English language Visionary Marketing Podcasts: Recent Episodes

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Are GenAI and content marketing compatible? Adobe organised a round table discussion on that subject during their Experience Makers conference in Paris in early November 2023. The debate brought together a few digital experts. During this discussion, I mentioned that there were limitations to GenAI images and that they weren’t technical. Others contended that it was just a matter of prompt engineering. Writing a good prompt may be recommended, but the limitations of GenAI image generation tools extend far beyond that. Such is my point, which I substantiate in this piece with insights derived from a one-year practice of such software within the administration of this very website.

GenAI and Content Marketing Lessons From ExperienceThis debate on GenAI and content marketing was an opportunity to take hindsight about images and their power to illustrate and differentiate our brands. Here we look at how generative AI was used to illustrate the Visionary Marketing news website.This debate was organised by Adobe at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. It was about generative AI and content marketing. This discussion turned out to be an opportunity for me to take stock of a year’s experience of using generative AI to generate images for Visionary Marketing.

GenAI and Content: Excitement and Second ThoughtsAt first, as we discovered Midjourney and its clones, we were all very excited. And we did have fun producing images for all intents and purposes. Then came a moment when hindsight was required. It was high time to take a step back from it all to ponder over the use of GenAI. As I explained during the debate, it reminded me of the HDR filters when I started using Adobe Lightroom 12 years ago. At first, one used them every day. Five years later, in hindsight, one removed them all.

Our roundtable on GenAI and content marketing: From left to right: Caroline Mignaux, Yann Gourvennec, Frédéric Cavazza, Adobe’s Lionel Lemoine and Fabrice Frossard.Here are a few thoughts on the use of these tools which, in my view, are more than ever worth investigating. Yet, one should look at them in the context of the widespread use of GenAI tools by both Web users and the Media.

1. On the one hand, what was initially pleasurable, at a time we felt like trailblazers, ends up being repetitive and bland. We come across too many of these pictures in the Media and on the Internet. Some of my readers pointed this out to me. My co-author even says he can’t understand why I don’t make more use of my own photos, whereas I am a photographer. He’s both right and wrong, and I’ll come back to that later. In the meantime, I insist that the featured image of this post is an original (and deliberately cryptic) photo by yours truly.
2. On the other hand, these images, often produced in haste, end up looking the same. They are also often rather garish, with saturated colours that are very characteristic of virtual images. They’re also rather banal and sometimes vulgar. I realise that this is a personal and biased statement. After all, though, when it comes to images, there is no such thing as objectivity.
3. There’s also a general trend towards ‘heroic fantasy’ type images, a genre I have nothing against, even though it’s not to my liking. But this does seem to add fuel to the fire about the trivialisation of images. We can add to this sci-fi-like illustrations, which are sometimes quite successful, but also confer a déjà vu aspect to your content.
4. Lastly, a feeling of unease about images that are very realistic but at the same time are not. It’s a phenomenon known in the digital world as the Uncanny Valley. We’ll deal with this topic on this site in more detail at a later date.

Using GenAI: Three Main StagesIn fact, at Visionary Marketing, we went through several stages. In the beginning, we only used images from my personal stock. All the Visionary Marketing content writers had to go through this limited stock of images. These photos are personal, and therefore unique. Yet a feeling of déjà vu soon set in. And above all, we were often unable to describe certain concepts using those images. It makes sense since this stock doesn’t include all the possible metaphors one would require.

Fishing for the right picture amongst 12,000 of them isn’t always a piece of cake. Not to mention the crafting of the right captions, a real challenge that was!A second step was to add stock photos to these images. This made it possible for us to get away from the limitation syndrome. However, it also made our illustrations look more commonplace. This could have been damaging in some cases. Fortunately, we were using Jumpstory and this image data bank was rather unusual. Thus, we avoided this pitfall to some extent. It was good while it lasted, for Jumpstory went under this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if GenAI killed it there and then.

Jumpstory images were sometimes quite good. But you had to look hard to find the right one. Anyway, it sadly went under in 2024.Over the Past Year, Generative AIAnd since last year, this is the third stage, we’ve been making more intensive use of generative AI to produce illustrations for our articles. In all cases, whether it be the first, second or third stage, we’ve come to the same conclusion: using the same image source all the time leads to a feeling of repetition, fatigue and trivialisation.

So you have to mix the different types of images and above all, as I explained during the Adobe debate, you have to be able to master the prompt so as to produce illustrations that are different from what we usually see on the Net.

The more abstract the prompt, the more eye-catching and different the image produced. That’s what makes you stand out from the crowd. This is rather counter-intuitive. Indeed, most self-proclaimed AI pundits on LinkedIn and elsewhere will be adamant that such prompts should be banned. What life has taught me, though, is that when the crowd produces A, producing non-A will make your work — and yourself — more distinctive.

Besides, advanced mastery of all the tools, generative AI, Photoshop, Illustrator, or all of them combined, means that you can retain total control over your images. Thus, you should be able to produce less commonplace pictures or illustrations for your content.

Last but not least, don’t hesitate to revisit your content to change illustrations that, with hindsight, seem too trivial, too stereotyped or too garish. Unless, of course, you like it that way.

More than ever, marketing is not about getting things done. It’s about getting things done differently. Whether you resort to GenAI or not, you should always bear that in mind. The post GENAI and Content Marketing: Learning from experience appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

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Our reporters attended the Paris Retail Week 2024 event, a trade show of which we are media partners, to take stock of fraud and the role of AI. We collected a lot of valuable feedback on threats (both in-store and e-commerce) and the countermeasures proposed by artificial intelligence. To do so, we interviewed Gilles Bijaoui, head of CX at Fujitsu (Customer Experience being the name of the retail division chosen by the Japanese company). During this discussion, which took place at the opening of the show, he gave us a wealth of information on fraud and described the AI solutions designed to combat it. Such solutions have now been deployed for almost two years in retail chains of all sizes.

When AI fights fraud in-store and on websitesAI and fraud detection in retail: Fujitsu’s Gilles Bijaoui, Head of Customer Experience at Paris Retail Week on 17 September 2024 in ParisIsn’t AI-driven fraud reduction deja vu?Gilles Bijaoui. Indeed, this has been a recurring topic over the last five years, whether at NRF or Paris Retail Week. But it wasn’t really implemented in the field. But over the last two years or so, that has completely changed. Post Covid, we find these solutions in production in many retailers of all sizes.

There are several types of AI involved, including generative AI. This has been rolled out by several large retail chains and the feedback is fantastic. Be it regarding performance, reducing employee theft and shoplifting, whether for physical retail or e-commerce.

What kind of fraud are we talking about?GB. There are two types of fraud in retail and e-commerce:

1. Firstly, in-store fraud, just over half of which is linked to theft in the shop and around 40% is due to shop assistants themselves.
2. When it comes to e-commerce, it’s more likely to be linked to electronic flows of information, either payment fraud or identity theft (or phishing). It’s more complex and also more damaging.

Fraud on e-commerce platforms accounts for almost 20% of e-commerce sales worldwide. That’s a huge amount! If you compare this figure with in-store theft or fraud, it’s down to only 2-3%.

We caught up with Gilles Bijaoui at Paris Retail Week to talk about AI and fraud detection.We’re definitely on a different scale with e-commerce. It’s also linked to the volume of transactions, which soared during and after the Covid crisis.

But the good news is that, thanks to AI technologies, we’ve seen a reduction in the growth of these fraudulent activities over the last two years or so. Previously, electronic fraud was growing at a rate of around 20% a year, but thanks to AI we’re now down to less than 15% per annum. And it’s getting even better with the education of individuals and businesses.

Are there any regional variations regarding fraud in retail?GB. Not in Europe, all countries are pretty much the same. Only one country is an exception, and that’s the UK, which has even more fraud, as in the US, whether it’s physical or e-commerce.

That’s a difference of around 10 points over France. What’s more, the figures are reversed. Physical retail theft in the United States and Great Britain is higher than in the rest of Europe. And conversely, e-commerce is better controlled there than on the continent. Most likely because they decided to deploy these solutions before other countries.

On the other hand, given the massive in-store fraud in the United States, many everyday consumer products are under lock and key.

Let’s now talk about combatting fraud with artificial intelligenceGB. For physical stores, there have been two eras, and two different systems.

Previously, artificial intelligence was based on data. The more data we had, the more artificial intelligence systems learned, and were able to identify recurring patterns. This has changed to the extent that now, we’re relying more on the definition and identification of behaviours and movements.

Some of these modern solutions have recorded hundreds of human behaviours that can help determine a person’s intentions. Based on what we call “patterns”, we are able to tell, with the in-store camera system and artificial intelligence, whether a person intends to buy, steal, or just potter around. This is a starting point for AI to trigger personalised in-store promotions.

Personalisation With AIGB. For example, if you’re standing in front of the aisle dedicated to formula milk in a supermarket and you’re hesitating, artificial intelligence will advise you based on the information available. It can also provide you with recipes based on the food you are buying or suggest that you virtually try the garments you are about to purchase.

We can also offer promotions tailored to the person based on their loyalty cards, and instantly offer a coupon on an item a consumer is looking at.

These marketing and merchandising efforts are no longer restricted to online commerce. Now, they are also available at the point of sale. And all this, thanks to artificial intelligence.

How can one avoid hallucinations on such recommendations?GB. We have to fight this idea that humans will be disappearing because of AI. These systems are not autonomous. They need to be controlled. Certain words must be banned, for example. The way we address people has to be calibrated so as not to offend or be too intrusive. All this has to be strictly supervised.

Marketing messages must be constantly calibrated, both by us and our customers.

