Revolutionary firm's approach to commerce for transformaional marketing
I had an opportunity to attend the IBM Korea Industry Symposium C-Suite summit which was taken place in Grand Intercontinental Hote Seoull on March 3rd. IBM uncovered the perspective how firms to revolutionize their approach to commerce. Interesting points to cover were, IBM seemed now seriously recognize the proliferated mobile media and started to think of strategic approach to put the "customers" at the center of every business operations. Fistly, IBM VP of SW shared his perspective on the future approach to commerce. Net message was, firm must anticipate customer behavior based on customer insights across all channels - this perspective more clearly articulated at the second topic: "From Analytics to Interactive Marketing."
Second topic was covered by IBM SVP Unica. He articulated interesting data points. 75% of people don't believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements. 88% of CEOs picked "getting closer to the customer" as their top priority, and 75% of marketers plan to reorganize by the end of 2011. ... and Mobile is not a single channel - actually it has multi facet such as mobile messaging, mobile web sites, mobile email, mobile applications and mobile search & display Ads. So challenges were, 1) channels were proliferated how do we....
2) The internet evolves more than we expected.... 3) the consumer is now at the driving seat, so at the end of the day, new marketing requires new thinking...
Making this a reality takes an integrated marketing approaches: Integrated Marketing Solution.
Firstly, consistent, compelling Brand & Customer Experience is required. Secondly, optimized cross-channel marketing processes are needed. Lastly but least, deep customer insight is essential piece of ingredients. Then followed by the showcase how does this related to our real life customer interaction. One example was, cross-channel user identification strategy and the other one was identifying the influencers & opinion leaders.
Pannel Discussion
After the break, pannel discussion continued. KAIST professor Youngjae Jang, who is known for influencer in management science area and also famous for the book titled "management concert" in Korea, lead the pannel discussion as a chair. His short presentation was also interesting. He shared his experience in U.S during MIT Ph.d Student. Amazon sent a personalized e-mail and professor Jang was somewhat thrilled by the preciseness of Amazon recommendations - it was a perfect match of professor Jang's unmet needs! I could not remember the other whole stories now, but he illustrated the cases where technologies were analyzed and recommend toward the personalized offer based on historic analysis and behavior.Professor Jang also explained the case of Netflix as another example of persolized offer. He also has been contributed series of article to the Chosun weekly biz section to which he claimed management should be based on science. Netflix case also has covered from Chosun Weekly biz at the edition of incentive design between enterprise and consumer. He also mentioned the story of US baseball major league winning prospect between Sanfrancisco Giants vs LA Dodgers. UC Berkley and Georgia Tech stundent could figure out who would fall out in this match by using the linear programming. He also mentioned the IBM's ILOG acquisition and mass hiring of mathmatical consultants. You can see the Weekly biz article from here. Sorry it's Korean language.
Senior VP of LG Display, VP of Amore Pacific and IBM Growth Market VP were the panel lists. Amore expressed its intention to provide personalized campaign offer target to more than three million Amore user and shared their plan for customer analytic project. LG Display explained their challenges and unveiled its intention to analyze the its customer's customer market, in other words, B2C market to cope with the swiftly changing but uncertain future customer trends. IBM VP John (my boss) shared the IBM's challenges to cope with rapidly proliferated and changing mobile media and demand program process design.
When I return to my office, one scene came to my memory. That was popped up from second topic by Unica VP: the scene from "minority report." So new marketing is now talking about this kind of personalized offer owing to the advanced analytic technology and proliferated floating mobile informations. Then next question is, people will be happy... or feel certain sentiment of intrusion?
