Recently I have been developing the keynote for Gartner’s annual “CRM” Summit event in London. I place CRM in quotes because though this event has been running many years - it isn’t actually called that any more. It is called the Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit. Personally, I like that title because for many people the term CRM connotes only one stage in a longer technological journey that marketing is on. At the event, I’ll be introducing some of Gartner’s thinking about Digital Business and how it applies in the context of customers and marketing. Gartner now defines digital business as:
The creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds.
That points to another massive wave of creative change, coming to those who work at the interface between technology and marketing.
I’m old enough to feel nostalgia when I watch Mad Men. When I joined the workforce in the mid 1980s, the marketing leaders I met were raised with the thoughts and ideas of the swaggering big brand advertisers of the 1970s. It was all about TV and bigger was better. Hiring movie directors and spending more than anyone before, was the way to win. Here’s an example. But in those days, the intersection between information technology and marketing, amounted to not much more than a couple of Apple Mac computers, used to review print ad graphics from the agencies.
Then came two massive waves of technological change to marketing. First, in the 1990s came CRM, which emerged because technology advances made it possible to store and analyse all of a customer’s transactions in large databases, drive conversations via direct mailing and call center technology and actively manage aspects like loyalty, customer lifetime value, cross selling and up selling. Second, in the 2000s came digital multi-channel marketing. The explosion of the web and email as interaction mediums, then supplemented by social and mobile – have given marketers a dazzling array of possibilities. There is still a huge amount of new innovation and value to come from those opportunities, but the next major wave is already here and it won’t wait.
The internet of things is upon us. It isn’t the future anymore. These products already exist:
- A capsule coffee machine that automatically sends its status to service engineers.
- A tennis racquet that measures every hit and transmits the data to a tablet app.
- A car with an app that allows you to ‘precondition’ it remotely before you get in.
- A set of bathroom scales that can tweet your weight.
- An electronic cigarette that can detect others vaping the same brand in the vicinity.
- Ski goggles that can show you where you buddies are on the slope.
Most of these things are sold by big brand companies you know, not just experimental start-ups. The richness of interaction and understanding that marketers will gain, from products that report on their state as they are used and consumed in the physical world, will be like nothing we have seen before. Today, Netflix can know precisely when people switch from viewing a program on TV to viewing on Tablet. Your company can know how long it takes between when a web page loads and when people first click on it. But those are things happening in the weightless, virtual information world. Soon, that kind of primary data understanding will come to the world we touch and hold and carry and sit on and kick. Marketers will understand how people live in enormous detail, discover new unmet needs and learn how to serve those needs better than ever before.
Once more, marketing as a discipline will be completely revolutionized by a new wave of information technology – this time from sensor and actuator enabled, wirelessly connected smart physical products. It is going to be quite a ride.