Let’s take an example. We’re currently working on fitting rooms. A lot of fraud is happening there, both by consumers and shop assistants. And RFID doesn’t really help fight this issue.

We have therefore combined several solutions so that we can identify that if a person comes in wearing red and goes out wearing black, something is clearly wrong. Similarly, if that person goes in wearing a size 12 and comes out with size 24, something isn’t quite right either. Behaviours are also analysed, as I pointed out earlier. At the end of the day, though it’s always the customer who decides where to draw the line. There are also laws governing the use of these technologies. For example, one isn’t allowed to recognise faces in continental Europe.

Is there a good business case you implemented with a retail chain?GB. We’ve worked with a well-known German hard discount chain for which we have deployed anti-theft solutions at the checkout. The solution makes it possible to identify fruit and vegetables in a relevant way. If you take a bottle of wine and you change the label or the barcode is not the right one, the system is able to detect it.

With this solution, we have succeeded in reducing thefts by 60%. Into the bargain, improving in-store communication, both towards shop assistants and customers, also helps to reduce thefts by around 20%.

How does it work in practice?GB. For automatic checkouts, a camera is placed on top, coupled with sensors that can measure not only the weight, but the typology of the product, its firmness, size, colour and even its density. The progress made with cameras is considerable. We’re able to spot the right product with around 90% success rate.

And it’s the same at the physical checkout, in other words, it also prevents certain employees – let me remind you that this accounts for 40% of fraud – from passing the wrong products, or forgetting to pass a product. If this happens, an alarm rings.

And once a certain number of alarms have been triggered, human intervention is required. We also know that most checkout fraud occurs in the last two hours before closing time. The pace picks up enormously at that point, because there are longer queues and dishonest employees figure it’s going to be easier to get away with theft.

Yet it is precisely where controls will be tightened, alarms will be more frequent, there will be greater vigilance over data reconciliation and a speeding up of the process. What is very important to bear in mind at all times is that all these systems are controlled and validated by human beings.

In the event of a mistake or problem, human intervention will either trigger apologies or reverse an incorrect identification. Artificial intelligence is an ally of commerce, but it is not inhuman if it is properly implemented.

What about e-commerce?GB. On the e-commerce systems that we deploy, we observe that fraud often comes from the same IP addresses and the same geographical areas. Fraud is often linked to an initial failure to enter a credit card number or make a payment. This triggers alerts accordingly.

In response, we will either block the payment or notify the end customer’s bank. The computing power is such that fraudsters can hardly get away with it. And banks have also made efforts in this direction, with 3D secure and dual authentication of purchases via mobile applications, email or text messages.

All online businesses, even the smallest merchant sites, are equipped with these solutions, which help to prevent attacks, the theft of customer files and phishing.

Could fraud ever disappear with AI?GB. We’re not that far off. Especially as we develop new technologies, including fingerprinting, retinal scanning and even palm scanning. Probably a lot of e-commerce sites or personal computers will soon be equipped with them.

In partnership with Ingenico, we have developed a system that recognises only the palm of the hand. The venous system is unique to each individual. And you can’t reproduce it with a photograph. Add to this heat measurement and you have an ultra-secure system that will further reduce fraud.

About FujitsuFujitsu is a company that is both well-known and little known. It is a large Japanese technology company that started out over 100 years ago with telecommunications and switched to services in the 2000s. It employs just over 130,000 people worldwide, and has a turnover of 33 billion dollars. Its retail division (aka Customer Experience) accounts for just over 20% of the Japanese company’s worldwide sales. Its activities are now focused on services and platforms for points of sale and e-commerce, not forgetting integration services, consulting and infrastructure for retailers. Fujitsu is even the 8th largest technology services company in the world.

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What is the likely impact of AI and GenAI in particular on jobs, especially in Europe? Two recent reports on the topic, one in the UK and another one in France shed light on this question. According to the French report, such impact could amount to 5%. Yet another case for precision vs accuracy. That figure seems counter-intuitive when so many self-proclaimed AI gurus, especially on LinkedIn, are hailing the GenAI “revolution“. Besides, the authors of the UK report don’t agree at all with that. As ChatGPT would have it, let’s “delve” into those reports and find out more.

GenAI impact on jobs: boon or doom?What impact will GenAI have on jobs in Europe? The answer to that question unmistakeably depends on which job and which associated tasks you are talking about. The French Commission on AI reassures us on this point – photo: a tailor’s workshop in the 10th arrondissement of Paris – photo Yann Gourvennec antimuseum.com.

Our own empirical analysis suggests a positive effect of AI on employment in companies that adopt AI, because AI replaces tasks, not jobs. In 19 out of 20 jobs, there are tasks that AI cannot perform. Jobs that can be directly replaced by AI would therefore represent only 5% of jobs in a country like France. What’s more, the generalisation of AI will spur job creations, in new occupations as in old ones. To sum it all up, some industries or geographies could experience net job losses, therefore requiring Government support, but this does not mean that AI will have an overarching negative effect on national employment in France.

French Commission on Artificial Intelligence report, March 2024 – p. 41

Anxiety in the eyes of some of my younger studentsI often talk to young students from all areas about the impact of GenAI on jobs and careers. I often sense a bit of reticence and even anxiety in them at a time when young adults are still asking themselves many questions about the future and aren’t necessarily clearly determined about what they want to do in the future. Beyond that, the current state of hype around GenAI further blurs these students’ vision by making them feel the weight of an uncertainty that is already difficult for some to stomach.

The impact of generative AI on employment is not easy to assess. And we’ve had to struggle with our image-generating AI tools to get them to avoid a doomsday view of the future of work with robots everywhere… What if, in the end, the future of work was a mere evolution of today’s work practices? Image generated with MidJourneyRecent reports have added fuel to the fire, such as this one from the IMF.

Almost 40 percent of global employment is exposed to AI, with advanced economies at greater risk but also better poised to exploit AI benefits than emerging market and developing economies. In advanced economies, about 60 percent of jobs are exposed to AI, due to prevalence of cognitive-task-oriented jobs. A new measure of potential AI complementarity suggests that, of these, about half may be negatively affected by AI, while the rest could benefit from enhanced productivity through AI integration.

IMF 2024 report on AI and the impact on employment and the future of work

The British government has also published a report on this subject. Its more task-oriented approach is a little more nuanced, but still fairly unappealing.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are likely to have a profound and widespread effect on the UK economy and society, though the precise nature and speed of this effect is uncertain. It has been estimated that 10-30% of jobs are automatable with AI having the potential to increase productivity and create new high-value jobs in the UK.

Gov.uk report on the impact of AI on jobs, Nov 2023

It’s worthy of note, however, that the authors are resorting a great deal to the conditional tense. This undoubtedly urges us to interpret these results with caution.

A more nuanced report on the impact of AI on jobsThe French report is much more nuanced and refers to a large number of interesting studies, starting with the one by Antonin Bergeaud (an economist and professor at the Paris H. E. C. School of Management), from which I extracted an important schematic.

The approach of the French report makes a clear distinction between GenAI and AI, and even automation in the broad sense (i.e. aimed at the manufacturing industry). It’s a distinction that seems crucial to me, given the many misconceptions linked to the measuring of the impact of AI. Which AI? Generative AI? Machine Learning, deep learning, neural networks? Or even just plain good old IT, unless we are mentioning robotisation, automated supply chains…

In short, AI is everything and everything is AI. That seems to me a silver bullet for generating panic among the general public and especially young students who are trying to find their way in the future.

A More Thorough and Subtle ReportThe French report is therefore more precise than the others I’ve read, in that it makes a clear distinction between GenAI and the others. It is also focusing on tasks rather than jobs. This approach has also been that of the British government.

Impact of AI on jobs: Antonin Bergeaud’s projections are extremely smart and way above my mathematical abilities. In the top left-hand corner one can see the jobs of accountants and telemarketers, professions of which I’ve been reading about the disappearance since the 1980s (accountants) and 1990s (telemarketers). It’s bound to happen one day, but is ChatGPT to blame? It’s doubtful, and you don’t need a PhD in Quantum physics for this – diagram taken and adapted from Antonin Bergeaud’s report.The report is in disagreement with previous approaches, pitting them against each other and pointing out that, in the end, there may be no need to panic:

This approach using the exposure of tasks, vs jobs, to GenAI makes it possible to estimate aggregate effects at the level of the economy as a whole, and to allow comparisons between countries. However, it has several limitations. Here are the two main ones. On the one hand, it is a static approach: the studies are based on existing tasks and therefore do not take account those tasks that could be created as a result of the development of AI […] On the other hand, it is based on an estimate of the probability of different tasks being replaced by AI (see above diagram).

In short, even if you think it’s a better approach, thinking of the impact of AI in terms of tasks isn’t really possible. It’s like painting a picture of a landscape from the window of your intercity train at 100 miles per hour. On top of that the painter has left his glasses at home and is therefore making assumptions about whether he should add cows, or sheep, in the meadow in his painting.

[…] overall, the deployment of AI in the economy should have a positive effect on the number of jobs. Catastrophic predictions about the end of work are no more credible than similar predictions made in the past. Especially as even the task-based approach represents the upper limit for the impact of AI. Indeed, it makes the assumption that it is profitable to automate all the tasks that can be automated. But this assumption is far from being true today. The diminishing cost of AI systems and the possibility of distributing the same AI system to a very large number of users will be key factors in determining the impact of GenAI on tasks and jobs.

Antonin Bergeaud

In conclusion, if the result is not negative, it must be positive, even if it is undoubtedly just as difficult to prove as the opposite.

