In the predictive enterprise, marketers become clairvoyant
By 2025, at least half of the world’s leading digital retailers will take share by anticipating the needs of customers versus responding to them.
When Jack Welch made his famous observation — that competitive advantage lies in the ability to respond to needs faster than competitors — he was looking through a 1980s lens when concepts like smart machines, artificial intelligence, big data and advanced algorithms resided in ivory towers and science fiction films.
Fast forward 30 years and emerging technologies are empowering marketers with an electronic looking glass that provides previously unimaginable visibility into the buyer’s context — one in which people share where they are, what they are doing and whom they are with.
In this new world of clairvoyant marketing, brands don’t wait even a microsecond for buyers to identify their needs and desires. Rather, they offer solutions, even before the buyers themselves are aware they have a problem.
Waiting for buyers to tell you what they want, will soon become a losing strategy. Even Real-Time Marketing won’t be good enough.
The initial triangulation of keen buyer insight, informed by data from the cloud, social media and mobile platforms, launched a movement (albeit one not heralded by a great deal of thunder) known as “RTM,” or real-time marketing. RTM’s fundamental assumption was that deep analysis of past and present behavior, combined with such techniques as location awareness, would award a brand with the ability to respond to customers faster than its competitors.
But RTM, like most promotional tools, was based on the idea that buyers knew what they wanted.
Now, “Offer a solution before I’m aware of the problem” has become a common rallying cry of the digital customer. For example, today’s UPS driver doesn’t wait to experience engine trouble, rather avoids it altogether when the vehicle signals its need for service.
UPS Process Management Director Jack Lewis says, “Prediction gives us knowledge. But after knowledge comes wisdom and clairvoyance. Soon, the system will correct problems before the driver ever realizes anything was even on the verge of starting to go wrong.”
In this new world, commerce is even more ubiquitous.
Innovation pioneered by wearables provides other compelling examples. Soon it will be commonplace to have our smartwatch transmit data to our physicians as they craft our treatment plans. Or, consider a scenario in which your watch alerts you to a sale on protein bars after noting a protein deficiency in the nutritional analysis it performed on you the week before. Or your fitness device, sensing you are dangerously dehydrated, directs you to a store that carries Gatorade.
These symbiotic experiences are far more seamless, transparent and frictionless than marketers ever imagined. While one approach uses intelligence to make an offer to a buyer in the moment — another seizes business advantage by using wisdom to get in front of such awareness.
One approach solves a problem after it has occurred; the other prevents the problem from happening in the first place.
Get to work on your organization’s culture.
Cross-functional, multi-discipline teams are critical to your ability to succeed with this new style of marketing. You must know everything you can about a customer or prospect to orchestrate good anticipatory marketing.
Organizational units that insist on owning a specific customer scenario will work inadvertently to compromise clairvoyant marketing. Hence, as with most transformation efforts, transforming the organization’s culture is often the leading priority investment.
