knowing that other people enjoy being around us So often, I come across business owners who will tell me, “I want to talk to my community.” Meaning “my customers”. The issue though is that not all customers are part of a community. Brompton’s, Apple’s and Dyson’s customers maybe. Even that is debatable. Giff Gaff’s, that’s for sure. But most businesses’ customers aren’t forming a “community of customers”. Number one reason is … you are not a likeable brand! It doesn’t mean your products aren’t good nor selling well. But there is no emotional bond between your customers and your brand. Hence the three questions. Here they are. 1. “What do you think I should do?” (as a brand) The essence of marketing is being interested in one’s customers. This doesn’t mean that product-led marketing has no future. It means that you should always ask customers how they feel, what they like and what they don’t like. And that means being genuinely interested in what they have to say. You do not need to carry out online surveys amongst millions of buyers. Interviewing, in depth, twelve of them will suffice and it won’t take that long. 2. “What other facts would help you to make a decision?” People make decisions for emotional reasons all the timeLove your customers and they will love your brand too. Image generated by Midjourney with the following prompt: “An old-fashioned 19th century sepia drawing of a lady customer who offers a bunch of flowers to a shop owner in a department store like Whiteley’s and is kneeling before him.” Not sure the AI got Whiteley’s right, though. Maybe it’s never been to Bayswater.The author is right. Emotion is part of the buying process. It’s also true of B2B. Truth be told, it’s probably even more true of the B2B purchasing process. B2B is said to be rational and B2C emotional. More often than not it’s the other way around.  A B2B buyer will need to be reassured. Buying expensive stuff for a business means taking a huge risk and putting one’s head on the block more often than not. The more you reassure your client, the better. Buying a B2B service or product isn’t always a matter of features. Most of the time it’s not at all. It’s about reassurance as mentioned above, and feeling the vendor will support you and help you Failure isn’t just a threat for sellers, it’s also a threat to buyers. Failing to negotiate and buy the right service at the right price could cost you money and your reputation. The buyer is as much afraid of buying than the seller (I’ve worked on both sides I can guarantee it’s the way it happens).  3. “How do you think you would feel if you decided to do X?” Trying to put oneself in one’s customers shoes means genuinely help them make the right decision and partnering with them. This is something I’m particularly keen on. Not just selling, but working alongside my clients to help them succeed. “Customer Success” is even a popular job position at the moment. However I find that too often, it’s just a phrase and the customer success officer is just a seller in sheep’s clothing. Try and be genuinely interested in the success of your customer and you will be surprised. We supported a client with a man from Mars report last year. It was just a wee three-day engagement but the outcome was nice: Whereas our client was about to embark on a costly and useless B2C strategy which would have led to nothing, we comforted them by pointing towards a more rewarding low-hanging fruit strategy while emphasising a few issues that needed to be fixed. This little engagement made our client save hundreds of thousands of euros (each year). A few days ago, I received a little note from them with a box of chocolate. Yes! They sent us the chocolate, not the other way round. Not only that, they shared their prospects with us. They are genuinely grateful we helped them. And we are genuinely happy we did. We feel proud that we’ve helped a nice company as best we could. As the author at Inc.com points out: You’ll give better advice, and you’ll become more charismatic in the process See! Self-development articles can be helpful to businesses too.  Read the original Inc.com piece  The post Ask these 3 questions if you want your customers to love your brand appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

So you think your customers love your brand? Really?! Recently, I came across a <a href="https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-with-high-emotional-intelligence-ask-3-key-questions-to-become-more-likable-give-better-advice.html" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">motivational piece on Inc.com</a> entitled: “People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likeable and Give Better Advice.” I am not usually interested in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/self-development" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">self development articles or books</a>. However, I found these 3 questions useful to businesses if only you read them through the eyes of an entrepreneur. One may even venture to say that they are the very essence of marketing. <h2>Ask these 3 questions if you want your customers to love your brand</h2>Self-development isn’t my cup of latte but asking these 3 questions taken from a motivational article in <a href="http://Inc.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Inc.com</a> will help you become more likeable and make your customers love your brand! <h3>Love thy customers and they will love thy brand!</h3> Self-development isn’t my cup of tea, yet it’s one of the most popular book categories amongst the general public. It is understandable, people need advice and are in search of simple if not simplistic recipes. They need them to survive in a world which is generally perceived, not always rightly, as hostile. When I came across that <a href="http://Inc.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Inc.com</a> piece, I found that I could turn it into a short bullet point list targeted at businesses and entrepreneurs. After all, those who can ask these three questions can get their customers to love their brand better. The piece is entitled “People With High Emotional Intelligence Ask 3 Key Questions to Become More Likeable and Give Better Advice”. Let us review these 3 questions and put them into a marketing and business context. I have therefore hacked this list to my liking. You can read the original <a href="http://Inc.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Inc.com</a> article afterwards if you feel you need to become a more likeable person too. <blockquote>[Businesses] like to be liked. It’s human nature: We crave connection and relationships, and we enjoy the affirmation and ego boost that results from knowing that other people enjoy being around us</blockquote> So often, I come across business owners who will tell me, “I want to talk to my community.” Meaning “my customers”. The issue though is that not all customers are part of a community. Brompton’s, Apple’s and Dyson’s customers maybe. Even that is debatable. Giff Gaff’s, that’s for sure. But most businesses’ customers aren’t forming a “community of customers”. Number one reason is … you are not a likeable brand! It doesn’t mean your products aren’t good nor selling well. But there is no emotional bond between your customers and your brand. Hence the three questions. Here they are. <h3>1. “What do you think I should do?” (as a brand)</h3> The essence of marketing is being interested in one’s customers. This doesn’t mean that product-led marketing has no future. It means that you should always ask customers how they feel, what they like and what they don’t like. And that means being genuinely interested in what they have to say. You do not need to carry out online surveys amongst millions of buyers. Interviewing, in depth, twelve of them will suffice and it won’t take that long. <h3>2. “What other facts would help you to make a decision?”</h3> <blockquote>People make decisions for emotional reasons all the time</blockquote>Love your customers and they will love your brand too. Image generated by Midjourney with the following prompt: “An old-fashioned 19th century sepia drawing of a lady customer who offers a bunch of flowers to a shop owner in a department store like Whiteley’s and is kneeling before him.” Not sure the AI got Whiteley’s right, though. Maybe it’s never been to Bayswater. The author is right. Emotion is part of the buying process. It’s also true of B2B. Truth be told, it’s probably even more true of the B2B purchasing process. B2B is said to be rational and B2C emotional. More often than not it’s the other way around. <ul> <li>A B2B buyer will need to be reassured. Buying expensive stuff for a business means taking a huge risk and putting one’s head on the block more often than not. The more you reassure your client, the better.</li> <li>Buying a B2B service or product isn’t always a matter of features. Most of the time it’s not at all. It’s about reassurance as mentioned above, and feeling the vendor will support you and help you</li> <li>Failure isn’t just a threat for sellers, it’s also a threat to buyers. Failing to negotiate and buy the right service at the right price could cost you money and your reputation. The buyer is as much afraid of buying than the seller (I’ve worked on both sides I can guarantee it’s the way it happens).</li> </ul> <h3>3. “How do you think you would feel if you decided to do X?”</h3> Trying to put oneself in one’s customers shoes means genuinely help them make the right decision and partnering with them. This is something I’m particularly keen on. Not just selling, but working alongside my clients to help them succeed. “Customer Success” is even a popular job position at the moment. However I find that too often, it’s just a phrase and the customer success officer is just a seller in sheep’s clothing. Try and be genuinely interested in the success of your customer and you will be surprised. We supported a client with <a href="https://agence.visionarymarketing.com/en/services/digital-transformation-services-man-from-mars-report.html" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">a man from Mars report</a> last year. It was just a wee three-day engagement but the outcome was nice: Whereas our client was about to embark on a costly and useless B2C strategy which would have led to nothing, we comforted them by pointing towards a more rewarding <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2007/06/joint-innovation/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">low-hanging fruit strategy</a> while emphasising a few issues that needed to be fixed. This little engagement made our client save hundreds of thousands of euros (each year). A few days ago, I received a little note from them with a box of chocolate. Yes! They sent us the chocolate, not the other way round. Not only that, they shared their prospects with us. They are genuinely grateful we helped them. And we are genuinely happy we did. We feel proud that we’ve helped a nice company as best we could. As the author at <a href="http://Inc.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Inc.com</a> points out: <blockquote>You’ll give better advice, and you’ll become more charismatic in the process</blockquote> See! Self-development articles can be helpful to businesses too. <blockquote> <a href="https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-with-high-emotional-intelligence-ask-3-key-questions-to-become-more-likable-give-better-advice.html" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Read the original Inc.com piece</a> </blockquote> The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/01/brand-love/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ask these 3 questions if you want your customers to love your brand</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Ask these 3 questions if you want your customers to love your brand