Five percent impact of GenAI on jobs… why not 5.2%?As for the 5% figure announced in the French report (see the quote above), I suppose it should be taken as an order of magnitude. There is a nuance added to the report in that respect. The authors mention that these 5% may vary from one occupation to another. What I take from this is that for the vast majority of occupations, this figure of 5%, is probably not to be taken at face value. Some occupations will not be affected by artificial intelligence at all, especially generative artificial intelligence. This doesn’t come as a shock to us. It takes us back to our work on jobs in 2030, where we already showed the prevalence of non-automatable occupations (surface technicians and others) in the most sought-after professions.

Automation Is neither Easy Nor Happens OvernightOccupations that are apparently easy to automate, such as bookkeeping, for example (if we fail to take its more consultancy-like aspects into account) have been on the chopping block for years. But despite the doomsday predictions, including our own, it has to be said today that the jobs of chartered accountants remain among the most in demand.

Yet all the technology is available to automate both bean counters’ tasks and data transmission. Nowadays, almost all invoices are dematerialised even though they are only unstructured PDF files. And yet most of the work of accountants remains manual whether we like it or not. Whether it’s ticking boxes between reconciliation systems or copying figures into a general ledger. The change lies mainly in the declining technical nature of the job.

Ditto for banking. Experts have been naming banks dinosaurs for years. Here again, we have to make amends. And yet there have been many restructurings, and they didn’t wait for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its clones. But here’s the thing: changes don’t happen overnight. Besides innovation in organisations isn’t governed by wizardry but resistance to change.

Finally, let’s return to an occupation that was in the top left-hand corner of Antonin Bergeaud’s schematic. I mean that of secretaries. An occupation that has already been largely transformed since the 1990s. It has also been steadily declining to the point of disappearance at least in the United States (they only amount to a fraction of European employees now, i.e. a small proportion of 19% of all jobs). And yet, the impact of artificial intelligence between the 1980s and the year 2000 was bound to be close to zero. I should know, I was in charge of an AI project in those days. In that same period, though, I witnessed and even played an active role in the boom of the deployment of IT in businesses.

GenAI and jobs: looking at the big pictureWe therefore need to get back to these forecasts with a critical look. Starting with those of the IMF. And this report by the French Committee on Artificial Intelligence deserves credit for playing down the most hairy-fairy statistics on this subject.

In conclusion, after reading all these reports, the future isn’t any more predictable than it was before that. We might even venture to say that we are even more confused. Admittedly, as the authors of the French report point out, we are already seeing, and will continue to see, employees that are made redundant in professions where business models are already being jeopardised by ICTs, such as journalism.

But is this sufficient for us to reckon that what we are going through today is a “revolution” in terms of employment? There are no indications on this. All we could surmise is that a minority of jobs will be hit — be it 5%, less or more.

Time will tell whether this figure or that of the International Monetary Fund was the right one, but I’m inclined to believe that the ballpark figure quoted by the French Artificial Intelligence Commission is closer to reality.

Predictions lie but figures don’tFinally, to end on an intellectual note, let’s quote Vaclav Smil in his book Numbers don’t lie.

Being realistic about innovation

Modern societies are obsessed with innovation.

We are to believe that innovation will open every conceivable door: to life expectancies far beyond 100 years, to the merging of human and machine consciousness, to essentially free solar energy.

This uncritical genuflection before the altar of innovation is wrong on two counts: It ignores those big, fundamental quests that have failed after spending huge sums on research.

And it has little to say about why we so often stick to an inferior practice even when we know there’s a superior course of action.

Vaclav Smil, Numbers don’t lie

It’s this last sentence that I think is important. All forecasting exercises start from an assumption: that which state that when a technology improves our lives, it’s bound to be implemented.

It may seem like a no-brainer at first glance. What I have learned in the field throughout my career, however, is that when a solution is better, especially when it is better, resistance to change is all the greater. And it’s rarely the most obvious and cost-effective solutions that win. Especially because human decisions are seldom rational.

Thus, assuming that generative AI is without contest a boon to productivity gains, a theory I’m not at all sure I buy into, it would be wrong to believe that the mere fact that it exists guarantees its rapid and universal implementation.

Here again, time will be of the essence.

• download the 2024 IMF report on the impact of AI on jobs
• download the UK report Nov 2023 on the impact of AI on UK jobs
• download Antonin Bergeaud’s report [in French] from 2024 on the impact of AI on tasks and jobs
• download the 2024 artificial intelligence commission UK report
• donwload the 2024 report by the French commission on AI

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Thomas Deneux is the founder of Learning Robots whose aim is to help pupils, students and businesses to learn AI, with the help of home-made self-driving gizmos. These little machines on two wheels are more serious than you’d think. They are all about the teaching of advanced computing. Thomas described his philosophy to me during this interview conducted at the heart of the Neuroscience Institute of the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). In essence, a no-nonsense approach to teaching and learning AI.

When AI and robots join forces to teach artificial intelligenceBehind Learning robots’ self-driving gizmos – seen on their training track here in Saclay – there is a teaching philosophy and a full-fledged training corpus.Who are these friendly colourful robots?We’re overwhelmed with social media posts and news about AI. Often, pundits will tell you that you need to know how to use ChatGPT and make prompts. That’s all very well, but we must free ourselves from the tech giants who build these models.

At Learning robots, we want to spark vocations among people who are interested in finding out how it works and want to use AI better.

What is artificial intelligence anyway? AI gave birth to these fantastic tools and programs. Yet, at the same time many people are scared. Our aim, with these user-trained robots, is to make AI accessible and friendly.

What’s behind these robots?In our introductory activities, the user drives a robot as if it were a remote-controlled car. But behind this robot is an AI that will record all the necessary data. Next, the robot takes over from the user in autopilot mode and drives around the circuit.

Then we organise a race between the robots that have become autonomous in this way, and users may therefore observe that not all of them will perform equally well. It’s natural because performance depends on the quality of the training.

The aim is to make people understand that AI machines do not become “intelligent” out of the blue.

Behind AI, there are humans who have gathered data. And AI will only be as good as its data.

We’ve been training our Midjourney AI to produce an infographic based on Thomas’s interview and here’s how it came up with these AI self-driving car races…. This one isn’t as nicely organised as those by Learning Robots.Today’s AI is still at the stage where it reproduces patterns. It’s a mere “stochastic parrot“.

The stochastic parrot as seen by Midjourney, who is definitely very creative.In the early days of AI, there were expert systems, which worked with ever more sophisticated knowledge bases. Then we realised that rather than predicting all the potential situations, we could simply feed the AI with samples based on existing data sets and implement self-learning algorithms.

With large language models (LLMs), humongous quantities of text have become available. So much so that AI has become capable of generating text by itself. But the principle is the same: the basis is those samples provided by humans.

With AlphaAI, everything is very simple. A sensor will tell the machine what to do, for example turn left when there is light on the left. Or turn right when there is light on the right-hand side. This helps users understand the basics. After that, it’s just a matter of scaling up to more advanced AI.

What prospects can we expect from this kind of robot?When you interact with a Large Language Model (LLM), you are essentially producing text, even though you could also generate images, music, videos, etc.

Robotics is the future of AI

But what I see emerging is that the future of AI is about robotics. The Figure start-up has just raised $675 million and has signed agreements with OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia to develop humanoid robots. It’s flavour of the month. Our role is not to enter this competition, however.

Small but powerful. The AI robots by Learning robots – source Leaning Robots

Our vocation is educational. We want everyone to be able to get to grips with these technologies.

Our aim is to enable people to train their own AI, so that they can easily develop their own ideas, such as home automation projects for instance. And also make AI accessible to SMEs. Our development plans could evolve in the future to move away from teaching and training, towards a plug and play solution for introducing AI and automation into the business world.

What is your philosophy behind all this?I’m a technophile, yet I’m not at all a techno enthusiast. I think there are some really pertinent questions being asked. And that’s why I think we need to focus on training and education.

We need to keep as many people as possible informed, to debunk all the myths about AI.

• • On the one hand, AIs have their limits;
  • Secondly, users feel immediately more comfortable with a tool after getting to grips with it.

AI can be funLet me tell you about an anecdote.

We work with a well-known luxury goods company in Paris, France, for whom we run autonomous robot races. Their employees train their robots for the race. The first feedback from learners on these training courses is: “I’ve realised how much AI is fun!”

It’s true that digital tools also have their downsides, such as creating addictions. But if you get to grips with them, you can achieve great results.

We need to evangelise about AI adoption, there are so many exciting potential applications for it.

I’m involved in a number of AI think tanks and I’ve realised that what the general public expects from researchers is to be told what the future will be. In fact, it’s very hard to predict the future. Innovation is about trial and error. Sometimes its adoption is faster than we think, at other times it’s not.

Always the unexpected happens.

Can we imagine a world, where chores are all carried out by machines?I think so. We’re already seeing it in the home construction business. Tomorrow, it’s very likely that AIs will be performing a certain number of tasks. However, I hope there will still be room for humans’ creative skills.

For instance, manmade products are highly valued by consumers these days. Mass-producing widgets is easy. But creating something unique is more rewarding.

There will always be room for human creativity.

Finally, there is hope for human beingsI think so. Some people are depressed because they think they are going to be dominated by AI. But look at self-driving cars: they were supposed to be ubiquitous by 2010, and it didn’t happen.

But we shouldn’t be wearing our rose-coloured spectacles either.

Both citizens and politicians need to get to grips with the issues related to AI. As far as I am concerned, I remain optimistic about what can be achieved with these tools.

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‘Breaking down silos’ is certainly digital transformation’s most common phrase and myth. If you haven’t heard this phrase repeated over and over again, chances are your government hasn’t let you … Read on

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Will marketing jobs be killed by AI? We met with Jamie Brighton, Adobe’s Product Marketing Director at the Adobe Summit 2023*, and his answer is a blatant No! Jamie sees AI … Read on

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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 2023This 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 PageWe 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 PerspectiveHere, 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 ForwardGenerative 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.

