The blog

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.

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?

The parsnip hype (‘pastinaak’ in Dutch) recently put online advertising in the spotlight again. A Facebook ad, aimed at female fans of the cooking show Dagelijkse Kost living in Eeklo, encouraged them to buy parsnips. The sale of this vegetable rose significantly in two local supermarkets. At the same time De Correspondent published a contradictory viewpoint, based on the eBay case. This company stopped all Google advertisements in 2013, but after eight weeks sales figures remained stable. Conclusion: for years eBay had been spending millions of dollars on useless online advertising. Does online advertising work or not? The truth lies in the grey area. To reinforce this conclusion, we spoke with Koen Pauwels, Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Northeastern University and member of our company's advisory board. He followed the discussions closely and carried out a study on online advertising. Based on his knowledge and our experience, we analyzed the viewpoints in the article in De Correspondent.

Technology is fundamentally changing the behavior of consumers, and with it the way customers expect to interact with companies. How can brands break through the virtual noise given the limited time they have? Creating personalized customer experiences is a major opportunity to do so.

A lot is happening in the world today and unfortunately it’s not all good news. War and violence make it into the headlines every day, climate change is real and threatening, the #metoo campaign showed that sexual intimidation is affecting women all around the globe. In short, the world is in a really bad state and our future doesn’t look so bright either. But then it’s that time of the year again when love and warmth are everywhere and when we try to contribute more to society than we usually do. It’s not only on an individual level that we undertake all sorts of actions, but also brands are putting in an extra effort these days. Some of them even go a step further and do not restrict their efforts to the end-of-year period alone. This year, an increasing number of brands have included societal causes in their marketing campaigns. Look at the ‘We Accept’ campaign by Airbnb, in which the brand uses a specific tone to strengthen its commitment to diversity. Or how P&G promotes racial equality with its ‘The Talk’ commercial. This ad shows parents from an Afro-American background having “the talk” with their children about the difficulties of growing up as a minority in the U.S. Closer to home we have the collaboration between Alpro and WWF, in which the brand donates 10 cents for every bottle sold to support WWF in its battle against deforestation.

In this day and age, companies and brands are encouraged to exceed customer expectations by delivering personalized experiences. Hence, it's about time you change the title on your business card into 'experience maker'. There are many definitions, but this one sums it up perfectly: “A true experience maker is only happy when the customer’s life is made a lot easier”. Or as CMO Claire Cronin stated during the Adobe Summit in May 2018: “At Virgin Atlantic, we are memory makers and the customer is the compass.”

You are planning on throwing a B2B event, and you want it to be the ultimate experience for your audience. Clients, leads, influencers, whoever is invited, they have to be wowed. Well, that’s great, because experience is key for the marketing future and you are on the right track. But what could be a good as well as efficient approach for setting up this event behind the scenes? That’s right, start leveraging your marketing automation tool for events as well.

This third part of our 3-piece article series based on an interview with marketing professor Koen Pauwels focuses on the “WHO”: Which skills should marketers have to be able to analyze their data?