Social Selling is about strategy, it’s not about tools or tactics, let alone the infamous LinkedIn Social Selling Index. Social Media is one of the most important avenues for B2B marketers in the post-pandemic world. Let’s hear it from an expert on what it takes to be great at social and leverage this channel effectively. In this podcast Tim Hughes talks to us about the updated version of his book on social selling.  Social selling is about strategy it’s not about toolsSocial selling isn’t a tool, it’s about strategy and it’s a must-have in a post-pandemic world – Buy the book from Amazon now!   TH In this new version of the book I have added more content and bolstered it after discussing with 15 practitioners – people that are doing social selling. For an organisation’s executive team, social selling ought to be part of the strategy. When social media came out, many didn’t know what to do with it. The marketing department would leave it in a cupboard and then bring it out every week or two. They’d post something on a corporate page and ask everybody to like it, which more often than not doesn’t fetch good results. Social now is a clear competitive advantage for an organisation. But it has to be run as a strategy, not as a tactic. The key thing about the book is that I want to show there’s a clear connection between social media and leads and meetings. How are you going to use social to build a pipeline and get revenue? Social Selling Is Not Communicating Online, It’s About Dollars We have a definition as well as methodology for social. Social selling is using your presence and behaviour on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationships and trust, which lead to conversations and commercial interaction.A proper Social Selling strategy isn’t about communicating online Tim Hughes says, it’s about dollars and cents!The key thing there is we’re driving commercial interaction. Organisations now at a leadership level should be able to say at board meetings that we’re spending ‘x’ on marketing and getting ‘y’ from social media. It’s not about getting likes and clicks and views, it’s about revenue. They should be able to say we’re getting $10 million from the use of social media. That’s about driving a strategy from the top down to actually understand why they’re on social. Let’s talk social media in terms of a classic exhibition. You as a buyer know what supplier you want to talk to. So you go over there, sit down and have a conversation. Probably at that exhibition there would be somebody who would have seen you and would talk to you. Now, we would expect what happens on social media is I walk into it and a salesman comes up and smacks me in the face with a brochure. Nobody’s interested in that.LinkedIn is your shop window!We know from research that people come to social media to be social. We’re not coming to social media to be smacked on the face with a sales brochure.  One of our clients is Namos, an Oracle reseller, with whom we worked to transform their sales team. We now have buyers coming on to social media, walking up to their sales team, which is transformational. Normally when it’s about sales people, folks don’t like or trust them. Here, we have buyers coming up to their salespeople saying, I think you can help me – and that’s translating. One of them has recently signed a $2.6 million deal.  We have organisations that are doing multimillion-dollar deals purely because of their position on social and treating it as a strategy, while ensuring that everybody within the organisation is involved.  Creating a mission statement We do a classic brainstorming session where we get the C-suite and probably one of their advisors into a room. Then we work through with them about the importance of strategy and using data to show how the world is changed. People quite often recognise that there’s been this change, but they don’t understand that now 60% of the world’s population is active on social media for two and a half hours a day. This is the data that comes from Simon Kemp. Telstra Purple came up with a mission statement which says a social organisation sees social as a platform for closing the distance between clients, prospects, remote employees and potential recruits. Social gives them the ability to get traditional visibility that you would expect from marketing. They’re a cybersecurity company. So they are very keen to be trusted and to get the trusted advisor status, for people to say that company looks like they know what they’re talking about.Humans are social animals, and social selling is well suited for social animals who need to converse and collaborate with one another.Tools for Social Selling We as a business actually use very few tools because this is about you and being human centric. We use Slack internally. I have used internal social now for a number of years. When I was in corporate, we used it to attain an increased efficiency of the employees by 25%. That’s like getting 25% more employees at no cost and it saved so much time. It didn’t stop meetings, but it used to cut down their time. It works only when you have senior leadership using it. Leaders should say, as they did in my previous organisation, that if you want to get hold of me, I am on Slack. I might check email only at certain points in the day. So Slack is where we should connect. What Matters Is Conversations and Collaborations We use Slack, LinkedIn and a number of social platforms purely because today we live in two worlds – physical and digital. As soon as we go online onto social media, we’re in digital. What we need to be able to do as salespeople and leaders of organisations is to be able to walk digital corridors and have digital conversations. The key is to make sure that if you’re going to start in sales as the point of actually transforming your organisation to digital, then what you need are people who have seen it, done it and whom the sales team respects. Age doesn’t have an impact at all on understanding social Mindset required for social selling It isn’t just about social selling, but transforming your organisation to digital. We have the physical world that we all know and love, and we have the digital world. Social media is a conduit to the digital world. Your LinkedIn profile is you – it’s your digital twin. So the way that your LinkedIn profile looks is how you want the digital world to recognise you. For example, at Cambridge Display Technology, they’re not using any recruitment consultants or recruitment advertising anymore. They have gone digital and empowered their people to talk online that it is a great place to work for. They articulate how great their diversity program is, or how well their ESG program unfolds. Those who read this on social say that it looks like a place I want to work for. It the world of digital, social gives us new efficiency and new ways of working. It’s not about tools, a new ERP system or anything like that. It’s about using digital is the way that we work, and that empowerment across the organisation means that we can work in different ways. We can strip out cost and be more efficient. What we would recommend is having an open mind and understand that there is a new digital way of doing things. Businesses Navigating Their Way in the New Digital World When Adam Gray and I started our company six years ago, we thought we had eight months, at which point everybody would get it and it would become the norm. Here we are in our seventh year and 99.99% of companies do not understand this. There are companies who have got big marketing budgets and don’t understand digital. There’s this misalignment from a leadership perspective to understand what social and digital stand for and what it means for their business. To break away from this, it’s about likes and clicks and things like that. I recently read about an organisation who have got 300,000 employees. They’ve got 8 million followers on LinkedIn, but get 15 likes per post, out of which seven are internal. This clearly means they aren’t influencing their prospects and customers. It’s about understanding the world of digital, the way it works and not just an understanding about social, but having the business acumen about how to apply it.  Things have changed because of Covid-19 and we need to do things differently. Organisations are coming to us as they are completely redesigning their processes which are 30 years old. Social Selling Doesn’t Take Long Look at the speed of things – LinkedIn allows you to have 200 connections a week. That’s 200 conversations with people you’re trying to influence. Social selling actually shortens the sales cycle because of not having to deal with a lot up front. People will see you as soon you are online and have a conversation with you instantly. We saw a real tipping point in October 2020 when people in the UK went into the second lockdown. We had to relearn the way we worked. I don’t need to commute anywhere, I can sit in my office or at home and run a normal day’s work. The impediment to success on social and digital is that there are still so many mental models out there that 30 years ago is the way that we do things. LinkedIn and its impact on social selling In the physical world, when we meet a potential client for a meal or sports, we don’t immediately talk about work. We try to get close to the person, and this is what being social is about. We don’t talk about business posts and personal posts. This is life posts. This is about understanding each other. It pulls people towards you. I know social selling, but also the fact that my father has dementia and he’s in a home allows you to know the real Tim Hughes – the Tim Hughes that you would deal with if he delivers a service to you. What you’ll find is that LinkedIn will become more like Facebook, because more people will actually recognise the fact that by doing this you’re getting people to understand you When you come to my LinkedIn profile, you should better understand what it is that I stand for. Your LinkedIn profile is your shop window to the world. It’s about as soon as your ideal customer spots you, he thinks you are interesting. He is curious about that and walks towards you. Your LinkedIn profile explains who you are, and it cannot merely be the fact that you go to work, but that you’re going to spend the next weekend seeing your parents. That’s part of me and who I am. People respect that and I get people coming to me which punches out my network, punches into the people that I’m trying to influence. Social Selling Strategy: Social Media, Not Spam Media Social is not about putting a brochure online – neither your ideal customer nor anybody wants it. People buy people. I’m looking for a relationship with somebody. Someone that can help me solve my business issues and that I can trust. Somebody that I know that if the project starts failing and I ring them up, they’re going to take that call. Even if it’s a Saturday, I can look upon them that they’re an organisation I want to do business with. Now, when I do business in the physical world, I don’t walk into a meeting and immediately give people brochures. I sit there and say, I’ve been working here for 20 years. I’ve been selling accounting systems for 20 years across industries. I generally know about some things about accounting, but there’s bound to be something I have missed. It’s about bringing that expertise and also bringing your personality as people buy people. This is social media. This is not spam media. It’s about empowering the people, that’s when things actually start happening and the magic takes place.  The post Social selling is about strategy it’s not about tools appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Social Selling is about strategy, it’s not about tools or tactics, let alone the infamous LinkedIn Social Selling Index. Social Media is one of the most important avenues for B2B marketers in the post-pandemic world. Let’s hear it from an expert on what it takes to be great at social and leverage this channel effectively. In this podcast <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothyhughessocialselling/?originalSubdomain=uk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tim Hughes</a> talks to us about the updated version of his book on social selling. <h2>Social selling is about strategy it’s not about tools</h2>Social selling isn’t a tool, it’s about strategy and it’s a must-have in a post-pandemic world – <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Social-Selling-Techniques-Influence-Changemakers-ebook/dp/B0BKQVLSF7/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_fr_FR=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&amp;crid=3PK5BKGK0UQU9&amp;keywords=social+selling+tim+hughes&amp;qid=1673257789&amp;sprefix=social+selling+tim+hughes%2Caps%2C65&amp;sr=8-2" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Buy the book from Amazon now!</a> TH In this new version of the book I have added more content and bolstered it after discussing with 15 practitioners – people that are doing <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2017/12/social-selling/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">social selling</a>. For an organisation’s executive team, social selling ought to be part of the strategy. When <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2018/07/how-to-optimize-your-social-media-strategy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">social media</a> came out, many didn’t know what to do with it. The marketing department would leave it in a cupboard and then bring it out every week or two. They’d post something on a corporate page and ask everybody to like it, which more often than not doesn’t fetch good results. <blockquote>Social now is a clear competitive advantage for an organisation. But it has to be run as a strategy, not as a tactic.</blockquote> The key thing about the book is that I want to show there’s a clear connection between social media and leads and meetings. How are you going to use social to build a pipeline and get revenue? <h2>Social Selling Is Not Communicating Online, It’s About Dollars</h2> We have a definition as well as methodology for social. Social selling is using your presence and behaviour on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationships and trust, which lead to conversations and commercial interaction.A proper Social Selling strategy isn’t about communicating online Tim Hughes says, it’s about dollars and cents! The key thing there is we’re driving commercial interaction. Organisations now at a leadership level should be able to say at board meetings that we’re spending ‘x’ on marketing and getting ‘y’ from social media. It’s not about getting likes and clicks and views, it’s about revenue. They should be able to say we’re getting $10 million from the use of social media. That’s about driving a strategy from the top down to actually understand why they’re on social. Let’s talk social media in terms of a classic exhibition. You as a buyer know what supplier you want to talk to. So you go over there, sit down and have a conversation. Probably at that exhibition there would be somebody who would have seen you and would talk to you. Now, we would expect what happens on social media is I walk into it and a salesman comes up and smacks me in the face with a brochure. Nobody’s interested in that.LinkedIn is your shop window! <blockquote>We know from research that people come to social media to be social. We’re not coming to social media to be smacked on the face with a sales brochure.</blockquote>  One of our clients is <a href="https://www.namossolutions.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Namos</a>, an Oracle reseller, with whom we worked to transform their sales team. We now have buyers coming on to social media, walking up to their sales team, which is transformational. Normally when it’s about sales people, folks don’t like or trust them. Here, we have buyers coming up to their salespeople saying, I think you can help me – and that’s translating. One of them has recently signed a $2.6 million deal. We have organisations that are doing multimillion-dollar deals purely because of their position on social and treating it as a strategy, while ensuring that everybody within the organisation is involved. <h2>Creating a mission statement</h2> We do a classic brainstorming session where we get the C-suite and probably one of their advisors into a room. Then we work through with them about the importance of strategy and using data to show how the world is changed. People quite often recognise that there’s been this change, but they don’t understand that now 60% of the world’s population is active on social media for two and a half hours a day. This is the data that comes from <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/eskimon/?originalSubdomain=sg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Simon Kemp</a>. <a href="https://purple.telstra.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Telstra Purple</a> came up with a mission statement which says a social organisation sees social as a platform for closing the distance between clients, prospects, remote employees and potential recruits. Social gives them the ability to get traditional visibility that you would expect from marketing. They’re a cybersecurity company. So they are very keen to be trusted and to get the trusted advisor status, for people to say that company looks like they know what they’re talking about.Humans are social animals, and social selling is well suited for social animals who need to converse and collaborate with one another. <h2>Tools for Social Selling</h2> We as a business actually use very few tools because this is about you and being human centric. We use <a href="https://slack.com/intl/en-in" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Slack</a> internally. I have used internal social now for a number of years. When I was in corporate, we used it to attain an increased efficiency of the employees by 25%. That’s like getting 25% more employees at no cost and it saved so much time. It didn’t stop meetings, but it used to cut down their time. It works only when you have senior leadership using it. Leaders should say, as they did in my previous organisation, that if you want to get hold of me, I am on Slack. I might check email only at certain points in the day. So Slack is where we should connect. <h2>What Matters Is Conversations and Collaborations</h2> We use Slack, LinkedIn and a number of social platforms purely because today we live in two worlds – physical and digital. As soon as we go online onto social media, we’re in digital. <blockquote>What we need to be able to do as salespeople and leaders of organisations is to be able to walk digital corridors and have digital conversations.</blockquote> The key is to make sure that if you’re going to start in sales as the point of actually transforming your organisation to digital, then what you need are people who have seen it, done it and whom the sales team respects. <blockquote>Age doesn’t have an impact at all on understanding social</blockquote> <h2>Mindset required for social selling</h2> It isn’t just about social selling, but transforming your organisation to digital. We have the physical world that we all know and love, and we have the digital world. Social media is a conduit to the digital world. Your LinkedIn profile is you – it’s your digital twin. So the way that your LinkedIn profile looks is how you want the digital world to recognise you. For example, at <a href="https://www.cdtltd.co.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cambridge Display Technology</a>, they’re not using any recruitment consultants or recruitment advertising anymore. They have gone digital and empowered their people to talk online that it is a great place to work for. They articulate how great their diversity program is, or how well their <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-and-governance-esg-criteria.asp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ESG program</a> unfolds. Those who read this on social say that it looks like a place I want to work for. <blockquote>It the world of digital, social gives us new efficiency and new ways of working.</blockquote> It’s not about tools, a new ERP system or anything like that. It’s about using digital is the way that we work, and that empowerment across the organisation means that we can work in different ways. We can strip out cost and be more efficient. What we would recommend is having an open mind and understand that there is a new digital way of doing things. <h2>Businesses Navigating Their Way in the New Digital World</h2> When <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamgray/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Adam Gray</a> and I started our company six years ago, we thought we had eight months, at which point everybody would get it and it would become the norm. Here we are in our seventh year and 99.99% of companies do not understand this. There are companies who have got big marketing budgets and don’t understand digital. There’s this misalignment from a leadership perspective to understand what social and digital stand for and what it means for their business. To break away from this, it’s about likes and clicks and things like that. I recently read about an organisation who have got 300,000 employees. They’ve got 8 million followers on LinkedIn, but get 15 likes per post, out of which seven are internal. This clearly means they aren’t influencing their prospects and customers. It’s about understanding the world of digital, the way it works and not just an understanding about social, but having the business acumen about how to apply it. Things have changed because of Covid-19 and we need to do things differently. Organisations are coming to us as they are completely redesigning their processes which are 30 years old. <h2>Social Selling Doesn’t Take Long</h2> Look at the speed of things – LinkedIn allows you to have 200 connections a week. That’s 200 conversations with people you’re trying to influence. Social selling actually shortens the sales cycle because of not having to deal with a lot up front. People will see you as soon you are online and have a conversation with you instantly. We saw a real tipping point in October 2020 when people in the UK went into the second lockdown. We had to relearn the way we worked. I don’t need to commute anywhere, I can sit in my office or at home and run a normal day’s work. <blockquote>The impediment to success on social and digital is that there are still so many mental models out there that 30 years ago is the way that we do things.</blockquote> <h2>LinkedIn and its impact on social selling</h2> In the physical world, when we meet a potential client for a meal or sports, we don’t immediately talk about work. We try to get close to the person, and this is what being social is about. We don’t talk about business posts and personal posts. This is life posts. This is about understanding each other. It pulls people towards you. I know social selling, but also the fact that my father has dementia and he’s in a home allows you to know the real Tim Hughes – the Tim Hughes that you would deal with if he delivers a service to you. <blockquote>What you’ll find is that LinkedIn will become more like Facebook, because more people will actually recognise the fact that by doing this you’re getting people to understand you</blockquote> When you come to my LinkedIn profile, you should better understand what it is that I stand for. Your LinkedIn profile is your shop window to the world. It’s about as soon as your ideal customer spots you, he thinks you are interesting. He is curious about that and walks towards you. Your LinkedIn profile explains who you are, and it cannot merely be the fact that you go to work, but that you’re going to spend the next weekend seeing your parents. That’s part of me and who I am. People respect that and I get people coming to me which punches out my network, punches into the people that I’m trying to influence. <h2>Social Selling Strategy: Social Media, Not Spam Media</h2> Social is not about putting a brochure online – neither your ideal customer nor anybody wants it. People buy people. I’m looking for a relationship with somebody. Someone that can help me solve my business issues and that I can trust. Somebody that I know that if the project starts failing and I ring them up, they’re going to take that call. Even if it’s a Saturday, I can look upon them that they’re an organisation I want to do business with. Now, when I do business in the physical world, I don’t walk into a meeting and immediately give people brochures. I sit there and say, I’ve been working here for 20 years. I’ve been selling accounting systems for 20 years across industries. I generally know about some things about accounting, but there’s bound to be something I have missed. <blockquote>It’s about bringing that expertise and also bringing your personality as people buy people. This is social media. This is not spam media.</blockquote> It’s about empowering the people, that’s when things actually start happening and the magic takes place. <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Social-Selling-Techniques-Influence-Changemakers-ebook/dp/B0BKQVLSF7/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_fr_FR=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&amp;crid=3PK5BKGK0UQU9&amp;keywords=social+selling+tim+hughes&amp;qid=1673257789&amp;sprefix=social+selling+tim+hughes%2Caps%2C65&amp;sr=8-2" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a> The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/01/social-selling-strategy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Social selling is about strategy it’s not about tools</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Social selling is about strategy it’s not about tools