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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 MidjourneyDigital Experiences Don’t Always Mean Good ExperiencesPeople 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 ExperiencesGenius 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

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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 AdvertisingScope3 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 enlarge

In 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 footprint1. Driver number one is the consumption of the terminals that Internet users are resorting to. 2. 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? 3. 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. 4. 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 OutThe 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 selection

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 SortableMultiplying 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 attentionHowever, 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 EmissionsIt’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.

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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 ModelsAccording 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 ChainAs 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 ElasticityIt 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 BusinessAs 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.

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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 VisualsWe 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 nutshellCMI 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 surveyInsight number one: test your assumptionsThe 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 platformThe 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 processesWhen looking at what kinds of visuals are more successful than others, CMI’s survey consistently highlighted 3 main content types:

1. Video content
2. Custom photos (as opposed to stock images)
3. 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 budgetAs 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 storiesThe 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 😉

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How do consumers form their perceived value of a product or service? This is the question that Bain & 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 ServiceWhat makes customer value? Bain offers a dossier on this subject – image made with Midjourney.Going beyond Maslow’s pyramidAccording 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 & 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 valueA 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 & Company’s Elements of Perceived Value PyramidPerceived 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 websiteThe interactive version of the perceived customer value pyramidClick on the thumbnail to see the interactive version of this customer value pyramidWe can summarise the different components of value as follows:

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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 IndustriesThrough 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 CourtElements 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.

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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 vuFirst 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 futureI 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 purgeIn 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 JournalThere 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 treatsIn 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” employeesI 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.

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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 2022During 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-yearOur 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 geographiesSingapore 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 & Job Search and FinTech IndustriesThis 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 usageOur 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 CoolI 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 MouthThere 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 SpendsThat’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.

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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.

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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 ProfessionalsLXA 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 complexSixty-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 educationSales 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 badSales 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 alignment80% 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 SuccessWe 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 EnablementAll 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 runIt’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 contentLet’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 forceNow, 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 teamsHence, 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 processTo 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 EnablementTo 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 presentationA more in-depth analysis is available in the recording which I have included hereafter.

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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 SarronTwitter 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 TwitterTwitter 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 MarketersTwo 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 mediaWe 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 InfluencersWe’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 channelsYou 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 SaysIn 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 TwitterIf 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.

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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.

1. “What other facts would help you to make a decision?”

   People make decisions for emotional reasons all the time

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.

• 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).

• “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

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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 DollarsWe 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 statementWe 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 SellingWe 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 CollaborationsWe 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 sellingIt 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 WorldWhen 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 LongLook 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 sellingIn 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 MediaSocial 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.

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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 MetaverseOther, 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 MetaFinally, 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 predictI 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 campaignsMeta 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 realityMoving 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 WebThis 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.

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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 consumersCM.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 relationship

A 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.comAbove 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.

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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 StartedD.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-upRight 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 startMarqvision 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 AwardMarqvision’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 & 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.

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With the current pandemic, the digitisation of business has sped up considerably. Hence, I was asking myself questions about the future of e-commerce. To find out, I interviewed Rob Van Nuenen from Holland. Rob is the CEO and founder of Channable, an automated centralised ad management system operating in the e-commerce space. He talked to us about the future of e-shopping and the new trends observed in terms of searching for information about products.

New trends in product searches and the future of e-commerce What are the future trends of e-commerce? To find out I interviewed Channable’s Rob Van Nuenen Many recent studies have been done on e-shopping. The U.S. is far ahead in this space, and Amazon is picking up more and more of the search terms for products. So, the initial search is already done for almost 50 per cent in the US on Amazon.

The future of e-commerce: a more diverse European landscape “This trend isn’t observed yet in Europe, but here we are witnessing a significant shift towards big marketplaces which are a bit more diverse than in the US, but Amazon still gets its fair share.”

Where do product searches come from? eMarketer tells us: not from Google. [Data from an October 2019 CivicScience survey]European diversity here refers to some big local marketplaces like Rakuten, but the question is “how much do they weigh against Amazon?” There are several others besides Amazon. In France, there’s Cdiscount or Otto in Germany. I think it really depends on the country. In France, Germany and the UK, Amazon is way bigger than in Benelux or Nordics, for example, where it has just begun taking root.

Europe has a few Internet giants you’ve probably never heard of, like Poland’s Allegro. Growing market share for Amazon and the direct access to products through their search engine may bother Google, and as a result, we might expect a few changes with the current dominance of Google ads.

“I reckon that players like Google are in a bit of a pickle with this because they are missing out on all this traffic at the moment, and Amazon is proving to be a real competitor” Van Nuenen added.

I reckon players like Google are in a bit of a pickle with this situation

At least for product searches, there is a change in dominance, but besides that, Google doesn’t have a real competitor. “For product searches, I believe more people will go directly to marketplaces as they can find any product there for the right price,” Nuenen stated.

Marketplaces are stealing Google’s thunder, what future for e-commerce? Earlier on, people were afraid that Google would actually steal all the clicks for them, but now these clicks are going directly to marketplaces, including Amazon, and replacing one dominance with another.

Yet, is it the end of e-commerce as we know it and what does that mean for small players and small businesses that want to sell things online?

“As a small online retailer, you need to be visible somehow, and these are of course easy access points for you to get known to a large audience,” said Van Nuenen.

There is a love-hate relationship between small businesses and marketplaces

“But I hope it’s not the end of e-commerce as we know it. That would be terrible for our business, and I also don’t think that it will happen,” he added.

“It’s a love-hate relationship that small businesses have with these big corporations because the latter can actually help the former grow. So, they need the smaller ones to actually have products to advertise, and they’ll just make sure that they have the audience to show those products to.

There’s a big difference between ads and selling your products on marketplaces. Of course, ads are based on clicks, and hence there is a cost per click. You need more data to see if a certain amount of clicks actually led to a purchase.

On marketplaces, however, it’s much easier because you just push your products there; as soon as a product is being sold, you pay a commission on top of it to the marketplace. Hence, there’s more certainty that you will not incur any cost if you don’t sell anything.”

On marketplaces, there is no risk of incurring costs if you don’t sell anything

Small businesses should do both, Nuenen advises: “go to marketplaces and use their affiliation type of doing business. But if the budget doesn’t allow you to, then the easier way is to sell on marketplaces.”

So small businesses still need to build their own eShops? If your business decides to build its own e-commerce site, what happens is if you advertise on Google, your name is actually being shown there, which is much better for your brand awareness.

“Whereas on a marketplace, your brand is shown somewhere deep down. But since you will probably sell the same product as other e-shops, you don’t necessarily need to be visible.

Also, with regards to sending the actual products to customers, it could be sent in an Amazon box. So, you don’t even have your own branding there. However, if your aim is to get known, then you should use Google instead,” Rob van Nuenen explained.

Moving forward, Van Nuenen thinks there is still a rationale for owning your e-shop There is a vast number of new e-shops coming up every month. This actually over-floods the market a little and makes it much harder to be visible on any channel. But still, I think if you have the right product and an e-shop, it’s definitely worth going for it.

“In the beginning, I would go for marketplaces just because it’s easier, and they can get some traction for my products thanks to their large audience. But if you want to grow further and not depend on one channel or one marketplace, then you will have to diversify.

I should launch my business on marketplaces to start with, generate business, generate revenue and margin, and then as a second stage, create my own e-shop to ensure that I have my own brand presence online,” Van Nuenen declared.

Even though opening an e-shop on standard platforms like Shopify is no longer difficult or costly, Channable’s founder thinks that if a business wishes to connect its warehouse with its e-shop, it’s a much better choice to “go for something other than the standard solution and augment features by creating a customized one.”

Looking towards the future: the e-commerce landscape in five years It’s hard to predict the future of e-commerce Rob van Nuenen said, but I think this business in five years will have many new channels.

I think the e-commerce business in five years will have many new channels

“One of the things that we see now, for example, is social selling on social media platforms such as Snapchat or Facebook. I believe this will be much more pertinent, while marketplaces will stay where they are and may even grow bigger, and Amazon will grow further too.

Also, search giants like Google will also be thriving, as they cater to the specific needs of consumers. But I would say that although marketplaces will grow bigger, many smaller ones will die out because they won’t be able to compete with big corporations like Amazon.”

Many antitrust efforts have been launched against Google, Amazon and Facebook in the US. Yet, van Nuenen is a bit sceptical on this subject.

“They will all get these fines for which they are already prepared. I don’t think though that a huge scandal will surface. These big companies will survive anyway.”

About Channable Channable is a data feed management platform with which one can create and feed ads on diverse marketing channels and marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay or Google with product data directly provided by online retailers.

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Contact centres might be threatened with extinction. Covid-19 changed digital experiences for businesses and customers to a point that the new normal for contact centres may be no contact centres at all. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Adrian Benic, VP Products at Infobip, a telecommunications and IT company with a Worldwide footprint and headquarters in Croatia and London. Adrian told me that, despite all the talking, building digital experiences wasn’t a reality. Yet, Covid-19 changed everything and the CRM digitisation process was considerably sped up.

Covid-19 threatening contact centres with extinction Contact centres under a threat of extinction Adrian Benic says, as Covid 19 reshaped an entire industry Caption: Most businesses think they are building digital experiences for their customers but they aren’t, Adrian Benic told me. Covid-19 has changed that ball game radically.

Despite all the prattle about digital transformation, not even mentioning the buzzword bingo regarding digital experiences, “what most businesses are really doing is building add-ons to existing experiences, add-ons that are by nature broken in terms of the journeys that their consumers are taking” Adrian told me.

