Building A Timeless Brand

Engulfed by the tsunami of digital transformation all around us, global markets have turned more uncertain as the way people retrieve, consume, share information has changed. The C suite executives across the globe are keen to sail smart into the future, to succeed and thrive.

IT’s all about defying eternity and creating a timeless brand as disruptive technologies shake the complacency out of archaic systems and processes. So, how is this going to impact the future and what can we do to create a timeless brand? Significantly, this has become a question of survival for enterprises, big or small.

Read on to navigate some of the trends that will shape the industry in the years ahead.

Artificial Intelligence is going to dominate the future as forward thinking leaders will seek higher performance and measurable outcomes. In a bid to outsmart the competition, they will focus on doing more with less for more. This will entail embracing more automation, more predictive analytics, and a higher shift to machine learning and robotics, all aimed at better decision making, optimizing cost, balancing resources and improving productivity. We will see more and more intelligent agents able to perform jobs that require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making. From IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Google Voice Search, Google Brain, Google Translate, Xbox, Netflix, and autonomous cars artificial intelligence has already slowly impacting our lives.

Precision marketing will rule as brands will see their identity continue to have a roller coaster ride with self-learning ‘data driven insights’ transforming their narratives. The radicle shifts in the way buyers look for and consume information and the manner in which they want to be interacted will trigger more granular and integrated customer-centric strategies. As empowered consumers will increasingly expect brands to anticipate and respond to their customized needs quickly, CMOs will strive to aggregate, enrich, and glean real time predictive insights from big data – through offline, online and social sentiment analysis. As the pace of technology development is going to be rapid; marketers need to be in a constant state of test- learn-run experimentation mode, in order to intelligently decide what makes sense for their businesses.

Customer Experience will remain vital to thrive in the intelligent era. This will be accentuated by fundamentally and unpredictable breakthrough in technologies like hybrid Clouds which will force the leaders to seek a deep, scientific understanding of the cognition of the customers.  Armed with novel, real-time, insights - forward thinking leaders will harness advanced customer experience solutions to embrace digitally transformation and differentiate their products and services across all channels, touch points, and interactions.

CMOs will be able to create a single source of customer data and develop ‘persona’ for every marketing process and predict behaviors. In a bid to personalize meaningful experiences, influence, and monetize, the leaders will treat every customer as an individual. This kind of ‘precision marketing’ will entail listening, analyzing, profiling, and engaging customers intelligently across the full client life cycle with the right content in the right context to amplify the brand narrative and deepen the relationship.

The good news is computational advertising is already helping the marketers find the best match between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement or content customized for the target. Leaders will also tap emotion detection and analysis tools to generate actionable insights to create new levels of customer intimacy. Recommendation engines can offer thought leadership articles, blogs or videos to on-line audience, based on a prediction of their interests. They can help predict customer preferences, interests and prod them to purchase or influence. Social sentiment analysis tools will see greater adoption.

Leaders will embrace Natural Language Processing and Brain-machine interfaces to measure and track customer focus, engagement, interest, excitement, affinity, relaxation, and stress levels. While still a work in progress, machine perception is a near reality today. Advanced adaptive technologies will help marketers better understand their customers using computer vision, machine hearing, and machine touch. Collaborative research like BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will help map Brain neurons connections and help gain insight into how the brain’s individual cells and complex neural circuits interact. This will also help future marketers to foster customer loyalty scientifically, and effectively.

The question is how do the smarter leaders embrace such rapid change? As marketing evolves into a fusion of art and science, an open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary, experimental and creative attitude will be needed to sense, influence and serve. IT’s all about being essential to clients, to continually learn, innovate and add sustained value to business and society, and to stay ahead of the curve – Whatever is the Next.

Are we ready to embrace the future?

The Blogger is Kiran Kumar Yellupula:  The views expressed here are purely personal. Please share your feedback at mediavalue@yahoo.com