What if the immersive web were the ultimate goal of Meta’s new strategy? This idea came up during our interview with Pierric Duthoit, Business Director France at Meta, at the Tech for Retail exhibition, of which Visionary Marketing was a media partner. Pierric shared with us some of the innovations launched by Meta as well as his strategic views. A strategy closer to Forrester’s vision than that of B2C commentators. Forget the Metaverse, Meta’s True strategy is about the Immersive WebThe world’s eyes are on the Metaverse, but Meta’s real strategy would be more geared towards the immersive webThe announcement by Mark Zuckerberg on the Metaverse, followed by Facebook’s name change took everyone by surprise. Immediately, naysayers seized the opportunity to denigrate it to the well-known tune of “it will never work!” I have seen less than lukewarm comments regarding Meta’s plans for the future but some disgruntled Meta employees are even more critical. The least one can say is the Metaverse is not probably aimed at users of Meta’s historical brand, deemed tarnished by The Guardian. Heated Discussions About the Future of the Metaverse Other, more enthusiastic commentators followed suit, speaking highly of this vision of the future. At the same time, they were pointing out that other players were already working on it too. Visionaries, meanwhile, claimed that the Metaverse was a reality, but not for Meta, but with online gaming heavyweights like Fortnite.The Immersive Web experience in business starts with all virtual meetings – image by Meta Finally, others announced that the Metaverse was promising and was already attracting investors, even if it didn’t really exist. Finally, pragmatists like Forrester’s analysts, said that B2B was bound to be the future of the Metaverse. Often, there are heated discussions between proponents and detractors of the Metaverse. The future of nascent technologies is hard to predict I have read a lot about this subject and I must admit that sometimes I feel a bit lost. Not only because of its complexity, beyond reach for most. Above all, I find that many commentators do sound a bit adamant about the future of nascent technologies. My experience with technology has taught me that one can never be too cautious. I had rather test innovations in the field… quietly and without getting too excited. What I understand from Pierric Duthoit’s interview is that Meta’s strategy is not really the Metaverse, though, which would not be for now, but rather a new form of Web, the immersive Web. I see it above all as a series of creative attempts. After all, this is how innovation works. One step at a time. While some may find it hard to believe in the future existence of immersive experiences in virtual remote meetings, I would therefore remain cautious. After all, we have waited 20 years for web conferencing to be universally embraced. The current Zoom fatigue, although real, will not make online meetings disappear. They are part of our working environment and innovations in this area are still possible, and even desirable. Here is a summary of my discussions with Pierric Duthoit who described some of the innovations Meta is currently carrying out for its clients. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: a solution for optimising e-commerce performance campaigns Meta is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to dramatically increase the power of its platforms around the world. So, “the goal of the Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (A+SC) solution is to allow our clients to reach the right audiences, test different kinds of graphic designs tailored with their audiences and improve their performance”, says Duthoit.  In these times of crisis, our customers are not looking to spend more, but rather to optimise their performance.  Using the solution results in an approximate 12% improvement in CPA (cost per action). “On our platforms, many people discover brands or products. This is Discovery Commerce. The approach is to push a number of options thanks to the knowledge we have of our audiences,” Pierric emphasises. Avantage+ Shopping Campaigns is used by companies such as Samsung. This allows them to test different images and texts, and optimise them for their audiences.  A+SC automatically pushes the best optimisation to the largest possible audience  Instagram and augmented reality Moving on to another innovation and Instagram, “When we talk about augmented reality, we are talking about the provision of filters that allow you to see almost in three dimensions”, Pierric explains. Furniture vendors for example, will let you see the furniture in your home before you buy. A camera system films your environment and places the fixtures in it. Using augmented reality to the full  More than 700 million of Meta’s 3 billion users use AR filters  Many B2C brands are already integrating three-dimensional elements into their product design. This then makes it possible to implement augmented reality very quickly. Will the Metaverse ever be live on Instagram? “It is already possible to have your NFTs on Instagram. You can upload them and share them. It’s a first step,” Pierric Duthoit stresses.  The Metaverse as defined by Meta will see the light of day within ten years. These technologies take time  In the Metaverse experience, a lot happens in B2B, Pierric explains. “Accor hotels are looking at how to practise online learning with virtual reality with people all over the world, and applications are starting to emerge in the medical field.” Meta announced partnerships with Zoom, Microsoft, AutoCAD and Accenture at Connect 2022. It aims to begin deploying virtual reality around these B2B solutions any time soon.Many commentators in the online gaming world have claimed that the Metaverse was a reality… but not for Meta.Meta on its way to the immersive Web This interview showed us that Meta’s strategy goes well beyond the Metaverse. Its aim is geared towards the immersive Web. It all starts with a set of technological innovations that are being put in place one after the other. It is too early to draw any conclusions, though. Visionary Marketing will therefore keep an eye on these initiatives over time to measure their progress. The post The Immersive Web is Meta’s ultimate goal, not the Metaverse appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

What if the immersive web were the ultimate goal of Meta’s new strategy? This idea came up during our interview with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierricduthoit/?originalSubdomain=ae" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Pierric Duthoit,</a> Business Director France at Meta, at the <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/fr/2022/10/passeport-numerique-produit/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tech for Retail</a> exhibition, of which Visionary Marketing was a media partner. Pierric shared with us some of the innovations launched by Meta as well as his strategic views. A strategy closer to <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/03/metaverse-for-b2b/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Forrester’s vision</a> than that of B2C commentators. <h2>Forget the Metaverse, Meta’s True strategy is about the Immersive Web</h2>The world’s eyes are on the Metaverse, but Meta’s real strategy would be more geared towards the immersive web The announcement by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/28/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-meta-metaverse" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Mark Zuckerberg on the Metaverse</a>, followed by Facebook’s name change took everyone by surprise. Immediately, naysayers seized the opportunity to denigrate it to the well-known tune of “it will never work!” I have seen less than lukewarm comments regarding Meta’s plans for the future but some disgruntled <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/07/metaverse-slow-death-facebook-losing-100bn-gamble-virtual-reality-mark-zuckerberg" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Meta employees are even more critical</a>. The least one can say is the Metaverse is not probably aimed at users of Meta’s historical brand, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/07/metaverse-slow-death-facebook-losing-100bn-gamble-virtual-reality-mark-zuckerberg" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">deemed tarnished</a> by The Guardian. <h3>Heated Discussions About the Future of the Metaverse</h3> Other, more enthusiastic commentators followed suit, speaking highly of this vision of the future. At the same time, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/metaverse-impact-world-future-technology/story?id=82519587" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">they were pointing out that other players were already working on it too</a>. Visionaries, meanwhile, claimed that the Metaverse was a reality, but not for Meta, but with <a href="https://mashable.com/article/fortnite-is-the-real-metaverse" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">online gaming heavyweights like Fortnite</a>.The Immersive Web experience in business starts with all virtual meetings – <a href="https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/future-of-work-meta-connect-2022-quest-pro-microsoft-accenture/?utm_source=visionarymarketing.com&amp;utm_medium=oculusredirect" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">image by Meta</a> Finally, others announced that the Metaverse was promising and was already attracting investors, <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/27/forrester_metaverse_2023/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">even if it didn’t really exist</a>. Finally, pragmatists like Forrester’s analysts, said that <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/03/metaverse-for-b2b/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">B2B was bound to be the future of the Metaverse</a>. Often, there are heated discussions between proponents and detractors of the Metaverse. <h3>The future of nascent technologies is hard to predict</h3> I have read a lot about this subject and I must admit that sometimes I feel a bit lost. Not only because of its complexity, beyond reach for most. Above all, I find that many commentators do sound a bit adamant about the future of nascent technologies. My experience with technology has taught me that one can never be too cautious. I had rather test innovations in the field… quietly and without getting too excited. What I understand from Pierric Duthoit’s interview is that Meta’s strategy is not really the Metaverse, though, which would not be for now, but rather a new form of Web, the immersive Web. I see it above all as a series of creative attempts. After all, this is how innovation works. One step at a time. While some may find it hard to believe in the future existence of immersive experiences <a href="https://medium.com/geekculture/build-an-immersive-virtual-workspace-for-business-with-metaverse-3d-space-f2b6f867dda3" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">in virtual remote meetings</a>, I would therefore remain cautious. After all, we have waited 20 years for web conferencing to be universally embraced. The current Zoom fatigue, although real, will not make online meetings disappear. They are part of our working environment and innovations in this area are still possible, and even desirable. Here is a summary of my discussions with Pierric Duthoit who described some of the innovations Meta is currently carrying out for its clients. <h3>Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns: a solution for optimising e-commerce performance campaigns</h3> Meta is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to dramatically increase the power of its platforms around the world. So, “the goal of the <a href="https://www.adlucent.com/resources/blog/meta-advantage-shopping-campaigns-what-are-they-and-how-to-create-them/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns</a> (A+SC) solution is to allow our clients to reach the right audiences, test different kinds of graphic designs tailored with their audiences and improve their performance”, says Duthoit. <blockquote> In these times of crisis, our customers are not looking to spend more, but rather to optimise their performance. </blockquote> Using the solution results in an approximate 12% improvement in CPA (<a href="https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/CPA" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">cost per action</a>). “On our platforms, many people discover brands or products. This is Discovery Commerce. The approach is to push a number of options thanks to the knowledge we have of our audiences,” Pierric emphasises. Avantage+ Shopping Campaigns is used by companies such as Samsung. This allows them to test different images and texts, and optimise them for their audiences. <blockquote> A+SC automatically pushes the best optimisation to the largest possible audience </blockquote> <h3>Instagram and augmented reality</h3> Moving on to another innovation and Instagram, “When we talk about augmented reality, we are talking about the <a href="https://medium.com/catchar/top-10-best-augmented-reality-effects-for-instagram-app-in-2020-according-to-catchar-89615f0b4d6f" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">provision of filters</a> that allow you to see almost in three dimensions”, Pierric explains. Furniture vendors for example, will let you see the furniture in your home before you buy. A camera system films your environment and places the fixtures in it. <h3>Using augmented reality to the full</h3> <blockquote> More than 700 million of Meta’s 3 billion users use AR filters </blockquote> Many B2C brands are already integrating three-dimensional elements into their product design. This then makes it possible to implement augmented reality very quickly. <h3>Will the Metaverse ever be live on Instagram?</h3> “It is already possible to have your NFTs on Instagram. You can upload them and share them. It’s a first step,” Pierric Duthoit stresses. <blockquote> The Metaverse as defined by Meta will see the light of day within ten years. These technologies take time </blockquote> In the Metaverse experience, a lot happens in B2B, Pierric explains. “Accor hotels are looking at how to practise online learning with virtual reality with people all over the world, and applications are starting to emerge in the medical field.” Meta announced partnerships with Zoom, Microsoft, AutoCAD and Accenture at <a href="https://about.fb.com/fr/news/2022/10/meta-connect-2022-vers-le-futur-du-travail/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Connect 2022</a>. It aims to begin deploying virtual reality around these B2B solutions any time soon.Many commentators in the online gaming world have claimed that the Metaverse was a reality… but not for Meta. <h3>Meta on its way to the immersive Web</h3> This interview showed us that Meta’s strategy goes well beyond the Metaverse. Its aim is geared towards the immersive Web. It all starts with a set of technological innovations that are being put in place one after the other. It is too early to draw any conclusions, though. Visionary Marketing will therefore keep an eye on these initiatives over time to measure their progress. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2023/01/the-immersive-web/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Immersive Web is Meta’s ultimate goal, not the Metaverse</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