Many businesses are behind in terms of building digital experiences “What happens is that the online contact support team might work until five and after that consumers are stuck without help because everyone is getting ready to leave the office” he explained.

Also, people that might be working the evening shift might not be available on the channel that consumers expect to find them on.

Support centres that are closed when consumers are available, deliver an awful digital experience “It’s a sad reality” Adrian Benic went on. “When you think about it from the consumer standpoint, no one really wants to waste time on a website and talk to one’s telco support staff to upgrade one’s plan or any other chore.”

Experiencing any form of inconvenience is already the beginning of the end of a good customer experience.

“Such businesses aren’t really customer-centric. They pretend they are, but all they achieve is filling in their own pockets.” Adrian said.

Harsh words, but the truth hurts, sometimes, as the saying goes.

Changing behaviour imposes new tools This changing behaviour has an impact on the kind of tools that people are using, and we are not just talking about plain-vanilla social media platforms. The aim is what one could call a messaging ecosystem.

One needs to build the “new WhatsApp or Viber or WeChat for the customer relationship world” Adrian said. “When you think about it, there’s a whole ecosystem that could serve a consumer’s needs: from finding the service to talking to a business, and consuming and paying for it, everything could be found within the same ecosystem.”

Let’s talk about WeChat in China, for example, with which you can go to a grocery store, buy vegetables and fruits and pay with your mobile phone. “To those people, it’s as easy as selling apples or oranges,” Adrian said. But what about the rest of the world? “If such platforms are so successful in China, and attract so many consumers and generate a lot of business, why aren’t businesses adopting them at a much faster pace anywhere else?” He wondered.

Messages come from anywhere, one never knows in advance

The key is to ensure that the person at the receiving end doesn’t actually need to worry about where messages come from”

There are two areas to take care of.

• One of those areas is the need to have access to all the data in a way that enables businesses to immediately understand the situation and take action as soon as the customer has contacted customer support
• The other point is that the channel doesn’t really matter: “What one should only care about is the consumer and his/her needs.” Adrian said.

So, why aren’t businesses doing this as they should?

“What companies are really doing, when ignoring this reality is jeopardising their business”, Adrian added, because in the end, when you don’t engage directly with consumers in this day and age, they will forget about you and choose another brand.

“I believe that instead of closing those channels, there is an opportunity to offer services through them as a self-service model to your consumers,” He added.

“In order to be very efficient in terms of what you are offering on those channels and in what way, you do not necessarily need to incur additional costs. It’s about doing more with less or doing more with the same, and that is exactly what we are trying to achieve in the market”, Adrian added.

An example of outstanding service: the bank that guesses your needs

Adrian told me the story of his bank in Croatia, which focuses on service and customer experience. What they do is that they profile their customers in such a way that they only offer their services to mass affluents. “I think they’re amazing,” Adrian said.

The reason why is simple: “I haven’t seen them in the past two years”, he said. “Instead, they come to me. So, wherever I am, they are here to deliver superior service.” That’s the one true way of understanding consumers and their needs.

The impact of the Coronavirus crisis on customer support

Due to COVID-19, “businesses were cut off from their customer bases who could not reach them since their employees lacked the necessary infrastructure at home. They then started to look for online solutions.”

This pandemic had sped up the digitisation process

Many businesses thus started transforming quicker and moving their working capacities online.

In essence, two things happened:

• Traditional businesses started opening up services and offering them online instead of having people calling in. They started moving towards online channels and serving through touchpoints such as websites or mobile. The process had started before, but COVID-19 made this change even more urgent.
• On the other hand, in the retail industry, wherever face to face interactions was essential to business, suddenly, work proved very difficult — mostly with non-essential stores — and a lot of people lost their jobs. “We have witnessed that a lot of these retailers started moving their capacities online in terms of creating e-commerce platforms. They up-skilled their employees in a way that they could serve as relationship managers or allowed them to manage tasks digitally rather than being there in person waiting for customers to visit the store. So a part of this change, if not all, was driven by the current pandemic crisis.

With this change, what technologies are the winners and losers

“I would definitely say that chatbots are big winners, as there is a huge demand for it from all over the world. There is also the self-service aspect because traditional IVRs and Voice have moved into Chat space.” Adrian said.

“The whole point is to have this experience built end to end, in a way that it can help solve customers’ issues,” Adrian said.

Contact centres as we knew them under threat of extinction “Is there a threat of extinction for contact centres as we knew them? I think so!” Adrian added. “There aren’t going to be many people stuck in big rooms, side by side, telephone in hand.” He predicted. “In my eyes, the new normal for customer support will be to work from any device anywhere around the world.”

“I think it’s a win-win approach” Adrian added. “Customers will be happy because support agents will be happier too.”

Off-shoring may not be the trend in the future “The way the new normal is implemented in post-COVID contact centres will depend on the brand,” Adrian concluded.

“As to off-shoring, I’m not adamant there will be more of it” he said. “Businesses will mostly try and deliver more with less until they figure out what is next for their business. A lot of businesses are unsure about the future.”

An uncertain future for contact centres and everything else As Britain has just moved into tier 4, and Italy has already gone back into lockdown, Germany is panic-stricken and French media is all about freaking everyone out that January 7 will be day one of the third wave, one cannot but agree with Adrian: an uncertain future it will be.

In that context, the new normal — be it for contact centres and their threat of extinction or anything else — will be about flexibility and little else.

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Have search engines — and Google in the first place — become useless? At a time when more than half of Internet searches deliver no clicks, it is time to ask a question which may seem counterintuitive but is, in my mind, crucial: What is the use of search engines and isn’t it time we moved on to something else? Here is the result of my research, which will demonstrate that you should blame yourself, and no one else, for the current state of the Internet.

Have search engines — and Google in particular — become useless? There is something broken in the Internet world. Search engines may even have become useless. Let’s find out why As far as Google’s search engine are concerned, I have already answered that question for myself. I have indeed already switched to DuckDuckgo (or duck.com for short) for more than a year and going back is not an option. I’m not alone, although the number of users of this engine is still low (approx. 5 million users worldwide, half of them in the US). When I read James Temperton’s article in Wired UK (see below), I decided to take the plunge. After all, by 1997, few users had given up Yahoo! for Google. So we can give them some time too.

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Important notice: I would like to make it clear that my approach is not motivated by European jingoism, as I have explained here, nor even by the desire to take control of my data. Honestly, I don’t think that any of the Internet giants have used one-tenth of the data that was stolen from me by good old European so-called GDPR-friendly businesses. My motivation is, in fact, that of a broader vision of freedom of expression, of the Internet as a common good for humankind, and of universal access to information.

The market shares of search engines in the USA in 2020: no comment! When opting for DuckDuckGo, my first impressions weren’t that good, to be honest. It was a bit like when switching from an English car to a European one. I had to get used to the fact that the steering wheel and the gear lever weren’t quite in the same place. But I got used to it very quickly because the differences are not that significant and the tool is well designed, the search engine is swift, without too many bells and whistles and the search results were relevant.

Is DuckDuckGo making other search engines useless? This could be so. It is well designed and fast. A bit like Google in its early days. And it offers a rather broad list of choices (Web/Wikipedia/Twitter/Instagram/Facebook etc.) [duck.com to access it]Granted, image results are a little behind Google, and it happens once in a while that I go back to images.google.com. I admit to it, but it won’t last. Prior to this, search result relevance — however subjective — was, in my opinion, the main reason for staying with Google. None of the search bots I had tried before had been good enough for me to stay with them. All this changed when I tried it.

Not only is it a quite satisfactory online research tool, but DuckDuckGo doesn’t show results from Google (unlike Startpage, which only removes the tracking from Google but still uses their results. They even pay them to do that!)

Ecosia plants trees (that’s pretty cool) and it’s not a bad engine, but they mainly use Yahoo! Bing and Wikipedia, so the sources are less diverse than DuckDuckGo which is more exhaustive. Bing, which also has its qualities, is not necessarily among the best. This isn’t just because of its technology, but because webmasters are mostly reluctant to be indexed by them.

In terms of usage, I even find DuckDuckGo better than Google: the language and country selection (France/ROW) is more intuitive, and the search window selection is more accessible. Google requires four clicks to change countries and languages. I use two main tongues and less frequently, a third one. I don’t call Google user-friendly in that respect.

With DuckDuckGo local search (French in the above picture) is one click away. With Google, it takes 4 clicks with drop-down menus in between. Switching between languages and countries is a lengthy process that has become completely unwieldy. Well, no one speaks two languages, do they?! DuckDuckGo (or Duck.com for short) uses a mix of results from a “compilation of “over 400″ sources,[8] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia[…].”

As with Democracy in which every vote counts, every search, every user counts, and if you use everyone’s tool, its predominance shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.

In a nutshell, my main issue was to find a usable search engine and DuckDuckGo did the job.

That said, DuckDuckGo isn’t perfect either- there has been some controversy about their favicon storage – but it’s not really a major problem.

Let’s rejoice about having found a proper search engine in working order, free and almost ad-free (it resorts to Bing Ads but also allows you to remove them. As for me, I’ve rarely seen any, except once or twice, even if that’s where they get their funding from).

see the list of alternative search engines in 2020

Changing search engines can make a difference with the Internet landscape I won’t try to force you to ditch Google, nor even can do. Yet, you will find out in the following lines, that such a change has had a serious impact, especially with regards to the data collected by Google along my Web journeys (i.e. 10 to 15 hours a day, 6 days a week at least for the last 25 years).

And perhaps you should also ponder that change since Google is increasing its pressure on CPC and Ad costs (see Semrush report below). To top it all, the US has just launched antitrust litigation against Google.

