The blog

Indeed, we fully understand your thinking: “Here we go again, another article about GDPR…” Will it be yet another legal firm translating a 300+ page regulation into a slightly more understandable text? Or maybe it’s the next IT company trying to sell you THE solution for being GDPR compliant. Or perhaps it’s the next blogger telling you it’s much ado about nothing?

Now that the holidays are almost coming to an end, companies need to deal with the yearly September struggles popping up. This is a period in which new joiners typically start, some projects and teams might change and it’s time for those sensitive topics of budget and business plans.

We all agree that being agile as an organization is key to remain relevant & competitive, right? The results of our Yearly Marketing Survey 2017 have shown that to be agile as an organization, the role of the senior management team may not be underestimated: 59% of respondents indicated that it’s key that senior management is committed to walk the talk.

We’ve all had that angry feeling when running around in circles at the supermarket not finding specific products. People who pay frequent visits to huge and cluttered retail spaces – hypermarkets for instance – will recognize this pain. Now, imagine how wonderful and time-saving it would be if you could use virtual maps that gave clear directions to the items on your shopping list.

Stop pretending: the time has come to act as a real customer-centric company! How customer-centric are Belgian Marketers? In our Yearly Marketing Survey 20171 53% of Marketers claimed to have a very customer-centric company (scoring themselves 7 or more out of 10). However, digging deeper into the results, we were able to see that Belgian companies lack maturity in areas such as customer experience, organisational design and data strategy. So there is a clear delivery gap where marketers THINK they are customer-centric, but are clearly not acting on it.

Nowadays, in this world of marketing automation, a human error is only one click away. We all know the feeling of panic when we unintendedly post, send or share a message. And we can testify! Recently we also accidentally sent out a wrong email. Oops, something went wrong…

Share of market, share of wallet, share of mind, etc. As brand marketers we monitor these numbers closely. However, do they really matter? Keeping your brand alive is not about a percentage in your monthly performance dashboard – or any other number for that matter. As Byron Sharp said: ‘what you should care about as a marketer is the mental and physical availability of your brand’. Or, translated into shares, it is all about ‘share of life’.

If you witnessed the death of typewriters, radio cassettes and analogue cameras you will have felt the wobbles of the digital revolution in its early years. Today Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes the headlines as one of the most disrupting forces of our century. In an article published in June 2016, The Economist claimed, “Experts warn that the substitution of machinery for human labour may render the population redundant. They worry that the discovery of this mighty power has come before we know how to employ it appropriately. Such fears are expressed by those who worry that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy millions of jobs and pose a Terminator-style threat to humanity.”

In October 2016, mobile and tablet traffic overtook desktop traffic for the first time. Since then, we have been living in a mobile-first world. Mobile makes us communicate differently. As marketers, we are already consciously making the shift to digital. We are investing in fancy websites and new technologies for our companies. But mobile often lags behind.

In this ever-changing world, marketers know they need to change their strategy. To face the increasingly competitive industry and deliver profitable growth, companies should focus on building a more personalized and enjoyable service/product for their customers.