The Immersive Web is Meta’s ultimate goal, not the Metaverse

A worldwide survey of 7,000 people highlights the poor perception of customer service by consumers. In Europe and the rest of the world. Fortunately, technological solutions are available to marketers who want to improve their flailing customer service. This survey by CM.com is entitled “Customer Service: When Emotions Take Control”. It could serve as a roadmap for businesses that are keen to improve their customer experience in 2023. Visionary Marketing interviewed Pierre Garrigues, CM.com Country Manager for France, to dissect the survey and collect his recommendations. CM.com survey shows customer service is a major source of frustration for consumers CM.com’s survey on customer service shows clearly that consumers aren’t really impressed with the quality of service they are getting from their favourite brands. Disclosure: This podcast is produced in partnership with Ecranmobile.fr and CM.com. Dutch company CM.com has interviewed 7,000 consumers worldwide. Looking at the numbers, barring a few exceptions, one finds that frustration is overwhelming with regard to consumers’ interactions with brands, regardless of the geography. CM.com’s customer service survey shows that each interaction between a customer and a brand is a decisive moment in their relationshipA consumer braces for impact before contacting his customer serviceCustomer Service Interactions: Good and Not So Good Vibes “Consumers rarely contact the customer service department of a product or service provider to congratulate them. Consumers mostly contact support for questions about product quality, last mile delivery issues or product dissatisfaction,” Garrigues says. This leads to rather negative emotions, as the study confirms. 41% of consumers are already irritated when they contact customer service The study reveals that more than a quarter of respondents ask a relative to contact customer service on their behalf. This tells you how much of an ordeal that must be!Contacting customer service? Not quite a picnic yet for most consumers. The good news is one third of them seem to be happy!“This survey shows how difficult it is to interact with a brand and get answers to the questions you have,” he says.With this customer service survey, CM.com lays bare the emotions associated with each support contact channel. Live chat and point of sale (face to face) stand out in this panel. It is also worth noting that consumers view social media and messaging apps positively. Except for the French who don’t seem to use social for customer service. Some regional differences still exist apparently.Consumers’ love affair with omnichannel marketing Brands need to do away with the old-fashioned ticketing approach “If you contact a brand using the ticketing method, by email, phone and social networking, you will probably receive three different answers to the same question,” he points out.The siloed approach to ticketing must be banned according to Pierre Garrigues of CM.com Above all, one shouldn’t lose the human touch: “Tools are not designed to be natively connected to all available platforms and means of communication,” Pierre Garrigues went on. “Customers should never be likened to a number, they should be identified by their first and last names, purchase and relationship history with the brand.” Different Channels in Different Geographical Areas “Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram for Asia-Pacific and WeChat allow omnichannel contact and exchange,” continues Pierre Garrigues. They are popular in most areas but some of these channels are unknown in some places. This is the case for Viber in France, Garrigues explains. “The penetration rate of Viber in France is 4%, vs. almost 40% in Eastern European countries,” explains Pierre Garrigues. International companies must therefore choose the most appropriate mix of channels. Depending on the geographical area, the age or idiosyncrasies of the customers they are dealing with. Businesses need to adapt to their customers’ preferred channels, rather than impose theirs What’s in store for customer service in the future? “The current period and the turbulent times we are going through will naturally force brands to better serve their existing and loyal customers,” predicts Pierre Garrigues. CM.com’s customer service survey shows that almost half of the surveyed customers had rather change brands after a bad customer experience if the product or service they purchase is worth over €500.These customers are the primary source of revenue and results for the company. It has too often been neglected at the expense of customer acquisition marketing or awareness campaigns. This will not last. Customer service used to be a low priority but it is bound to come to the forefront in the future “Some brands have already taken steps towards this change. Omnichannel marketing allows for the collaboration between the customer service and customer acquisition departments. Brands should implement this change for the benefit and experience of their customers as well as their employees,” says Garrigues. Community management can no longer make do with moderating comments on a social networking page This survey is the living proof that customer service needs a major overhaul.  Download CM’s survey of 7,000 consumers in the UK, the US, China, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. The post Customer service is a major source of frustration for consumers appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

A worldwide survey of 7,000 people highlights the poor perception of customer service by consumers. In Europe and the rest of the world. Fortunately, technological solutions are available to marketers who want to improve their flailing customer service. This survey by <a href="https://cm.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a> is entitled “Customer Service: When Emotions Take Control”. It could serve as a roadmap for businesses that are keen to improve their customer experience in 2023. Visionary Marketing interviewed <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierre-garrigues/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pierre Garrigues</a>, <a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a> Country Manager for France, to dissect the survey and collect his recommendations. <h2><a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a> survey shows customer service is a major source of frustration for consumers</h2> <a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a>’s survey on customer service shows clearly that consumers aren’t really impressed with the quality of service they are getting from their favourite brands. Disclosure: This podcast is produced in partnership with <a href="https://ecranmobile.fr" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Ecranmobile.fr</a> and <a href="https://www.cm.com/fr-fr/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a>. Dutch company <a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a> has interviewed 7,000 consumers worldwide. Looking at the numbers, barring a few exceptions, one finds that frustration is overwhelming with regard to consumers’ interactions with brands, regardless of the geography. <blockquote><a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a>’s customer service survey shows that each interaction between a customer and a brand is a decisive moment in their relationship</blockquote>A consumer braces for impact before contacting his customer service <h3>Customer Service Interactions: Good and Not So Good Vibes</h3> “Consumers rarely contact the customer service department of a product or service provider to congratulate them. Consumers mostly contact support for questions about product quality, <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/10/last-mile-delivery-first-priority-for-companies/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">last mile delivery</a> issues or product dissatisfaction,” Garrigues says. This leads to rather negative emotions, as the study confirms. <blockquote>41% of consumers are already irritated when they contact customer service</blockquote> The study reveals that more than a quarter of respondents ask a relative to contact customer service on their behalf. This tells you how much of an ordeal that must be!Contacting customer service? Not quite a picnic yet for most consumers. The good news is one third of them seem to be happy! “This survey shows how difficult it is to interact with a brand and get answers to the questions you have,” he says.With this customer service survey, <a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a> lays bare the emotions associated with each support contact channel. Live chat and point of sale (face to face) stand out in this panel. It is also worth noting that consumers view social media and messaging apps positively. Except for the French who don’t seem to use social for customer service. Some regional differences still exist apparently. Consumers’ love affair with omnichannel marketing <blockquote>Brands need to do away with the old-fashioned ticketing approach</blockquote> “If you contact a brand using the ticketing method, by email, phone and social networking, you will probably receive three different answers to the same question,” he points out.The siloed approach to ticketing must be banned according to Pierre Garrigues of <a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a> Above all, one shouldn’t lose the human touch: “Tools are not designed to be natively connected to all available platforms and means of communication,” Pierre Garrigues went on. “Customers should never be likened to a number, they should be identified by their first and last names, purchase and relationship history with the brand.” <h3>Different Channels in Different Geographical Areas</h3> “Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram for Asia-Pacific and WeChat allow omnichannel contact and exchange,” continues Pierre Garrigues. They are popular in most areas but some of these channels are unknown in some places. This is the case for Viber in France, Garrigues explains. “The penetration rate of Viber in France is 4%, vs. almost 40% in Eastern European countries,” explains Pierre Garrigues. International companies must therefore choose the most appropriate mix of channels. Depending on the geographical area, the age or idiosyncrasies of the customers they are dealing with. <blockquote>Businesses need to adapt to their customers’ preferred channels, rather than impose theirs</blockquote> <h3>What’s in store for customer service in the future?</h3> “The current period and the turbulent times we are going through will naturally force brands to better serve their existing and loyal customers,” predicts Pierre Garrigues. <a href="http://CM.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CM.com</a>’s customer service survey shows that almost half of the surveyed customers had rather change brands after a bad customer experience if the product or service they purchase is worth over €500. These customers are the primary source of revenue and results for the company. It has too often been neglected at the expense of customer acquisition marketing or awareness campaigns. <blockquote>This will not last. Customer service used to be a low priority but it is bound to come to the forefront in the future</blockquote> “Some brands have already taken steps towards this change. Omnichannel marketing allows for the collaboration between the customer service and customer acquisition departments. Brands should implement this change for the benefit and experience of their customers as well as their employees,” says Garrigues. <blockquote>Community management can no longer make do with moderating comments on a social networking page</blockquote> This survey is the living proof that customer service needs a major overhaul. <a href="https://www.cm.com/downloads/emotions-customer-service-research/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Download</a> CM’s survey of 7,000 consumers in the UK, the US, China, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/12/customer-service-survey/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Customer service is a major source of frustration for consumers</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Customer service is a major source of frustration for consumers