But let’s go back to the original question because after all, all I did was to replace one engine with another — virtuous at this moment but perhaps not tomorrow — and the initial question was: “Have search engines (and above all Google) become useless”?

One: half of the Internet searches no longer result in clicks This is quite something. As of today, half of Internet search results no longer generate clicks. So what of it?! You may ask. Quite simply, it means that if searches no longer lead to Websites, Web publishers will soon go belly up.

Not only content publishers like us, but also retailers. Why bother searching for information all over the place when you can find it with Google. In other words, it’s a return ticket to the world of information control. The main difference is that it’s carried out on a global level, and we aren’t talking about 1984-style State-driven control but a private business making choices on our behalf about what information we should or shouldn’t access.

I’m not sure it’s worse, mind you. I’m not a great fan of totalitarian states. I’m not sure it’s any better either.

In short, here again, Internet users vote with their mice. For a complex but open and free Internet, or a closed and proprietary Internet. It’s your choice.

Two: a search engine or an advertising engine? Moz demonstrates the second point in a post where they ask the question: who are Google Ads made for? Certainly not for users and even less to satisfy lawmakers on disclosure practices in advertising.

By gradually removing the distinctive elements (see the montage above based on Moz’s article) from online advertisements, Google is increasingly confusing users and turning its search engine into an advertising engine.

The pile of paid results on top of free search results is sometimes so intrusive that you may have to scroll for a whole page to find where the real searches are.

Three: CPCs are skyrocketing Google CPC prices going through the roof is hardly something new. Once again, users, in this case, marketers vote with their mice. There seems to be no end to feeding the fat cat. If you want to see the damage done, take a quick look at the table from the Semrush study of 2020.

[click to enlarge] CPC costs in some industries such as insurance or marketing are just insane. Buying a keyword in a sought-after high-tech field will quickly cost dozens of euros per click. Visionary Marketing thus saves more than €1,000 excl. VAT in daily investment costs. SEO and quality content are expensive, but they are, in the long run, highly profitable Four: users want to find before they searched As stated in number one, most searches aren’t searches; people are merely checking a quick result in position zero, aka SERP zero (regardless of its accuracy). James Temperton begins his Wired article with this point too: people do not search anymore.

I have also realised this in the business schools where I work (here we are talking about highly educated students). As I like to ask my pupils tons of questions – it keeps them awake and helps me probe their knowledge of the Internet – I have seen reflexes change in recent years.

Whereas 3 or 4 years ago it was necessary to keep tabs on them (“don’t Google this, use your head!”), I realise that, nowadays, nobody in the classroom is looking for anything anymore. “Who created Wikipedia? “… radio silence. And no one thinks of searching the Web for the answer.

Careful here! I’m not trying to say that 21st-century people are stupid and that before, schools were chock full of geniuses. There is no ground for stating this, and we have no reliable basis for comparison. Also, knowledge has changed a lot, and many new concepts have emerged.

In fact, we know precious little about intelligence. Intelligence is hard to define and measure. IQ doesn’t mean much; its measurements aren’t steady nor comparable. There is a whole debate about this, and even experts disagree.

More than “stupidity”, which doesn’t mean anything because it is a subjective notion, one should rather talk about apathy, a much more factual concept.

I merely want to point out that researching information, an exercise that the old ones and I’m one of them now, learned though the perusal of encyclopaedias, is not part of people’s habits anymore.

In a way, it’s like music on Spotify (or Qobuz as far as I’m concerned). I have access to the entire catalogue — especially classical music — but I tend to discover far fewer different and original artists now than I used to when I regularly visited record shops or was borrowing records from my friends and went to the public library on Saturdays.

Connected speakers will put a final nail in that Internet research coffin. The Internet, and not curiosity, killed the cat.

• Hey, Google! Give me the answer I’m no longer looking for!”

Five: Google search results are not better anymore DuckDuckGo, or Ecosia or any other alternative search engine, performs at least as well as Google and even allows you to find different sources.

In 1997, when Google was launched, I was one of the first to praise it. Its minimalistic interface, convincing results, absence of distractions, are what all made it a gateway to the world’s knowledge. I had spotted how powerful that tool, long before it became universally used.

Then all the other engines, by our fault, finally disappeared. The little that was left was not worth much. They finally went belly up for good. We know the result: 92% share (and still, the 8 remaining per cent include access by third-party applications that shouldn’t be counted).

But here, I found one. Duckduckgo (see above), yet another American search engine, does at least as well and even allows you to find different topics than those found with Google.

I know it’s a lost battle from day one, for people will say…

• “Yes, but Google works fine!”

OK, if a website is being excluded from Google, it means sudden death for its publisher. Users made that possible.

Six: the Internet is (or used to be) a common good it now belongs to private businesses To be precise, as far as search engines are concerned – and therefore, the advertising revenue associated with it – one and only one private company.

Statistiques par digital information world So is the Internet still a common good? A place where one can still create freely for the benefit of all? Including businesses, and especially small businesses? Not quite anymore. And in many countries, it is so controlled that its very existence is threatened in the very short term.

An Internet smothered by authoritarian states or one by a de facto monopoly, not many reasons for rejoicing.

Here again, if users find that great… let them check the following point.

Seven: users, all using the same tool, are shooting themselves in the foot Googling by Jef Lofvers on his superb donthitsave.com website They only have themselves to blame… unless they get a grip on themselves.

Now things are getting even worse with all users throwing themselves into Chrome’s arms with great delight (especially because Android is prevailing on mobiles), and this is not making things any better at all.

Now Google, through its users’ own fault, controls the whole chain, like Carnegie Mellon who at the end of the 19th century mastered steel, coal and the railroad to transport them (so that no competitor could have its products hauled without incurring hefty costs and paying for the monopoly thus created).

Search engine stats. Beware! Huge bias as those numbers encompass mobiles.

Technically, Google, because it controls both inventory and sales and the vehicle of the sale is a monopsony and a monopoly – drawing from Economix How our economy works and doesn’t work – 2012 And with Chrome’s dominance, things aren’t getting any better. It is therefore urgent to switch from Chrome to Firefox, Safari or another. By the way, changing the default search engine (guess which one on Chrome and all major search engines) isn’t a piece of cake.

Changing the default search engine in Google Chrome. No less than 3 clicks and a lot of digging and even IT savvy is required. In other words, it is an impossible task for Joe Bloggs [click on the image to enlarge it]Edge’s market share is growing at the moment, but there is still room for improvement. And should dominance change sides, switching engines will be once more recommended. Please note, however, that the browser war is much more vivid on personal computers than on mobile phones due to the ultra-dominance of Android.

In fact, all browsers are equally good, and Chrome is no better than the others, it is even considered as a resource hog by Joanna Stern. The thing is that many developers want to save themselves trouble. They will thus require you to switch to Chrome to use their Web Apps.

One example, among many others: Zencastr refuses to run on anything other than Chrome or Firefox. Fortunately, it worked very well on the latter for a little while but it’s not functional anymore as of Summer 2021. In short, the choice of browser means something in terms of search engine use. Changing engines is easier on Safari, for example.

The choice of a default search engine on Safari is made in just one click. [click to enlarge] Eight: tracking Privacy is the point that bothers me the least, especially since users are in charge of their data if they really want to. But here again, do they really want to do that?

Theoretically here’s what Google knows about me: “My name, gender and date of birth, my personal mobile phone numbers, my last Google searches, the websites I visited, that I turned on the lights in my room last night, exactly where I’ve been for the last few years, that I like American football, games, jazz, audio equipment, my favourite food and drink.., where I work, where I live, the YouTube videos I’ve watched and my YouTube searches, every time I used my voice to interact with Google Assistant (with recordings of my voice)”.

What does Google really know about me? Not much actually because I only disclose what I want to. I still have my personal email box on Gmail though, yet as I access it through Outlook and Apple mail apps, ad targeting is not for me. But it is in fact possible to remove a substantial part of one’s Internet traces, including those left on Google. If only users weren’t so lazy. They do complain about tracking but, in fact, they are in charge.

The “activity controls menu on your Google account. For my part, everything’s erased after 3 months, but there’s not much to delete there, except maybe some of the Google maps searches (still way better than Apple maps or open maps). Nine: most worthy searches come from private databases Most of the material I rely on – except for articles like this one – comes from private databases, the content of which is not indexed by search engines.

The Guardian, WSJ, Les Echos, other news resources from around the world, reports from analysts such as Gartner, Forrester IDC and others, PR agencies that provide us with interesting market data and suggest interviews.

This is what one calls the Deep Web, but Joe Bloggs will most probably never hear of it.

The dream of a universal Web, a common good for humanity, is probably definitively over. The only remainder of free research is Wikipedia. Their constant requests for subsidies to finance their costly hosting resources show that the common good – whatever its limits – may not last forever. If you haven’t already done so, donate to Wikipedia!

Ten: I have probably wasted my time with this piece I have spent a few long hours writing this article and researching the sources of the figures I have included here. Yet I know that this work is absolutely useless. By the time I have closed the lid of my computer and pressed the publish button I will hear, as usual, the majority of users tell me that they are delighted with the situation as it is.

— “Google? Well, it’s convenient, isn’t it?”

What do you want to add to that?

In conclusion, search engines may not be completely useless, and it may not matter much. Unless users get a grip on themselves, nothing is likely to change in the future unless American litigators get their act together in the lawsuit against Google.

Certainly, there is a lot of whinging here and there, and particularly in Europe. Yet, all may not be lost after all.

Search engines are not the alpha and omega of knowledge. At least, I hope you haven’t thrown away your books – even your eBooks – this is where knowledge hides and must be found. The current Internet landscape is most probably the result of the complacency of Internet users; Internet giants are merely making the most of this.

