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At SAP, the global enterprise software developer, marketing strategy looks to leverage personalization and the creation of meaningful experiences.
I recently asked SAP global CMO Alicia Tillman to share her thoughts on how brands are evolving and how marketing is changing.
Paul Talbot: What took place in marketing over the past year that you have found noteworthy?
Alicia Tillman: Brands are moving closer and closer towards humanization from the way they communicate to the relationships they look to build throughout their community. As a result, quick-win marketing was officially put to bed in 2019, with marketers embracing the long game of loyalty and advocacy.
It’s an important step as marketers continue the journey of delivering a consistent and relatable narrative, at scale. But, the shift towards these deeply human stories requires equally deep insights – who customers and prospects are, what they want, what they need – and most importantly, how they feel.
The fact of the matter is that the future of business has feelings.
As the champions of the customer and stewards of the buying journey, brands must embrace their humanity and be able to shape a narrative in a way that makes audiences feel it to believe it. Authenticity and accountability are what’s needed in order to make the longest lasting impression and build a community of advocates necessary for sustainable growth in the digital era.
Talbot: The challenge of unlocking so-called intelligent data to perform specific functions… how are we seeing marketers take on this challenge and actually execute?
Tillman: Until now, the only level of data that marketers have historically had access to is O-data, or Operational Data of a business – things like transactional history, purchase history or financial history for example.
But O-data alone is no longer enough.
Marketers are starting to gain access to Experiential Data or X-data, which considers feelings-based metrics – like sentiment and customer feedback. When combined with the hard science of what makes an organization tick, Experiential Data can inform a more comprehensive narrative of the brand-customer relationship – making it easier for brands to design the products, services and experiences that their customers are after.
Talbot: If data provides opportunities for marketers to be more strategic, where are we witnessing the effective use of this capability?
Tillman: Strategic applications of data are really showing value in two particular areas – personalization and building once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Talbot: When an organization already uses machine learning or AI, and wants to thoughtfully evaluate the impact, how should this process be managed? What are some of the ways the impact of AI can be most accurately gauged?
Tillman: Brands win the hearts of customers and employees by inspiring deep connections on an individual level. So, AI’s ability to understand and evaluate the emotional responses of audiences – internally and externally – is one of the biggest impacts for a brand.
According to Gartner, by 2024 AI identification of emotions will influence more than half of online advertisements. As the development of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) continues to evolve, it will set a new standard in how brands build experiences – especially for companies hoping to detect emotions in order to influence buying decisions.
For SAP, AEI and Machine Learning from Qualtrics has enabled us to take unstructured data and drive intelligence for our customers at the point of sale – which has been paramount in our ability to take Experience Management to the next level.
Talbot: Has anything substantive changed over the past few years in terms of how technology marketers engage with customers and prospects?
The influx of technology into our daily lives has shifted the mindset of modern consumers. Brands – especially tech brands – can no longer simply lead with products or services as their primary differentiator.
Humans are emotionally driven individuals, and experiences keep them coming back time and time again. I believe that creating an exceptional customer experience is both an art and a science, requiring marketers to think more creatively about the brand-customer relationship.
Because consumers no longer apply different sets of expectations to purchasing something for their home or something for their business, it erases the siloed line between traditional B2B and B2C marketing entirely. As such, marketers must be nimble enough to make this transition with customers and think more holistically about the interaction points we make.
Talbot: Any other observations you would care to share?
Tillman: When people and machines work together to make smarter, more empathetic, more personalized and highly relevant interactions with consumers, employees and customers alike, we have the ability to change feelings. That, in turn, is what changes a business.
And if we can change a business, we have the opportunity to change the world.