Scaling a B2B start-up globally sounds nice, but how do you do this? To find out, I interviewed D.K. Lee, co-founder of Marqvision, a promising US start-up with operations in Korea and European presence in Paris, France. I spent some time with D.K. to understand his background, here is a written account of this fascinating discussion with a seasoned multicultural entrepreneur. Marqvision’s D.K. Lee shares his secrets for scaling a B2B start-up globally in just two yearsD.K. Lee told us all about how to scale a B2B start-up in just two years. Replicating this for yourself might well be a challenge for many. How It All Started D.K. Lee was born and raised in Seoul until he was 14 years old. Then he moved to Canada mainly to study English, and then spent his middle and high school years in Canada near Toronto.  Subsequently, he crossed the border and moved to Cornell to study management.  The founding of a B2B start-up Right after college D.K. (aka Do Kyung), joined EY where he was “fortunate enough to work with large corporations in Seoul like Samsung and LG and help them on digital transformation matters behind the scenes” he told us. This is when he realised that “Digital transformation was actually happening within big companies, not just in Korea but all over the world”. He then joined a start-up, Seoul-based Dailyhotel, as chief of staff and investment manager.  In 2019, the company was sold to a larger business, Yanolja, with a $60-million valuation. Yanolja is, according to their LinkedIn page, the fastest-growing and No.1 travel platform and the only ‘Unicorn’ among travel-related companies in South Korea. “That was my first exit experience,” D.K. told us. “Although I was not a founder, I was one of the older members of the company.” He then went on to found Marqvision in 2020. He first met his co-founder in 2019. “We gradually built up our idea, worked on the prototype, and launched our project in the first quarter of 2020.” Why found a company in the US? “The US provides a better foundation for entrepreneurs to scale their companies globally” D. K. Lee told Visionary Marketing. That’s only one of the reasons, though. “I think it’s still the place where you find the best talents in the tech industry, whether it be engineers, product managers and the sales and marketing folks,” he added. Recruitment is essential for my start-up to scale. Marqvision isn’t located in Silicon Valley, though, but 400 miles south of San Jose, in Los Angeles. The reason being that entertainment and luxury goods companies are situated near the city of angels, not San Francisco nor the Valley. If you can’t beat them, join them! Despite the reports we are having in Europe that Silicon Valley is going through a slump and the economic climate is rotten, it seems no other place on earth can beat California.   One distinct sign of this is that all other competing technology areas are rebranding themselves as XXX Silicon Something. Replace XXX with Berlin, Tel Aviv and “Something” with Roundabout for London or Sentier for Paris and you have it.  A vast majority of technological innovations are still coming from the United States, mostly from Silicon Valley Off to a quick and great start Marqvision is off a great start and it happened in just two years. I’m still amazed at the speed at which such businesses grow. In this case it’s no miracle. The start-up did find the solution to a major business problem (See our story here) D.K. thinks he’s “been lucky in many ways”. Having met a great co-founder and all the folks who worked with Marqvision.  Yet, the building and scaling of a start-up worldwide that fast can hardly be the result of luck alone. I asked D.K. how he’d done it so as to share his tips with our readers.  “In order to really scale your start-up globally, especially if you’re in the B2B space, you need to meet your customers face to face “That’s the only way to get a vivid, and real feedback about your product, about your solution, about your service,” he said.  That’s a clear warning to all these would-be entrepreneurs I’ve seen who are afraid to share their thoughts with you in the early stage of building their business.  “And that’s the only way to continuously enhance your product to the next level,” he added. In order to do that, your team must sit by your side to meet with your client.” And the result is staggering. In just two years, Marqvision was able to operate in five different offices across the world.  Winning a Prestigious LVMH Award Marqvision’s success didn’t pass unnoticed. LVMH awarded the US start-up the prize for innovation in the data and AI category whereas “more than a 1,000 companies had applied for this prestigious award”.“We were fortunate and honoured to have won the LVMH Innovation Award in the  data &amp; AI category” DK Lee (second on the right) declared. LVMH’s Arnaud in fifth from the left. [LVMH 2022 website]Joining the LVMH acceleration programme “Following the award, we joined La maison des start-ups,” D.K. Lee added, “a start-up acceleration programme offered by LVMH group.”  This is why Marqvision is also based in Paris’s Station F. “We have our Paris office over there until next year,” he told us. Multicultural management in a B2B Start-up “I love working with French people,” D.K. told us, “I love the breadth and depth of their experience and what they brought to the company in the field of the luxury industry.”  Admittedly, there are some language issues he confided, but “we have a great product manager who is acting as an ombudsman between the locals and the rest of the team in Seoul and the US”.  The sheer distance and time difference between all three continents are also an issue he admitted. “Working remotely is an inevitable trend moving forward,” he added, “but we should not deny all the benefits coming from working together side by side and in a nice office.” Hence the organisation of all hands meetings to ensure that everyone is on the same page.  Working from Home or in the Office? I know some people might find it ironic that large businesses are moving forward with WFH policies and start-ups are pushing back on that same issue. It is perfectly understandable, however. Big companies are more suited for remote working, I strongly believe that working together side by side for smaller start-ups is a much better way to build a stronger foundation early on   There is no doubt that collaboration tools have brought a great deal to modern management techniques and we, at Visionary Marketing, are using them on a daily basis.  However, D.K. has a valid point when he says, “all those tools are just a means to an end, and the end is actually the gathering of people. We could do that in person at a physical site, or we could do that through a gym or an audio conference. But I think one should know that it’s actually important for all people to get together.”  Marqvision even invited, a month ago, all its leaders from the US (East and West Coast) and Paris to their Seoul office. “So they could meet with our engineers, analysts and back-office employees. We had a great time, for just about a week. We had nice dinners and that was a great way to boost our morale.” Scaling a start-up isn’t just about working hard. It’s also about keeping the old team spirit alive across all time zones. The post How to scale a B2B start-up globally in just two years appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Scaling a B2B start-up globally sounds nice, but how do you do this? To find out, I interviewed D.K. Lee, co-founder of Marqvision, a promising US start-up with operations in Korea and European presence in Paris, France. I spent some time with D.K. to understand his background, here is a written account of this fascinating discussion with a seasoned multicultural entrepreneur. <h2>Marqvision’s D.K. Lee shares his secrets for scaling a B2B start-up globally in just two years</h2>D.K. Lee told us all about how to scale a B2B start-up in just two years. Replicating this for yourself might well be a challenge for many. <h3>How It All Started</h3> D.K. Lee was born and raised in Seoul until he was 14 years old. Then he moved to Canada mainly to study English, and then spent his middle and high school years in Canada near Toronto.  Subsequently, he crossed the border and moved to Cornell to study management.  <h3>The founding of a B2B start-up</h3> Right after college D.K. (aka <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dk-do-kyung-lee-99745540/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Do Kyung</a>), joined EY where he was “fortunate enough to work with large corporations in Seoul like Samsung and LG and help them on digital transformation matters behind the scenes” he told us. This is when he realised that “Digital transformation was actually happening within big companies, not just in Korea but all over the world”. He then joined a start-up, Seoul-based Dailyhotel, as chief of staff and investment manager.  In 2019, the company was sold to a larger business, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/yanolja/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Yanolja</a>, with a $60-million valuation. Yanolja is, according to their LinkedIn page, the fastest-growing and No.1 travel platform and the only ‘Unicorn’ among travel-related companies in South Korea. “That was my first exit experience,” D.K. told us. “Although I was not a founder, I was one of the older members of the company.” He then went on to found Marqvision in 2020. He first met his co-founder in 2019. “We gradually built up our idea, worked on the prototype, and launched our project in the first quarter of 2020.” <h3>Why found a company in the US?</h3> “The US provides a better foundation for entrepreneurs to scale their companies globally” D. K. Lee told Visionary Marketing. That’s only one of the reasons, though. “I think it’s still the place where you find the best talents in the tech industry, whether it be engineers, product managers and the sales and marketing folks,” he added. <blockquote>Recruitment is essential for my start-up to scale.</blockquote> Marqvision isn’t located in Silicon Valley, though, but 400 miles south of San Jose, in Los Angeles. The reason being that entertainment and luxury goods companies are situated near the city of angels, not San Francisco nor the Valley. <h3>If you can’t beat them, join them!</h3> Despite the reports we are having in Europe that Silicon Valley is going through a slump and the economic climate is rotten, it seems no other place on earth can beat California.   One distinct sign of this is that all other competing technology areas are rebranding themselves as XXX Silicon Something. Replace XXX with Berlin, Tel Aviv and “Something” with Roundabout for London or Sentier for Paris and you have it.  <blockquote>A vast majority of technological innovations are still coming from the United States, mostly from Silicon Valley</blockquote> <h3>Off to a quick and great start</h3> Marqvision is off a great start and it happened in just two years. I’m still amazed at the speed at which such businesses grow. In this case it’s no miracle. The start-up did find the solution to a major business problem (<a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/11/counterfeiting-on-marketplaces/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">See our story here</a>) D.K. thinks he’s “been lucky in many ways”. Having met <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/insup/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">a great co-founder</a> and all the folks who worked with Marqvision.  Yet, the building and scaling of a start-up worldwide that fast can hardly be the result of luck alone. I asked D.K. how he’d done it so as to share his tips with our readers.  <blockquote>“In order to really scale your start-up globally, especially if you’re in the B2B space, you need to meet your customers face to face</blockquote> “That’s the only way to get a vivid, and real feedback about your product, about your solution, about your service,” he said.  That’s a clear warning to all these would-be entrepreneurs I’ve seen who are afraid to share their thoughts with you in the early stage of building their business.  “And that’s the only way to continuously enhance your product to the next level,” he added. In order to do that, your team must sit by your side to meet with your client.” And the result is staggering. In just two years, Marqvision was able to operate in five different offices across the world.  <h3>Winning a Prestigious LVMH Award</h3> Marqvision’s success didn’t pass unnoticed. LVMH awarded the US start-up the prize for innovation in the data and AI category whereas “more than a 1,000 companies had applied for this prestigious award”.“We were fortunate and honoured to have won the LVMH Innovation Award in the  data &amp; AI category” DK Lee (second on the right) declared. LVMH’s Arnaud in fifth from the left. [<a href="https://www.lvmh.com/news-documents/news/lvmh-announces-2022-innovation-award-prize-list-and-its-grand-winner-toshi-during-viva-technology/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">LVMH 2022 website</a>] <h3>Joining the LVMH acceleration programme</h3> “Following the award, we joined La maison des start-ups,” D.K. Lee added, “a start-up acceleration programme offered by LVMH group.”  This is why Marqvision is also based in Paris’s Station F. “We have our Paris office over there until next year,” he told us. <h3>Multicultural management in a B2B Start-up</h3> “I love working with French people,” D.K. told us, “I love the breadth and depth of their experience and what they brought to the company in the field of the luxury industry.”  Admittedly, there are some language issues he confided, but “we have a great product manager who is acting as an ombudsman between the locals and the rest of the team in Seoul and the US”.  The sheer distance and time difference between all three continents are also an issue he admitted. “Working remotely is an inevitable trend moving forward,” he added, “but we should not deny all the benefits coming from working together side by side and in a nice office.” Hence the organisation of all hands meetings to ensure that everyone is on the same page.  <h3>Working from Home or in the Office?</h3> I know some people might find it ironic that large businesses are moving forward with WFH policies and start-ups are pushing back on that same issue. It is perfectly understandable, however. <blockquote>Big companies are more suited for remote working, I strongly believe that working together side by side for smaller start-ups is a much better way to build a stronger foundation early on  </blockquote> There is no doubt that collaboration tools have brought a great deal to modern management techniques and we, at Visionary Marketing, are using them on a daily basis.  However, D.K. has a valid point when he says, “all those tools are just a means to an end, and the end is actually the gathering of people. We could do that in person at a physical site, or we could do that through a gym or an audio conference. But I think one should know that it’s actually important for all people to get together.”  Marqvision even invited, a month ago, all its leaders from the US (East and West Coast) and Paris to their Seoul office. “So they could meet with our engineers, analysts and back-office employees. We had a great time, for just about a week. We had nice dinners and that was a great way to boost our morale.” Scaling a start-up isn’t just about working hard. It’s also about keeping the old team spirit alive across all time zones. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/12/b2b-start-up/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How to scale a B2B start-up globally in just two years</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