After all, it is up to us to vote with our mice. As citizens, as business people, marketers and business leaders who are now the victims of monopolies which we helped to create. And I’ve only mentioned one of them.

And now, I invite you to read James Temperton’s entire article entitled I ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here’s why you should too | WIRED UK

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Video interviewing can enhance market research greatly and even take it into a new dimension, including sentiment analysis. To find out why and how, I have interviewed Carl Wong, the CEO and Co-Founder of LivingLens who spoke to me from Liverpool. Carl talked to me about some of the innovative ways of carrying out consumer research, the use of video and massive data analysis, all based on his experience at LivingLens, a Medallia company.

When video interviewing gives market research a new dimension As explained by Carl, video interviewing confers market research a totally new dimension The rise of video can help rehumanise marketing data Video adoption has been steadily climbing for a couple of decades from the first camera phones in Seoul, South Korea and Japan in the 2000s to iPhone video recording in 2009 to billions of hours of video watched every day on platforms like YouTube or Facebook.

The last six months or so, we’ve seen a dramatic acceleration in the use of live video conversations. Have you used Zoom this week? Have you been doing a Tik Tok dance? Have you taken or shared a video on one of the three-point five billion smartphones on the planet?

Now, lots of us are using video every day, and that’s what we tap into.

We built LivingLens to help organisations drive change. Big data has revolutionised marketing but at the same time, it has dehumanised that data.

So, every time an executive sees a video of customers talking about their wants and needs, every single time they see engagements, they see empathy.

Why wasn’t there much more customer video in organisations up to now? It’s because historically, it was really hard. It was cumbersome, expensive, you need some specialist piece of software and it’s very difficult to scale.

So that’s the problem we solve. Video is translated into the tangible data of what people say, how people feel and what they do. And that means we can understand trends at scale, build video libraries as real knowledge bases and create compelling stories that drive change really, really quickly.

LivingLens’s Carl Wong broke new ground in the field of market research with video And you are using video interviewing to do away with long-winded surveys Absolutely. There are billions of surveys every year, and we’re all, I guess, suffering from survey fatigue to an extent, since surveys can be very long, and we are filling in less and less of them. We are in a place now where maybe there are one or two questions, the data-specific data points that need to be captured.

But more importantly, what is intended is to tell us how your experience was or give us your feedback or show us how you’re feeling. That’s it, it’s a single question.

And by clicking on the opportunity to leave a video or indeed audio, we open up. Typically, we would see six times the amount of words somebody will say in a video than the number of words they would type in an open-ended text question in a survey.

Also, people will describe more than one issue versus when they are typing away, where they may just stick to one. But we often see four or five different themes that emerge from people talking on camera.

We have seen the rate of response increase significantly over the course of the last 18 months. We are all just becoming more used to video and sharing our faces and using it from a technology perspective.

Now, the real challenge is to send this to hundreds of thousands of customers. That makes up a lot of data! It’s a massive amount of data, but the world is awash with big data right now along with the infrastructures, the processing and the machine learning capabilities to analyse it.

And actually, that is the magic of LivingLens. We take video content that is historically impenetrable to analyse – video is difficult to analyse.

But we take what people say. We use machines, speech to text in a very wide range of languages, and we turn that into unstructured written text.

And actually, the text analytics industry and capabilities within that industry is pretty mature.

Video interviewing leads to sentiment analysis We have a very sophisticated machine learning set of modules that allows us to understand at scale what people are talking about, which key themes are emerging, and what are the differences in those themes. We also do exactly the same with facial expression.

We recognise emotions and turn them into scaled, structured data, and we also add context. We have object recognition, again a pretty mature space. Everybody, whether you know it or not, is carrying that around today on his/her mobile phone.

You go and see your photos or search for an object, say for the beach, or search for a specific person, and the images will be returned. It’s a mature set of technologies and we tap into that so that we can send video into workable, structured and unstructured, scalable data, and we do it very well.

Could we take a few examples taken from your customer? We work with a lot of companies in the sorts of quick-service restaurants area around the world. Del Taco, for example, who have got a strong presence in North America are using LivingLens.

Using video and sophisticated speech-to-text techniques, it is possible to derive statistics from unstructured data. Rather than filling in a survey about the meal that you have just purchased, which was the traditional method, now that they’re sending customers the opportunity to share what they have experienced, by video.

In doing that, because it’s a real visceral experience of buying their food and consuming it that Del Taco clients can share with the leadership, and the front line staff. The people from the business don’t often get to see people in the restaurant and in cars actually consuming the food and talking about that experience with their families and friends and being able to really tap into seeing that experience at scale.

What that results in is a number of different things. For example, packaging and menu innovation, which is always a huge focus of quick-service restaurants across the globe, menu testing, and new item testing that has now evolved to be able to tap into video technologies that are in your pocket rather than setting up artificial stores to do that. That has been a real strong benefit that they’ll tackle.

Another customer would be Airbnb, for example. We are all familiar with Airbnb as a brand, but they are focused upon the guest experience, and indeed their wider customer experience is obsessive. They’re incredibly focused and invest very heavily from an insight and experience perspective.

They use LivingLens as a video repository, as a place to put all of their very extensive deep-dive focus group work interviews, video diary work, and they use our technologies to capture those videos. Then they use our platforms to house that very rich knowledge pool, and they use that day-in-day-out to put the customer in front of leadership, in front of design experts, in front of their user experience owners to hone and improve that customer experience every day.

With that technology, it is possible to delve into a particular experience, to extract one customer testimonial and sharing it with the board. Indeed, yes. And it can be used not just for impactful reporting, but also to change a customer’s experience if a customer is leaving feedback in a moment in that experience because they’re having a tough time.

In real-time, that can be escalated to the right people in the organisation who can then reach out to that customer and support them and help them.

That is a very powerful and effective use case. There’s also another really rich experience that we’re seeing across customers right now, it is our new Zoom addition.

The Zoom boom and its Medallia LivingLens interface So obviously, Zoom has a few new users, should we say so. They have gone from 10 million daily users or daily participants in December 2019 to over 300 million daily users right now. We’re all using video in our lives to talk to our colleagues, our friends and family.

That’s going to stick regardless of what happens with the future of this pandemic. I think the flexibility with remote working will absolutely stick. I think what that means is we’re all becoming much more comfortable using video communication platforms.

But imagine that all these conversations are useful to you and that you can analyse them all.

So if you can do that, then Zoom and platforms like it become the way you can really understand your customer, whether it be through customer interviews and online focus groups, or it could be how to really understand best practices across your sales force or could be a great way that we’re all connecting with each other and sharing hints and tips of how to just make our way in the world.

Using Zoom to better understand B2B customers and users We can take any content now in Zoom and turn that into a knowledge base. Turn that into a repository of wonderful trend and insight that we can tap into using that combination of Zoom and Medallia’s LivingLens. That’s something I’m really excited about. And companies like Atlassian rarely engaged with how to use Zoom, for example, the user experience, feedback and living lens to really leverage that content and drive insight in their business. Quite often it’s difficult to get feedback in a B2B environment; you have to work hard for that.

One of the drivers for that is, as we are busy professionals, we’re always on the go. We always have the next thing to get into on our to-do list. But what we’ve found with tapping into video is actually you don’t need to be sat there at your desk filling in a survey or typing in your responses.

You can be on your walk to your next meeting. You could be going to get lunch. You can be anywhere where your mobile phone is in your hands, and you can leave your feedback and show your experience through your smartphone. We are finding it to be really, really rich for a B2B feedback, specifically when it comes to busy professionals. That’s something that I think we’ll see more of, particularly as we’re getting more and more used to in our professional lives using video to speak to each other.

Why Carl Wong created LivingLens I am a market researcher. That’s what I did for twenty-five years. The first 10 years were in a big corporate office. Then I left and set up my own market research agency and that sort of evolved into LivingLens.

The reason we did that is that we were spending lots of money on understanding the customer, but we weren’t necessarily driving change in large organisations.

That is the genesis of LivingLens, great stories drive change. So, it’s about how we help people make great stories. I passionately believe that if we put the customer in the boardroom or if we put them on the front-line staff more so, people can see and feel and hear.

Well, customers are delighted by what frustrates them. It builds empathy and it builds emotional connection and it builds action. So that’s our mission, really.

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We’ve been urging B2B companies to transform digitally for many years. Now, COVID-19 has put so much pressure on everyone that even the most reluctant of businesses have finally moved forward to the point that nearly 5 years’ worth of transformation was achieved in barely five months, and it’s just the beginning. As the summer season comes to an end and companies brace themselves for a rocky end-of-year, meeting sales targets is getting harder. One more reason to shift gears and shed all old prejudices against digital. It’s what I call “Digital-First“, and it’s time to get started! Let me tell you why.

B2B businesses, it’s High Time to Shift to a Digital-First Strategy “Digital-First”: B2B, it’s time to rev up and shift digital into number one priority A year to remember… for a long, long time Our personal lives have also taken a significant tumble in the mists of lockdowns, closed borders, racial equality protests, homeschooling, and remote work.

We were off to a good start, but maybe the pressure in our tyres wasn’t sufficient, and here it was, a nasty puncture that slowed us down in the middle of the lockdown. It’s time to get back in the saddle and move on to “Digital-First!” It’s been a year we’ll all remember and gladly bid au revoir come January.

Marketers had better find new ways of growing business… fast! Until then, marketers are finding new ways of driving business, putting in place digital-first (or only) marketing plans as in-person events and meetings are cancelled or postponed, managing remote employees while delivering fast turnaround in sales campaigns, and rethinking content and exploring new digital mediums, while (of course) keeping peace at home.

And it also means that B2B customers must adapt and change how they search and select suppliers.

