Oliver Grüttemeier

My 2018 trend is called empathy centricity

Digitisation has undoubtedly created great new opportunities in recent years. Opportunities that have brought us closer to our customers and that help us tailor our products and services even more closely to them. Yet even though we can now calculate every marketing campaign and every sales figure down to the smallest detail, one thing should not fall by the wayside: our intuition.

Because as colourful and diverse as our beautiful new world may be, mankind has basically remained who we always were: a sentient, empathetic being who longs for real contacts, wants to understand and be understood, who questions and participates and who still trusts in his very own – completely analogous – instincts: feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling.

For 2018, the challenge is to combine the many opportunities of the digital with our empathic and intuitive capabilities – and to get the best out of both worlds, both for the customer and for our own employees.

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Vasiliy Tanasiychuk

Key communication trends for the Ukrainian market 2018

Ukrainian marketing is increasingly integrating into the global market. Therefore, in 2018 we will see different adaptations and interpretations of global communication trends at local level.

First, Big Data. Personal data is becoming an increasingly promising platform for transactions between brands and consumers in Ukraine. The coming year will increase the number of Big Data supporters among local market players.

The trend of personalized content will also continue its rise. During the last years Ukrainian business has been increasingly using advantages of direct online dialog with its consumers.

Smartphonization is one of the reasons why video on the go is becoming more and more popular. In 2018 online video content will remain preferable and influential communication channel for Ukrainian brands.

In the upcoming year Ukrainians will go on ignoring offline and online advertising successfully. The reply for this stable tendency will be native advertising that will focus on search for the most sophisticated ways of integration into popular media content.

Niche bloggers will play the increasing role in communications in 2018. Being opinion leaders for narrow online audiences, they can effectively use all advantages of personalized content and online video.

Also the increasing role of corporate blogs in marketing communications should be mentioned. An opportunity to communicate with consumers directly and to respond to changes in consumer demand quickly is an instrument that Ukrainian brands only begin to fully benefit from.

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Isabel Lopez

The temporary video

2017 was a boom for live temporary video users, thanks to Facebook Live, Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories. 2018 is looking to be the year of the temporary video for brands. It is no longer necessary to invest in large productions, these formats have more real, spontaneous and live content. This, together with the surge in influencers, means that brands don’t even need to create the content: it is the third parties who generate it, with the relevance that users demand and the brand only needing to manage promotion. On Instagram we are already seeing this type of strategy in that brands promote influencers’ posts in which their products are featured.

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and digital twins

Although these three terms are nothing new, 2018 is looking to be a year of progress in this sense. The evolution of artificial intelligence so that machines learn and “make decisions” will be relevant for certain business models. With the rise in machine learning within the industry, the processes are increasingly efficient, there is an increase in quality and the productivity of some businesses since they are able to “control” faults within virtual environments.

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Frances Valerie Bonifacio

The appetite for luxury goes “Tan-gital”

The Middle East consumer’s appetite for luxury has grown insatiable, at best gluttonous, so much so that online luxury malls, open 24/7, are now an emerging powerhouse. Ounass, “The Definitive Home of Luxury” from retail giant Al Tayer Group promises free 2-hour delivery within Dubai, while The Modist, “The First Ever Luxury Modest Fashion Destination” launched from a formidable start-up promises a platform that includes a personal shopping and styling team, 24/7 customer concierge service, and same-day delivery in the Middle East. Both are a direct response to Net-A-Porter’s success in a region which now represents an average order value 50% higher than the rest of the world. But digital retail is only half the luxury equation in the Middle East. Tangible experiences – in the form of brick and mortar stores clobbered up in “luxury wings” of prominent malls are now co-existing with pop-ups the magnitude, detail, and scale of actual retail stores. “Tan-gital” is the tight path between exclusive, physical on-ground experiences and the trend of forming luxury malls online. A trend with a win-win situation?

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Brett Cameron

Rethinking the shopping experience

Brett Cameron, Managing Director at Serviceplan Group Middle East, talked with Euan McLelland from INDEX about the retail market that has been transformed a lot by the digital revolution. One aspect of this change is that shopping can now be done almost entirely online, especially in Dubai, what leads to the question if it is essential for outlets to start incorporating digital elements into their interior design.

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Rami Hmadeh

Millennials in the Middle East are mostly ignored!

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At the “International Roadshow: Middle East Insights” in the House of Communication in Munich Rami Hmadeh, Managing Partner Serviceplan Middle East, talked about several trends and characteristics of the region. One of the aspects he talked about was how to adress the millennials. He specifies these thoughts in this article.

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Brett Cameron

Digital Retail…Really?

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Why is e-commerce always reported as taking away from bricks and mortar sales? Is this really the competition? Shouldn’t all brands be embracing both aspects to deliver a cohesive journey? Shopping malls are as popular as ever, however, our purchasing habits have evolved. The problem is mall and retail experiences are stubbornly antiquated.