How to scale a B2B start-up globally in just two years

Counterfeiting is one of the biggest sources of dirty money on the planet. And it does not only affect the field of luxury goods. It also concerns the production and sale of medicines and even spare parts for aircraft! To discuss this, Visionary Marketing interviewed Emmanuel Alavoine, Head of Expansion at Marqvision, a US start-up that in just two years has managed to forge partnerships with the biggest brands. Its co-founder also told us that the start-up could well become one of the next American unicorns. Here is the transcript of our interview, recorded during the Tech for Retail exhibition in Paris, of which we were media partner.  Marqvision Tackles Counterfeiting on MarketplacesEmmanuel Alavoine at the Tech for Retail show on 28 November 2022. Counterfeiting would represent more than 3% of world trade according to the OECD, a figure that is constantly increasing.Counterfeiting: “the world’s biggest economic blight” “It is the world’s biggest economic blight. Counterfeiting surpasses even the organised crime of prostitution, arms dealing and drugs,” Emmanuel told us. The OECD, in its 2020 report, estimates that the value of counterfeiting is €300 billion per year. “When we cumulate in value for the consumer, the damage is estimated at 3 trillion euros per annum,” Emmanuel Alavoine said.When you think of organised crime, you immediately think of drugs and prostitution. But counterfeiting is worth much more: 300 billion euros, the equivalent of Belgium’s GDP.Counterfeiting is therefore a real scourge of organised crime, often in the hands of the mafia Counterfeiters use all the methods of modern commerce, to piggyback on the fame of a brand they don’t own Counterfeiting doesn’t just affect the luxury goods industry It affects a wide range of industries and brands of varying reputations. Among the products affected is indeed luxury, with brands from the sector’s major groups, French, Italian, British and Spanish. “For this sector, it’s about traditional copying of iconic brands.” But counterfeiting also affects pharmaceuticals, food, hygiene, beauty products, kids’ toys, clothing and sports goods.When counterfeiting affects public health, a new dimension of crime is reached.This counterfeiting also affects more sophisticated sectors such as car parts, automotive equipment and lubricants, and even aircraft parts, tools and industrial components. “In terms of value, luxury goods still represent the greatest loss in relation to counterfeit products,” says Emmanuel. These products are worth several thousands, even tens of thousands of euros. Counterfeit products are worth, depending on the case, a few dozen euros. The price difference is already very revealing in the luxury sector. Sometimes the buyer is aware of what they are doing when they buy these counterfeit products. But the vast majority of counterfeit customers are in good faith and unaware of the nature of these products. Counterfeiting on Marketplaces Counterfeiting is found on e-commerce sites hosted by marketplaces. But it is also found on standalone merchant sites with their own URLs and domain names. They operate with impunity until brands spot them and implement legal solutions to remove them. Counterfeiting: a potential danger to the public There are different geographical sources of counterfeiting. “The OECD considers that 90% of counterfeit products today come from China,” explains Emmanuel. Counterfeiting from China is mostly transiting through Hong Kong. Counterfeiting in the world according to El Pais (OECD source) – 2017India is another platform for counterfeit products when it comes to medicines. Also noteworthy are countries like Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. Finally, there are the logistics resale platforms around the world. They allow these products to transit through lawless export hubs. And then reintroduce them into Europe, the US, Latin America or Africa. According to El Pais, apart from Hong Kong, other platforms include Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Ukraine and Albania. The organised crime of counterfeiting Counterfeiting is the work of organised crime, explains Emmanuel Alavoine. “That is to say, the industrial sites of counterfeiting are almost comparable to the industrial sites of brands”. They have international production capacities, quality control, international standards and they all have logistical channels for transport, registration, customs clearance identical to the original brands. Counterfeit industry sites are comparable to brand sites A hundred sensitive marketplaces “There are hierarchies of more or less sensitive sites. The majority of counterfeit production, as well as its consumption, is Asian,” adds the Marqvision representative. But these products are very easily exported to Europe and the US as well.No mistake on the final destinations of dangerous counterfeit goods… – Source OECD 2022Marqvision has identified around one hundred marketplaces that are lax to varying degrees and are open to the resale of counterfeit goods. However, according to its press release, the Korean system tracks “more than 1,500 marketplaces worldwide”. Some of these marketplaces are well known in Europe, such as Wish (note: an American platform). Others are extremely sensitive in South-East Asia in particular, or in China. They are trying to collaborate more or less openly and dynamically to stop this movement. Indeed, “it’s worthy of note that these marketplaces have an economic interest in constantly attracting traffic, whereas the interest of the brand is to control its channels and customer relations. These are conflicting interests,” explains Emmanuel, “that’s what causes the issue with counterfeiting”. What about big e-commerce platforms? “Larger portals are doing some upstream control work, but they are not immune to hosting the resale of counterfeit products.” Apart from Wish, there is Alibaba. “The celebrated Chinese platform works in partnership with Interpol, Europol and all major brands to combat counterfeiting with varying degrees of success and results,” explains Emmanuel Alavoine. “Alibaba has been somewhat stamped “counterfeit”, because they are a world leader in e-commerce, due to their mastery of the Chinese market. But their goal remains to attract more Western brands that won’t turn up if they don’t take a proactive stance against counterfeits,” adds Emmanuel Alavoine. How Marqvision Is Fighting Counterfeiting “We have developed a proprietary artificial intelligence system,” explains Emmanuel. “Our AI engineers are based in Seoul and work on our algorithm.” This algorithm will use two methods of detection: a) visual detection that will use images that have the appropriate resolution to compare them to the originals and b) semantic detection that is based on the analysis of text, titles, descriptions and price. We were able to attend the demonstration on the start-up’s stand. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons of confidentiality, it is not possible for us to show the video of this demo. Here is the simplified process as we can summarise it from memory. The work of detecting, and especially of denouncing irregularities, is done with the intervention of a human person. This choice is voluntary and justified.  The process can be summarised as follows:  The platform detects anomalies automatically as we described above, through image checking and semantic analysis, An operator will verify the results by performing a visual check, If the latter is satisfactory, the operator triggers the complaint procedure. It is voluntary that the machine doesn’t perform this operation, The system will thus automatically send a deletion request via the standard platform form. The form will autofill. All complaint features for documented platforms (the 1,500+ platforms mentioned above) are being directly integrated into the tool; The operator can proceed to the next check.  In conclusion, a future unicorn spotted by the LVMH group Given the stakes involved in counterfeiting and the importance it holds for the big names in luxury goods, it is not surprising that Marqvision was spotted by LVMH. The luxury group awarded them the innovative start-up prize out of 1,000 applicants (AI and data category). The Korean start-up is now hosted by Station F in Paris. D. K. Lee, the co-founder of the barely two-year-old start-up that has raised $25 million, told Visionary Marketing that Marqvision would probably be a unicorn before long. If one can judge the importance of a B2B solution by the size of the problem it solves, one will not be surprised by this prophecy.  Read the OECD report on counterfeiting The post US Start-up Marqvision tackles counterfeiting on marketplaces appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Counterfeiting is one of the biggest sources of dirty money on the planet. And it does not only affect the field of luxury goods. It also concerns the production and sale of medicines and even spare parts for aircraft! To discuss this, Visionary Marketing interviewed <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmanuel-alavoine-b6936868/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Emmanuel Alavoine</a>, Head of Expansion at <a href="https://www.marqvision.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marqvision</a>, a US start-up that in just two years has managed to forge partnerships with the biggest brands. Its co-founder also told us that the start-up could well become one of the next American unicorns. Here is the transcript of our interview, recorded during the <a href="https://www.techforretail.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Tech for Retail</a> exhibition in Paris, of which we were media partner. <h2>Marqvision Tackles Counterfeiting on Marketplaces</h2>Emmanuel Alavoine at the Tech for Retail show on 28 November 2022. Counterfeiting would represent more than <a href="https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/trade-in-fake-goods-is-now-33-of-world-trade-and-rising.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">3% of world trade according to the OECD</a>, a figure that is constantly increasing. <h3>Counterfeiting: “the world’s biggest economic blight”</h3> “It is the world’s biggest economic blight. Counterfeiting surpasses even the organised crime of prostitution, arms dealing and drugs,” Emmanuel told us. The OECD, in its 2020 report, estimates that the value of counterfeiting is €300 billion per year. “When we cumulate in value for the consumer, the damage is estimated at 3 trillion euros per annum,” Emmanuel Alavoine said.When you think of organised crime, you immediately think of drugs and prostitution. But counterfeiting is worth much more: 300 billion euros, the equivalent of Belgium’s GDP. Counterfeiting is therefore a real scourge of organised crime, often in the hands of the mafia <blockquote>Counterfeiters use all the methods of modern commerce, to piggyback on the fame of a brand they don’t own</blockquote> <h3>Counterfeiting doesn’t just affect the luxury goods industry</h3> It affects a wide range of industries and brands of varying reputations. Among the products affected is indeed luxury, with brands from the sector’s major groups, French, Italian, British and Spanish. “For this sector, it’s about traditional copying of iconic brands.” But counterfeiting also affects pharmaceuticals, food, hygiene, beauty products, kids’ toys, clothing and sports goods.When counterfeiting affects public health, a new dimension of crime is reached. This counterfeiting also affects more sophisticated sectors such as car parts, automotive equipment and lubricants, and even aircraft parts, tools and industrial components. “In terms of value, luxury goods still represent the greatest loss in relation to counterfeit products,” says Emmanuel. These products are worth several thousands, even tens of thousands of euros. Counterfeit products are worth, depending on the case, a few dozen euros. The price difference is already very revealing in the luxury sector. Sometimes the buyer is aware of what they are doing when they buy these counterfeit products. But the vast majority of counterfeit customers are in good faith and unaware of the nature of these products. <h3>Counterfeiting on Marketplaces</h3> Counterfeiting is found on e-commerce sites hosted by marketplaces. But it is also found on standalone merchant sites with their own URLs and domain names. They operate with impunity until brands spot them and implement legal solutions to remove them. <h3>Counterfeiting: a potential danger to the public</h3> There are different geographical sources of counterfeiting. “<a href="https://www.oecd.org/corruption-integrity/reports/trade-in-counterfeit-and-pirated-goods-9789264252653-en.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The OECD</a> considers that 90% of counterfeit products today come from China,” explains Emmanuel. Counterfeiting from China is mostly transiting through Hong Kong. <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/cmw4qtjnpkb4c5re2kwtw2mlkq.webp" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Counterfeiting in the world according to El Pais (OECD source) – 2017 India is another platform for counterfeit products when it comes to medicines. Also noteworthy are countries like Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. Finally, there are the logistics resale platforms around the world. They allow these products to transit through lawless export hubs. And then reintroduce them into Europe, the US, Latin America or Africa. According to El Pais, apart from Hong Kong, other platforms include Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Ukraine and Albania. <h3>The organised crime of counterfeiting</h3> Counterfeiting is the work of organised crime, explains Emmanuel Alavoine. “That is to say, the industrial sites of counterfeiting are almost comparable to the industrial sites of brands”. They have international production capacities, quality control, international standards and they all have logistical channels for transport, registration, customs clearance identical to the original brands. <blockquote>Counterfeit industry sites are comparable to brand sites</blockquote> <h3>A hundred sensitive marketplaces</h3> “There are hierarchies of more or less sensitive sites. The majority of counterfeit production, as well as its consumption, is Asian,” adds the Marqvision representative. But these products are very easily exported to Europe and the US as well.No mistake on the final destinations of dangerous counterfeit goods… – Source OECD 2022 Marqvision has identified around one hundred marketplaces that are lax to varying degrees and are open to the resale of counterfeit goods. However, according to its press release, the Korean system tracks “more than 1,500 marketplaces worldwide”. Some of these marketplaces are well known in Europe, such as <a href="https://wish.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Wish</a> (note: an American platform). Others are extremely sensitive in South-East Asia in particular, or in China. They are trying to collaborate more or less openly and dynamically to stop this movement. Indeed, “it’s worthy of note that these marketplaces have an economic interest in constantly attracting traffic, whereas the interest of the brand is to control its channels and customer relations. These are conflicting interests,” explains Emmanuel, “that’s what causes the issue with counterfeiting”. <h3>What about big e-commerce platforms?</h3> “Larger portals are doing some upstream control work, but they are not immune to hosting the resale of counterfeit products.” Apart from Wish, there is <a href="https://alibaba.com" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Alibaba</a>. “The celebrated Chinese platform works in partnership with Interpol, Europol and all major brands to combat counterfeiting with varying degrees of success and results,” explains Emmanuel Alavoine. “Alibaba has been somewhat stamped “counterfeit”, because they are a world leader in e-commerce, due to their mastery of the Chinese market. But their goal remains to attract more Western brands that won’t turn up if they don’t take a proactive stance against counterfeits,” adds Emmanuel Alavoine. <h3>How Marqvision Is Fighting Counterfeiting</h3> “We have developed a proprietary artificial intelligence system,” explains Emmanuel. “Our AI engineers are based in Seoul and work on our algorithm.” This algorithm will use two methods of detection: a) visual detection that will use images that have the appropriate resolution to compare them to the originals and b) semantic detection that is based on the analysis of text, titles, descriptions and price. We were able to attend the demonstration on the start-up’s stand. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons of confidentiality, it is not possible for us to show the video of this demo. Here is the simplified process as we can summarise it from memory. The work of detecting, and especially of denouncing irregularities, is done with the intervention of a human person. This choice is voluntary and justified. The process can be summarised as follows: <ol> <li>The platform detects anomalies automatically as we described above, through image checking and semantic analysis,</li> <li>An operator will verify the results by performing a visual check,</li> <li>If the latter is satisfactory, the operator triggers the complaint procedure. It is voluntary that the machine doesn’t perform this operation,</li> <li>The system will thus automatically send a deletion request via the standard platform form. The form will autofill. All complaint features for documented platforms (the 1,500+ platforms mentioned above) are being directly integrated into the tool;</li> <li>The operator can proceed to the next check.</li> </ol> <h3>In conclusion, a future unicorn spotted by the LVMH group</h3> Given the stakes involved in counterfeiting and the importance it holds for the big names in luxury goods, it is not surprising that Marqvision was spotted by LVMH. The luxury group awarded them the innovative start-up prize out of 1,000 applicants (AI and data category). The Korean start-up is now hosted by Station F in Paris. D. K. Lee, the co-founder of the barely two-year-old start-up that has raised $25 million, told Visionary Marketing that Marqvision would probably be a unicorn before long. If one can judge the importance of a B2B solution by the size of the problem it solves, one will not be surprised by this prophecy. <blockquote> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/contrefacon-ocde-rapport-9789264252653-en.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Read the OECD report</a> on counterfeiting </blockquote> The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/11/counterfeiting-on-marketplaces/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">US Start-up Marqvision tackles counterfeiting on marketplaces</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