Daunting? Absolutely.

B2Bs Prefer the Consumer Way of Buying In a recent McKinsey study of decision-makers in 11 countries and across seven sectors, it comes perhaps as no surprise that digital marketing and remote work in the months ahead will be instrumental parts of the sales process. This trend toward digital interactions isn’t new, but what came out in the study is how critical it is now.

McKinsey: 90% of B2B Sales Interactions Gone Remote Not only have 90 per cent of sales interactions gone remote—using video conferencing, phone, or a web-sales model—decision-makers in the McKinsey study see digital interactions to be two to three times more critical to their B2B clients than traditional sales interactions.

90% of B2B has moved to the digital-first virtual sales model under the influence of COVID-19 (source: McKinsey – 2020) Although the study did show that some remain sceptical in the long-term, more than half saw remote sales as equally or more effective than sales models used prior to COVID-19.

This move to placing greater importance on digital interactions reflects changes in the B2B buying behaviour trends seen during the past couple of years and that has now been amplified due to the pandemic.

When B2C shapes B2B experiences Not surprising, as B2B customers adjust to online buying, they will naturally compare it to their personal B2C experiences.

In the McKinsey 2019 study (pre-COVID-19), this trend was already emerging; the survey highlighted suppliers who provided “outstanding digital experiences to buyers” to be twice as likely to be chosen as primary suppliers than those who provided “poor digital experiences.”

The Company Website Is Instrumental in B2B Sales This unprecedented move to a digital-first approach for B2B companies isn’t only on the buyer side; the sales side is pivoting at speeds never seen before.

In a recent Contently article, a marketer from a sizable company had—pre-pandemic—set 80 per cent of the marketing budget for in-person events.

As most—or all—events move to digital-only, it means that every touchpoint within the sales cycle becomes even more critical, and that includes the company website.

Let’s make a pit stop and get back to basics: your B2B website is a must, it’s your number one sales tool Le business to business se met au numérique In recent years, we’ve seen B2B brands boost their websites and leverage them beyond just branding, placing a greater focus on sales, from lead generation to acquisition.

Needless to say, in the current environment, a B2B’s website plays an even more significant role in demonstrating a customer-first approach and hence driving future sales.

With little or no face-to-face interaction now, the B2B seller must establish a humanlike connection and answer the potential buyer’s pain points at each touchpoint on the website. It’s not an easy feat, especially when the products or services offered are complex.

Smarketing (i.e. making sales and marketing work together) is the right way forward As marketing often manages the digital experience, how it works with sales is fundamental in a digital-first (B2B) buyer journey. This interlinking is dependant on how well B2B decision-makers embrace (or not) a digital sales model.

The McKinsey study referenced earlier provides some insights by country; perhaps it is not surprising that most U.S. decision-makers favour going digital.

How B2B companies transition to a digital sales model will be primarily determined by their willingness to adapt to their potential customers’ needs and how they organize internally to be continually agile.

And, as seen on multiple fronts, the cross-over of B2C marketing tactics into the B2B space will continue, as demonstrated in the McKinsey 2019 study.

Online Chat as a Priority In Digital-First Strategies The study revealed how offering the option of live chat in the research stage was rated as one of the top three requirements for a “best in class supplier” by 33 per cent of those surveyed.

When asked to list the top three most frustrating issues with suppliers’ websites, decision-makers in the McKinsey survey cited the length of the ordering process, difficulty finding products, and technical glitches with ordering. In addition, respondents also cited confusing websites, lack of information on delivery and technical support, and difficulty setting up payments.

One can argue that these are the same pain points and frustrations experienced by consumers on B2C sites in the early days of e-commerce.

The Heightened Importance of Good Content in digital-first strategies As sales rely more heavily on content to feed demand generation, the content creation hit-miss strategy is no longer sustainable. For too long, marketers have pushed out so-so content and overly focused on the Google rank war, often to the demise of sales-worthy conversion rates.

Now that digital is the lifeline to sales, content creation and distribution that addresses the buyers’ pain points and aligned to the buyer journey is critical. B2B customers want content that is fresh, new, cutting-edge, thought-provoking, and, yes, answers to their pain points.

For too long, the race has been to get anyone—yes, anyone—to land on a webpage thanks to a quick search in Google.

Even though search engines have vastly improved search results, brand responsibility lies in serving the right content, at the right moment, to the right audience. It shouldn’t be—nor does it need to be—a hit-or-miss strategy.

Getting there means a more intentional sales funnel and buyer-lifecycle approach to content creation and distribution and meeting the audience at each stage of their buying journey. It is at this point that content plays a role in bettering the buyer experience and is of real value to sales and the financial well-being of a company.

“Digital-First” Means Listening to Your Audience As B2B brands move to a digital-first sales model, the opportunity to build relevant and timely content increases through listening to the audiences’ needs and pivoting when needed.

Digital channels provide a broad spectrum of opportunities to connect, listen, and interact with potential, current, and past buyers; this means that when companies strategically use content marketing, they have a competitive advantage through their in-depth knowledge of their audiences’ needs.

Being open to new channels can mean interacting with potential customers throughout the buying process in ways seldom used pre-COVID-19.

Rarely seen before the coronavirus, but now almost standard practice, are B2B brands running Twitter chats, virtual coffee breaks, LinkedIn lives, and digital-only events. To highlight this change even further is the doubling of webinar ads run by B2B marketers, as reported by MediaRadar.

Leveraging Podcasts To Drive Brand Awareness and Trust There are likely a few B2B brands that have dabbled in podcasts, guesting on niche podcasts, posting the episode on their blog page, or maybe even attempting to start a podcast. Either way, as audio becomes more prevalent in building brand trust and awareness, the podcast medium may be the next big sales driver for B2Bs.

As the number of podcasts continues to grow year-on-year, so does their popularity. Unlike blogs, where readers tend to skim and drop off quickly, podcast listeners tend to spend more time engaged in the content.

According to Edison Research’s 2019 study, 52 per cent of podcast audiences will listen to the entire audio episode, and they tend to listen to most of the shows they download on their smartphones and other mobile devices. Of those surveyed, 58 per cent will listen to between 76 per cent and 100 per cent of the shows they download.

The shelf-life of podcast episodes also tends to be longer, with listeners often going back and revisiting older episodes.

As podcasts continue to gain popularity across markets, they can be an excellent channel for building brand awareness and trust and connecting to a broad audience of active listeners.

Perhaps their most compelling benefit is podcasts’ ability to connect listeners in a more personal way and, therefore, build relationships to a level that is difficult to achieve through, for example, a blog.

And the beauty of podcasts is that brands can start their own or actively guest on podcasts that align with their products and service offerings or potential growth markets.

Making It All Work Together in Times of Remote Work The announcement by Google’s CEO that the company would extend its remote work policy well into 2021 was a wake-up call to companies around the world that how they manage their workforce is going to be a long sprint into the unknown.

Other tech giants have followed suit, with Mark Zuckerberg expecting half of Facebook’s workforce to be remote within the decade and Twitter telling its employees they can stay home permanently.

The challenge is to keep remote employees working together and meeting sales targets in the coming months. For marketing, this means rolling out vital campaigns quickly.

How B2B marketers will go Digital-First NewsCreds’ Insight report, which was released in June of this year, provides a glimpse of how marketers foresee a shift to digital and a heavier reliance on marketing technologies (martech) to manage campaigns in the future.

According to the study, the acceleration of campaign execution was a top priority for 70 per cent of the marketers surveyed, possibly driving increased spending of martech in the months to come.

This was echoed in Gartner’s CMO survey released in July. The research firm projects that spending levels on martech will stay at 26 per cent of the marketing budgets in 2020; of the 432 CMOs surveyed, 68 per cent foresee an increase in martech investments in the next 12 months.

Ever-increasing investments in martech — for what purpose? Even as spending levels remain at pre-COVID-19 levels, most markets still struggle with utilizing the full capabilities of their martech platforms. For example, marketers in the Gartner study report using only 58 per cent of their martech stack’s full capabilities.

As the world awaits a vaccine, companies are bracing for extended remote work of their employees, which could drive martech spending above current projections, as marketing teams must rely on technology to collaborate on campaigns and manage work.

In the U.S., according to a recent survey by economists from the Harvard Business School, one in six workers is forecasted to continue to work from home or to co-work for at least two days a week. This change in the work environment plays a significant role in how platforms can keep teams on track and working together. Managers will need to foresee these changes and ensure they have the necessary tools in place.

Digital-First Strategies Imply A Digital-First Workforce A survey of hiring managers on Upwork felt that one-fifth of the workforce might end up being entirely remote after the pandemic.

As C-suites tackle financial and market uncertainties in the months to come, how marketing budgets end up remains to be seen.

Even as the CMOs surveyed in Gartner’s survey remain optimistic, they feel that they are out of sync with the rest of the C-suite.

“Marketers remain stoic in the face of adversity and are significantly out of step with other C-suite members,” said Ewan McIntyre, Vice-President Analyst for Gartner for Marketers. “We see a significant number of CEOs and CFOs building scenario plans that include a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we progress into the ‘recover’ and ‘renew’ phases of this pandemic, CFOs will turn their attention to profitability, and marketing has the dubious honour of topping the list of functions where finance will look to trim expenses even further.”

It is difficult to predict how the remaining quarter of 2020 will end up. As countries brace for a potential second-wave of lockdowns due to increased coronavirus cases following the summer months, companies will likely initiate budget cuts. In Gartner’s study, more than 44 per cent of the CMOs surveyed had mid-year budget reductions due to COVID-19, and of those, 10.7 per cent expect additional cuts of more than 15 per cent.

The larger question is whether a digital-first approach can build and sustain companies in the coming months and into 2021.

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