The blog

THoMer Lucas attended The Next Web, one of Europe's most renowned tech conferences in Amsterdam. He brought home insights that demonstrate how the world of marketing never ceases to evolve.

Hi, I’m Pieter. While I’m a familiar face in the THoM family, I haven’t always been your classic marketer: I used to be the mastermind behind the popular Moodclub parties. Let me tell you how a humble party concept introduced me to the wonderful world of marketing! Let’s jump back to the year 2000. As a restless law student, the nightlife in my city let me down tremendously. I had to spend my Thursday nights with bad beer and even worse music. A true disappointment for the energetic youngster I was. Those cheap parties, however, led to a bold idea: why not start my own party concept? No sooner said than done, I sat together with a befriended designer to set up my own event: Moodclub. It was a concept that fully aimed at creating lasting memories. A gathering focused on customer experience, to put it in today’s words. Throwback to the early 2000s: me as DJ Pierre de la Rivière.

I was juggling being a mother of 3 with a full-time consulting job and a newly started entrepreneurial venture. How was I ever going to balance those on top of many other things?

Hyper-personalization takes experiences to the next level. They are the result of personal, behavioral and transactional data processed in an intelligent way, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The combination of data and technology enables companies to provide an advanced one-to-one experience at scale. Based on key take-aways from the Adobe Summit EMEA, we clustered building blocks together into a hyper-personalization loop.

While I was taking part in the Great Breweries Marathon in May, I realized that there are a lot of comparisons between running a marathon and setting up a Marketing Automation tool. That's why I listed the 8 comparisons I saw (yes, during a marathon you have quite some time to think…).

Dear Nathan, Zach and Adriana, You’re heartily welcomed into Generation Alpha – Digital Natives born after 2010! Arriving in 2014, 2015 and 2018, you guys are definitely the newbies. The title “Screenagers” is truly appropriate to describe you - Nathan, you learned how to turn the iPad/iPhone on and watch YouTube at only 8 months old – we would have never imagined!

Today, marketers are facing the challenges of increased competition, new distribution channels, proliferation of media channels and changing customer preferences, all of this to make data more scattered and more difficult to convert into meaningful information that supports decisions on how to allocate your marketing budget – and most importantly to measure and report the return on the investments made. But it is possible to link information about customers needs, preferences, habits and behaviors across all channels to the performance of a business’s sales and marketing activities. It all comes down to making sure the right things are being measured and visualized. By defining and tracking your marketing KPIs on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, you as a marketer can act on the data to immediately improve marketing performance – and this is exactly where digital marketing dashboarding comes into play.

Every year, numerous quantities of research try to estimate the size of the Belgian e-commerce market. Most of the time these high-level estimations are derived from the consumer perspective to tell the story on how Belgian e-commerce performs. We believe, however, that there are always two sides to a story, and that we should also pay attention to the merchants’ perspective. Therefore, The House of Marketing together with SafeShops.be explores this black hole of merchant-based facts through the E-commerce Barometer. As opposed to other research, the E-commerce Barometer brings forth accurate information on Belgian e-commerce based on real transaction data, in collaboration with payment service providers in Belgium. A payment service provider or PSP is a third party that facilitates and helps merchants in the acceptance of payments.

Put a group of marketing consultants together, mix it with enthusiasm and energy – and what do you get? An epic skitrip! Let us take you back to our THoMski 2019. At The House of Marketing, we like to go the extra mile, and this year we took it quite literally. After multiple trips to the Vosges, we decided to head to Austria! With a group of 47 enthusiastic employees from different entities of the Quanteus Group – The House of Marketing, BrightWolves and UPTHRUST – we traveled to Mayerhofen. The 12-hour bus ride couldn’t spoil the fun: we enjoyed our trip to the fullest. Looking back with a smile on 3 days of skiing, snowboarding and après-skiing, topped up with a pyjama party and jenever-pong game! Watch our brief after-movie to get a glimpse of our legendary skitrip.

Customers are or should be, at the heart of every organization. We segment them to personalize our offering and approach them differently to satisfy their needs most efficiently and effectively. However, in this day and age, are we really doing the best we can? Are traditional segmentation techniques still the way to go, or are we missing something? We all want to get personal and communicate the right message at the right time at the right place to the right person. This is where traditional segmentation techniques might not be effective enough to enable organizations to offer this kind of personalized experience. We all understand the value of segmentation as a means to better target our effort, but should we continue using segmentation when technology and big data has paved the way for hyper-personalization and one-on-one offerings?