US Start-up Marqvision tackles counterfeiting on marketplaces

Scott Berkun

The myths of innovation are ubiquitous. Everyone thinks they know what innovation is and means yet in fact innovation is probably one of the most overrated business concepts. ‘Poor is the substance, alas! and yet I’ve read all the books,’ the warning sent by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé would be perfectly valid for most of the literature devoted to innovation. There are books on that subject; however, which are worth reading such as the inevitable myths of innovation by Scott Berkun. We published this piece for the first time in 2010. We are republishing it because of its relevance in the current context of 2022.  The Myths of Innovation is a must-read for would-be innovators Scott Berkun delivering a presentation on his myths of innovationBerkun is a full-time writer and speaker and former program manager at Microsoft, the man behind the success of Internet Explorer at a time when the Web was dominated by Netscape. He also delivers lectures such as this amazing Carnegie Mellon presentation (per below) on the book I am describing here.Ask anyone about the epitome of innovation and they will tell you that the iPhone is it and that 2007 is the ultimate year of innovation. Ask Vaclav Smil and he’ll tell you this is nothing compared to other innovations like ammonia for instance. I’d even add that Apple never invented the smartphone. Nokia did, in 1995 or so and HTC (née Qtec) improved it as early as 2003. Most people confuse innovation for commercial success. That’s one of my favourite myths of innovation.His book is not based on dubious principles but spells out clearly the dos and don’ts of innovation. It’s a lot more powerful than most books because of that because it’s easier to learn from mistakes than mimic other people’s behaviour. Here are Scott Berkun’s ten myths of innovation summed up in a few words, and I hope this will convince you to buy a copy of his book too. All ten myths described by Scott Berkun in his book Myth number one: the myth of the epiphany. An epiphany, in essence, a sudden moment at which creation is supposed to happen, is epitomised by Archimedes’s Eureka moment or Newton’s apple. If many innovations are described as magical moments, the truth is often more complex: hard work is required, the Eureka moment is often coming at the end of that process (not the beginning). Most Eureka legends aren’t real; they are myths aimed at giving a romantic view of innovation, We understand nothing about the history of innovation Myth number 2: we understand the history of innovation. Well, so we think, but most of the time we don’t. Most of the stories we read about innovation aren’t real either. Google wasn’t a search engine to start with, nor was Flickr a photo-sharing platform, etc. In fact, most innovations are the results of errors, changes, and corrections, but we like history to smooth things out and make them sound perfect and simple. Myth number 3: there is a method for innovation. How does one deliver innovation? Despite our attraction to recipes, innovation is, in essence, a ‘charge into the unknown’ and therefore, a method for innovation is a bit of an oxymoron, Myth number 4: people love new ideas, so we like to think, but most of the time it’s not true. Changing one’s habits is always a challenge, and that is true of customers too (remember Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the chasm?) There is no end to the list of rejections that innovators have to face. Change management is an innovator’s best friend, The lone inventor Myth number 5: the lone inventor. We like stories in which a genius single-handedly changed the world: Edison invented the electric light; Ford invented the automobile; Apple invented the first graphical user interface, etc. All wrong! And most of these stories are wrong. Often, innovations happen simultaneously, too (in different countries at approximately the same time). Lastly, successful companies are often started by a group of people, not the obligatory lone inventor. Myth number 6: good ideas are hard to find. Ideas are everywhere, and not just found as a result of a brainstorm session (a tool which most of the time is badly used and implemented). Ideas come in more than many ways, mostly through trial and error. As far as I am concerned, because I am not a very imaginative person, I love to pick other people’s brains and make notes of all the ideas they have had but have never had the pluck to implement. ‘It would be so nice if we could do this and that and the other’ is often my starting point. The real issue is not the idea(s) but how they could come to fruition and when. Those who know better, most of the time, know nothing Myth number 7: your boss knows more about innovation than you do. Berkun argues that managers can make decisions that others can’t, but this doesn’t mean that they always know what to do. Often, power and a high position in the hierarchy exert pressure on execs, and they feel terribly alone. I have witnessed that the higher in the hierarchy, the further away you are from the field, the easier it is to lose sight of reality; theoretical views don’t make decision-making easy. Often, managers are, therefore, afraid of innovation. Berkun provides the antidote by describing the most necessary common traits of successful managers, Myth number 8: the best ideas win. There is a fairy tale view of innovation (in fairy tales good guys win, and bad guys lose) hence the belief that it’s always the best innovation that wins. There are so many counterexamples such as the QWERTY keyboard (aimed at slowing down typists to avoid jamming), HTML and JavaScript (probably the most horrendous computer languages ever invented), the M-16 rifle, etc. There are seven factors according to Berkun which are leading to product success: culture, dominant design, inheritance and tradition, politics, economics, subjectivity and short-term orientation. Problems and solutions Myth number 9: problems and solutions. Great innovations  —  such as the palm pilot project, a pioneering digital notepad of the 1990s  —  often come from the clear and simple spelling of a few problems that they are meant to solve. Believing that serendipity plays a major role is also wrong and yet another proof of the myth of the epiphany. Hard work and prototyping are of the essence. Myth number 10: innovation is always good. Rumour has it that Rudolf Diesel committed suicide when he realised that only the military was interested in his innovation. He thought that this would serve the purpose of the war between Germany and France. Diesel was a German national but he’d almost lived in France all his life. His innovation was being used to do harm and kill people and destroy Europe, not to do good and improve people’s lives. Other examples abound quoted by Berkun in his book  —  such as the DDT and personal computers and even cell phones, not to mention discrimination via the infamous digital divide.  In conclusion: true innovators don’t use the word innovation Such are the lessons we can derive from Scott Berkun’s research on innovation. In one of his posts on the Harvard Business Review blog, Berkun declared that true innovators don’t use the word innovation at all. They talk about new products, new projects, change management, or just doing things. Innovation isn’t a playground for intellectuals; it’s a game for doers and hard workers. I found the statements so true, and so close to how I felt (sometimes event organisers ask me to pitch about innovation and I feel weird about that because innovation is something one does but is very difficult to describe) that I decided to know more and buy this book. Now, the Myths of Innovation is one of my favourite business books. Find out more  ‘Why innovation is overrated’ by Scott Berkun download a free summary of the book the ‘Myths of innovation’ video at Carnegie Mellon, a presentation by Scott buy ‘the Myths of innovation’ from Amazon.read chapter 4 free of charge, courtesy of O’Reilly publishingThe post Must-read: Scott Berkun Spells Out The Myths of Innovation appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

The myths of innovation are ubiquitous. Everyone thinks they know what innovation is and means yet in fact innovation is probably one of the most overrated business concepts. ‘Poor is the substance, alas! and yet I’ve read all the books,’ the warning sent by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé would be perfectly valid for most of the literature devoted to <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2016/12/innovation-visions/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">innovation</a>. There are books on that subject; however, which are worth reading such as the inevitable myths of innovation by Scott Berkun. We published this piece for the first time in 2010. We are republishing it because of its relevance in the current context of 2022.  <h2>The Myths of Innovation is a must-read for would-be innovators</h2> <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/scott-berkun-myths-of-innovation-e1606552665292.jpeg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Scott Berkun delivering a presentation on his myths of innovation Berkun is a full-time writer and speaker and former program manager at Microsoft, the man behind the success of Internet Explorer at a time when the Web was dominated by Netscape. He also delivers lectures such as this amazing Carnegie Mellon presentation (per below) on the book I am describing here.Ask anyone about the epitome of innovation and they will tell you that the iPhone is it and that 2007 is the ultimate year of innovation. Ask Vaclav Smil and he’ll tell you this is nothing compared to other innovations like ammonia for instance. I’d even add that Apple never invented the smartphone. Nokia did, in 1995 or so and HTC (née Qtec) improved it as early as 2003. Most people confuse innovation for commercial success. That’s one of my favourite myths of innovation. His book is not based on dubious principles but spells out clearly the dos and don’ts of innovation. It’s a lot more powerful than most books because of that because it’s easier to learn from mistakes than mimic other people’s behaviour. Here are Scott Berkun’s ten myths of innovation summed up in a few words, and I hope this will convince you to buy a copy of his book too. <h3>All ten myths described by Scott Berkun in his book</h3> Myth number one: the myth of the epiphany. An epiphany, in essence, a sudden moment at which creation is supposed to happen, is epitomised by Archimedes’s Eureka moment or Newton’s apple. If many innovations are described as magical moments, the truth is often more complex: hard work is required, the Eureka moment is often coming at the end of that process (not the beginning). Most Eureka legends aren’t real; they are myths aimed at giving a romantic view of innovation, We understand nothing about the history of innovation Myth number 2: we understand the history of innovation. Well, so we think, but most of the time we don’t. Most of the stories we read about innovation aren’t real either. Google wasn’t a search engine to start with, nor was Flickr a photo-sharing platform, etc. In fact, most innovations are the results of errors, changes, and corrections, but we like history to smooth things out and make them sound perfect and simple. Myth number 3: there is a method for innovation. How does one deliver innovation? Despite our attraction to recipes, innovation is, in essence, a ‘charge into the unknown’ and therefore, a method for innovation is a bit of an oxymoron, Myth number 4: people love new ideas, so we like to think, but most of the time it’s not true. Changing one’s habits is always a challenge, and that is true of customers too (remember Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the chasm?) There is no end to the list of rejections that innovators have to face. Change management is an innovator’s best friend, <h3>The lone inventor</h3> Myth number 5: the lone inventor. We like stories in which a genius single-handedly changed the world: Edison invented the electric light; Ford invented the automobile; Apple invented the first graphical user interface, etc. All wrong! And most of these stories are wrong. Often, innovations happen simultaneously, too (in different countries at approximately the same time). Lastly, successful companies are often started by a group of people, not the obligatory lone inventor. Myth number 6: good ideas are hard to find. Ideas are everywhere, and not just found as a result of a brainstorm session (a tool which most of the time is badly used and implemented). Ideas come in more than many ways, mostly through trial and error. As far as I am concerned, because I am not a very imaginative person, I love to pick other people’s brains and make notes of all the ideas they have had but have never had the pluck to implement. ‘It would be so nice if we could do this and that and the other’ is often my starting point. The real issue is not the idea(s) but how they could come to fruition and when. <h3>Those who know better, most of the time, know nothing</h3> Myth number 7: your boss knows more about innovation than you do. Berkun argues that managers can make decisions that others can’t, but this doesn’t mean that they always know what to do. Often, power and a high position in the hierarchy exert pressure on execs, and they feel terribly alone. I have witnessed that the higher in the hierarchy, the further away you are from the field, the easier it is to lose sight of reality; theoretical views don’t make decision-making easy. Often, managers are, therefore, afraid of innovation. Berkun provides the antidote by describing the most necessary common traits of successful managers, Myth number 8: the best ideas win. There is a fairy tale view of innovation (in fairy tales good guys win, and bad guys lose) hence the belief that it’s always the best innovation that wins. There are so many counterexamples such as the QWERTY keyboard (aimed at slowing down typists to avoid jamming), HTML and JavaScript (probably the most horrendous computer languages ever invented), the M-16 rifle, etc. There are seven factors according to Berkun which are leading to product success: culture, dominant design, inheritance and tradition, politics, economics, subjectivity and short-term orientation. <h3>Problems and solutions</h3> Myth number 9: problems and solutions. Great innovations  —  such as the palm pilot project, a pioneering digital notepad of the 1990s  —  often come from the clear and simple spelling of a few problems that they are meant to solve. Believing that serendipity plays a major role is also wrong and yet another proof of the myth of the epiphany. Hard work and prototyping are of the essence. Myth number 10: innovation is always good. Rumour has it that Rudolf Diesel committed suicide when he realised that only the military was interested in his innovation. He thought that this would serve the purpose of the war between Germany and France. Diesel was a German national but he’d almost lived in France all his life. His innovation was being used to do harm and kill people and destroy Europe, not to do good and improve people’s lives. Other examples abound quoted by Berkun in his book  —  such as the DDT and personal computers and even cell phones, not to mention discrimination via the infamous digital divide. <h3>In conclusion: true innovators don’t use the word innovation</h3> Such are the lessons we can derive from Scott Berkun’s research on innovation. In one of his posts on the Harvard Business Review blog, Berkun declared that true innovators don’t use the word innovation at all. They talk about new products, new projects, change management, or just doing things. Innovation isn’t a playground for intellectuals; it’s a game for doers and hard workers. I found the statements so true, and so close to how I felt (sometimes event organisers ask me to pitch about innovation and I feel weird about that because innovation is something one does but is very difficult to describe) that I decided to know more and buy this book. Now, the Myths of Innovation is one of my favourite business books. Find out more <ul> <li>‘<a href="https://hbr.org/2008/07/why-innovation-is-overrated.html" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Why innovation is overrated</a>’ by Scott Berkun</li> <li><a href="https://www.getabstract.com/en/summary/the-myths-of-innovation/22284" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">download a free summary of the book</a></li> <li>the ‘Myths of innovation’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">video at Carnegie Mellon, a presentation by Scott</a></li> <li>buy ‘the Myths of innovation’ <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Myths-Innovation-Scott-Berkun-ebook/dp/B0026OR2PE" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">from Amazon.</a></li></ul>read chapter 4 free of charge, courtesy of O’Reilly publishing The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/10/myths-of-innovation/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Must-read: Scott Berkun Spells Out The Myths of Innovation</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Must-read: Scott Berkun Spells Out The Myths of Innovation