Our shopping experience typically begins in the carpark and yet these are a barren wasteland when it comes to delivering a positive sense of arrival. Then what about way-finding inside the malls? There has been some improvement in recent years, and the Dubai Mall App is a leader in this area, however the ongoing prevalence of traditional static grid-style location maps and the lack of smart apps that can identify your location while feeding you relevant brand information means the experience in most malls continues to be underwhelming and disconnected. Then once you enter the retail store, and if you are time challenged and shop for clothes like me by pointing at a mannequin and telling the sales assistant that’s what you want, then you are typically limited to the 5 or 6 static mannequins that are on display, despite the myriad of combinations created by that brand’s designers and displayed on their online site.

However, change is coming. Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods for $13.7B suggests an overhaul of the retail experience is coming and could see an integration of their payless Amazon Fresh Pickup concept. Imagine the world without the horrible experience of queuing at the supermarket check-out…it’s almost too good to be true!

When I meet with a retail brand, the first thing I ask them is how they believe they are offering a genuinely different experience in their space. Often their positioning is very good online, but it is somewhat lacking in the physical space making it difficult to see what attributes will connect customers emotionally to the brand. Furthermore, if digital connectivity does not continue into the physical space then crucial data on the purchasing habits is lost.

Without the appearance of an ‘always on’ experience in the retail space, then the message is that the retail environment is always one step behind the online offering. To retain a top-of-mind position then brands need an integrated programme of in-store digital interaction, online activities, in-store events and co-branded experiences that reiterate how the brand is an integral part of our life.

This article was first published by People Retail magazine.

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Gerrit Grunert

Content Marketing + Marketing Automation = ROI

Back to the future

When we hear the term content marketing, we tend to think of Red Bull and its stratospheric leap, the Michelin Gourmet Guide, or the John Deere DIY Magazine. Yet do these excellent and all-eclipsing examples of good communication not have a rather abstract effect on our current marketing reality, which is characterised by tight budgets, performance goals and technology? Can we replicate such success under our everyday conditions? Hardly, which is why we have to redefine content marketing, if it ever was defined in the first place.

Content marketing today

Content marketing is an umbrella discipline for a variety of specialist marketing disciplines that are not always so easy to differentiate from one another. Content marketing concerns creative experts, editors and copywriters, performance and e-mail marketing specialists, sales experts, developers and a host of other disciplines too. Each of these disciplines interprets content marketing in its own way, yet all stakeholders agree on the following principles:

  • Content marketing should achieve a return on investment.
  • Users take centre stage in content marketing since their ultimate transaction is what allows a return on investment to be achieved.
  • Content marketing therefore serves to activate users and motivate them to interact with the content producer so they are converted in terms of perspective to customers and disseminators for the producer.
  • Valuable, user-centred contents are therefore produced in content marketing so they can be conveyed to the distribution channel with the highest conversion rates at the most appropriate time.

Content marketing is therefore first and foremost a strategic approach to achieving corporate objectives. Entrepreneurs plan, forecast, validate, optimise and seek to scale. This is precisely where marketing automation comes into play, since it can do all of this and much more.

Marketing automation: The Swiss army knife

A marketing automation platform is a modular system that integrates a variety of different individual solutions, where Asset Management (the collection of all content assets needed in the marketing process), Distribution Management (control of distribution channels such as SEO, content, e-mail, social, paid and mobile), Data Management (the aggregation of continually generated user data) as well as Analytics (the cross-channel evaluation of all aggregated data at user level) come together in a uniform working environment. Depending on the stage of development, content management systems or testing suites then also come into play. The critical factor here is that the aggregated data describes the individual user behaviour and provides us with information on how we can satisfy the current information needs of the individual user in the best possible way in each case.

Personalisation “to scale”

In keeping with the principles we formulated at the outset, content marketing is therefore a sales-driven communications process in which the individual content is the currency. Because the individual user is the centrepiece of this process, the personalised content is the life force of content marketing. Regardless of whether the user is addressed by name in an e-mail or the website adapts to the individual needs of the visitor through dynamic content: personalising the content is critical if the measure is to succeed. The effort this requires can only be mastered by using automatable environments.

ROI-driven content marketing

The sales process can start in the earliest phase of the customer journey in future thanks to the opportunities afforded by scalable content architectures as well as the holistic analysis of the individual user’s digital footprint – namely when users communicate their individual challenge for the first time and we provide the right solution. The seller becomes a partner. Any company set on achieving a return on investment with its content marketing endeavours will in future have to unify three areas that frequently act as silos: communication, sales and IT. If a company can do this, then sustainable business success is guaranteed.

This article was first published by onetoone.de.

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Vera Yu

Seven social and economic trends in China

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On June 27th 2017 I have given a speech at the „International Roadshow 2017: China Insights“ to German enterprises in Munich with the title „The Future is Now“. I have shared some current social and economic happenings in China that are influencing the future, including consumption upgrade, sharing economy, live stream, and cash-free lifestyle, at the same time I have unveiled some business and marketing potentials embarked behind.

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