Blockchain technology is transforming the supply chain with limitless potential. It’s strengthening connections, making it more secure and transparent. Therefore, it’s a gateway for consumers to hold their favorite brands and companies accountable while guaranteeing product authenticity and responsible sourcing. According to IBM:   Blockchain for supply chain solutions help supply chain leaders use data to handle the disruptions of today and build resiliency for the future  From UPS to Louis Vuitton to Pfizer, blockchain is improving efficiency, ensuring authenticity, and reducing costs. Big changes are on the horizon for many brands as they discover the potential and consumer demand rises. Will Blockchain Technology Provide Vital Solutions for the Supply Chain?Can Blockchain technology be useful to the Supply Chain and innovation in that area? What is a ‘Blockchain’? A blockchain, simply put, is a shared database that records transactions and tracks assets. Let’s break it down. First, the ‘block’. In this case, transaction information. The block stores information such as; the buyer, the seller, product type, and the amount exchanged, etc. In reality, a block is a hashed line of code comprised of various numbers and letters; ‘e3f44q2bn…’.  Sort of like a DNA strand, a block holds the information, and if the block is altered it would be considered a completely different block.  Second, the ‘chain’. When a new block is made, the information gets encrypted and linked chronologically in a chain. Then a copy of the block is shared with everyone in the network. Storing the blocks chronologically, like a chain, means that each block relies on the block that comes before it like how each link of a chain relies on the link before it.Blockchain Technology is best known for being the underpinning of cryptocurrencies such as the (in) famous bitcoinCybersecurity and Blockchain Technology  The security of the blockchain relies on the decentralized nature of the system. Everyone in the network gets a copy of the chain. If someone were to attempt to change the information of a block, all the information in the chain following that would be void as there would be a break in the chain. This means that someone would have to adjust ALL the blocks following in order for the chain to accept that new block.  Let’s say that someone accomplished this feat. The problem that arises is that this single chain no longer matches the chain that everyone else in the network has a copy of. This essentially voids that chain. The shared database recognizes tampering with the chain and corrects the information. This means that the only way someone could change information, is if they changed over half of all the chains in the network, which is nearly impossible. Supply Chain Implementation The supply chain has the potential of implementing blockchain technology in many ways.  Business runs on information. The faster it’s received and the more accurate it is, the better – IBM  In the example above, a company can store transaction information to ensure authenticity and security. This helps with customer disputes, prevents fraudulent transactions, and false claims. Blockchain technology can offer tracking and traceability.  In sourcing, a block is created containing information about the exact location of where the raw materials were sourced. It can hold the payment and receipt information for the primary sector. This ensures proper compensation for the farmers, loggers, and miners acquiring the raw materials. An area that typically draws the short straw in the distribution of wealth. In transportation, a block is created containing information about each step in production. The lifecycle of a product can be stored that includes production, distribution, and delivery. Companies can display a public product blockchain to their consumers to showcase fair trade and ethical sourcing. The increase in transparency allows for greater trust from consumers. Public blockchains can even provide consumers with real-time tracking of a product which is vital in the evolution of last mile delivery.  Courier companies like UPS and Fedex are beginning to use this technology through BiTA.  Examples Big name companies are already implementing blockchain technology. Fashion companies like Louis Vuitton and Prada are collaborating with Aura to authenticate products and display a transparent supply chain. Products are tagged with a microchip to display product authenticity, manufacturing date, and where it was made. The customer can also easily find the model number, where it was purchased, its description, and much more by simply scanning the tag. It can even show consumers the entire product lifecycle to ensure ethical sourcing. According to the Prada Group:   The technology offered by the Aura Blockchain Consortium enables direct-to-consumer access to product-history and proof of authenticity; they can easily and transparently follow a product’s lifecycle, from conception through distribution, with trusted data throughout, and thus strengthen their relationship with their favorite luxury brandsPrada Group from MilanBig pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Bayer are collaborating with MediLedger to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and reduce chargebacks and fraud. For example, real-time tracking ensures compliance with regulations in temperature and humidity. Tagging drug inventory tightens the supply chain to reduce counterfeit drugs. As a result, this also helps when validating drug returns to manufacturers when wholesalers receive excess inventory.  According to Harvard Business Review:  The U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act of 2013 requires pharmaceutical companies to identify and trace prescription drugs to protect consumers from counterfeit, stolen, or harmful products  The Big Potential of Blockchain Technology for the Supply Chain There is big potential with the use of blockchain in many sectors of business. In the automotive industry, the technology can be used to store VIN numbers for easy recalls of vehicles, transfer car titles more efficiently, and track insurance data. For the food industry, it can display ethical sourcing and environmentally friendly practices. In the hospitality industry, hotel chains can reduce third-party booking services and create efficient booking and selling processes. In conclusion, blockchain technology has the potential to improve the supply chain of companies in ways we haven’t even discovered yet.  The blockchain provides a more secure, decentralized way to store information companies can become more efficient and transparent than ever before  As a result, connecting and tightening the supply chain from the source to the sale. Although, only the future can tell how blockchain technology will continue to improve and transform the supply chain. The post Can Blockchain Technology Innovate the Supply Chain ? appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

Blockchain technology is transforming the supply chain with limitless potential. It’s strengthening connections, making it more secure and transparent. Therefore, it’s a gateway for consumers to hold their favorite brands and companies accountable while guaranteeing product authenticity and responsible sourcing. <a href="https://www.ibm.com/blockchain-supply-chain" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">According to IBM</a>: <blockquote> Blockchain for supply chain solutions help supply chain leaders use data to handle the disruptions of today and build resiliency for the future </blockquote> From UPS to Louis Vuitton to Pfizer, blockchain is improving efficiency, ensuring authenticity, and reducing costs. Big changes are on the horizon for many brands as they discover the potential and consumer demand rises. <h2>Will Blockchain Technology Provide Vital Solutions for the Supply Chain?</h2>Can Blockchain technology be useful to the Supply Chain and innovation in that area? <h3>What is a ‘Blockchain’?</h3> A blockchain, simply put, is a shared database that records transactions and tracks assets. Let’s break it down. First, the ‘block’. In this case, transaction information. The block stores information such as; the buyer, the seller, product type, and the amount exchanged, etc. In reality, a block is a hashed line of code comprised of various numbers and letters; ‘e3f44q2bn…’. <blockquote> Sort of like a DNA strand, a block holds the information, and if the block is altered it would be considered a completely different block. </blockquote> Second, the ‘chain’. When a new block is made, the information gets encrypted and linked chronologically in a chain. Then a copy of the block is shared with everyone in the network. Storing the blocks chronologically, like a chain, means that each block relies on the block that comes before it like how each link of a chain relies on the link before it.Blockchain Technology is best known for being the underpinning of cryptocurrencies such as the (in) famous bitcoin <h3>Cybersecurity and Blockchain Technology </h3> The security of the blockchain relies on the decentralized nature of the system. Everyone in the network gets a copy of the chain. If someone were to attempt to change the information of a block, all the information in the chain following that would be void as there would be a break in the chain. This means that someone would have to adjust ALL the blocks following in order for the chain to accept that new block.  Let’s say that someone accomplished this feat. The problem that arises is that this single chain no longer matches the chain that everyone else in the network has a copy of. This essentially voids that chain. The shared database recognizes tampering with the chain and corrects the information. This means that the only way someone could change information, is if they changed over half of all the chains in the network, which is nearly impossible. <h3>Supply Chain Implementation</h3> The supply chain has the potential of implementing blockchain technology in many ways. <blockquote> Business runs on information. The faster it’s received and the more accurate it is, the better – <a href="https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-blockchain" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">IBM</a> </blockquote> In the example above, a company can store transaction information to ensure authenticity and security. This helps with customer disputes, prevents fraudulent transactions, and false claims. Blockchain technology can offer tracking and traceability.  In sourcing, a block is created containing information about the exact location of where the raw materials were sourced. It can hold the payment and receipt information for the primary sector. This ensures proper compensation for the farmers, loggers, and miners acquiring the raw materials. An area that typically draws the short straw in the distribution of wealth. In transportation, a block is created containing information about each step in production. The lifecycle of a product can be stored that includes production, distribution, and delivery. Companies can display a public product blockchain to their consumers to showcase fair trade and ethical sourcing. The increase in transparency allows for greater trust from consumers. Public blockchains can even provide consumers with real-time tracking of a product which is vital in the evolution of <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/10/last-mile-delivery-first-priority-for-companies/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">last mile delivery</a>. <blockquote> Courier companies like UPS and Fedex are beginning to use this technology through BiTA. </blockquote> <h3>Examples</h3> Big name companies are already implementing blockchain technology. Fashion companies like Louis Vuitton and Prada are collaborating with <a href="https://auraluxuryblockchain.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Aura</a> to authenticate products and display a transparent supply chain. Products are tagged with a microchip to display product authenticity, manufacturing date, and where it was made. The customer can also easily find the model number, where it was purchased, its description, and much more by simply scanning the tag. It can even show consumers the entire product lifecycle to ensure ethical sourcing. According to the <a href="https://www.pradagroup.com/en/news-media/news-section/aura-blockchain-consortium.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Prada Group</a>: <blockquote> The technology offered by the Aura Blockchain Consortium enables direct-to-consumer access to product-history and proof of authenticity; they can easily and transparently follow a product’s lifecycle, from conception through distribution, with trusted data throughout, and thus strengthen their relationship with their favorite luxury brands</blockquote>Prada Group from Milan Big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Bayer are collaborating with <a href="https://www.mediledger.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">MediLedger</a> to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and reduce <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelwolfson/2019/05/02/pfizer-and-other-healthcare-companies-aim-to-bring-blockchain-based-chargeback-protocol-to-market/?sh=46da361f5b3a" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">chargebacks</a> and fraud. For example, real-time tracking ensures compliance with regulations in temperature and humidity. Tagging drug inventory tightens the supply chain to reduce counterfeit drugs. As a result, this also helps when validating drug returns to manufacturers when wholesalers receive excess inventory.  According to <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/05/building-a-transparent-supply-chain" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Harvard Business Review</a>: <blockquote> The U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act of 2013 requires pharmaceutical companies to identify and trace prescription drugs to protect consumers from counterfeit, stolen, or harmful products </blockquote> <h3>The Big Potential of Blockchain Technology for the Supply Chain</h3> There is big potential with the use of blockchain in many sectors of business. In the automotive industry, the technology can be used to store VIN numbers for easy recalls of vehicles, transfer car titles more efficiently, and track insurance data. For the food industry, it can display ethical sourcing and environmentally friendly practices. In the hospitality industry, hotel chains can reduce third-party booking services and create efficient booking and selling processes. In conclusion, blockchain technology has the potential to improve the supply chain of companies in ways we haven’t even discovered yet. <blockquote> The blockchain provides a more secure, decentralized way to store information companies can become more efficient and transparent than ever before </blockquote> As a result, connecting and tightening the supply chain from the source to the sale. Although, only the future can tell how blockchain technology will continue to improve and transform the supply chain. The post <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2022/10/blockchain-technology/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Can Blockchain Technology Innovate the Supply Chain ?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://visionarymarketing.com/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marketing and Innovation</a>.

Can Blockchain Technology Innovate the Supply Chain ?

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