Marketing Changes with Technology & Consumer Behaviour

Authored by Abhinav Upadhyay, Chief Marketing Officer, Talentedge

Chameleons All!

As a marketer with the multi-industry, multi-country experience across various functions and driven change to stay ahead of the times, I can say with conviction that the time to start planning another transition to the way marketers respond to changing environment as well as to deepening impact of technology in human lives is well and truly here. Time for us to evolve yet again and adapt to the changing times.

In certain regards, all of us as marketers are chameleons, aren’t we?

As marketers, it is our job and responsibility to ensure that we are on top of every trend. Trendwatching & responding to them is not just a necessity but critical to our existence.

I have seen the shift to digital design. I have seen the shift to Digital as medium. I have the seen of productisation using technology. I have seen the era of CRM moving to CXM. I have implemented AR & technology to create products. I have used every possible new technology trend to turn it into a proposition or tool to either create a product offering or to delight my customers. This is what I call the Chameleon Syndrome where as marketers change their colour based on the environment and changes around us. 

In my journey across Telecom, Remittances, Financial Services, Payments, Education, Food and EdTech, I  have witnessed many disruptions. But one things has been common amongst companies that succeed - ensuring that marketing keeps itself and the organisation ahead of the curve across consumer behaviour and trends, product design and delivery, communication and affinity and on customer experience.

This Chameleon Syndrome is what differentiates marketers  from others as we adapt to any forthcoming trend that we foresee.

How will emerging tech transform the world of marketing & CX as we know it?

ML/AI & NLP will shake it all up

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence isn’t a technology company discussion anymore. It is out of those hallowed board rooms and in our lives. When you look at the way the right product gets recommended to you on amazon based on your buying and search history, it is nothing but ML at play.
When you get a playlist recommended on Spotify, it is deep personalisation based on Machine learning and when you get Movies recommended on Netflix, it is ML at play yet again. From Facebook to Google to Netflix to Amazon, Machine Learning is here to stay and grow.

Artificial Intelligence is beginning to have a huge impact in the way products are being created and how communication is happening. When you have AI based Video Creation platforms and AI based content writing and AI based Headline and Copy writing, it is bound to impact a lot of areas of marketing and advertising industry. The industry needs to get out of slumber and move with the times instead of being rigid.

With Ad-serving and optimisations being auto-optimised based on machine learning, it is bound to impact the role of performance marketers who are currently a key pillar of any marketing organisation.

As someone who likes to be the first to try a new offering, I am currently looking at Conversational AI as another huge disruptor.

The Agents in Inside Sales or Customer Support have for long been flooded with meaningless calls. Calls that Conversational AI can interrupt in between and only those that need a human intervention get passed on. From having Video based Conversational AI platforms to Voice to just text, the era is well and truly here.

The best part is that there are some amazing young startups who have productised this entire sales and service Call Centre & personalised conversation piece and you can now integrate these into your website, CRM, Dialers and Communication channels to deliver extremely personalised solutions using Conversational AI.

All this happens via Natural Language Processing (NLP) which enables the machine to learn every scenario that can happen in the languages that it gets trained on and then it can understand human intent and provide the right solution - FASTER and BETTER.

It doesn’t just stop there. Now, any agent while talking to a customer can get PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS ON WHAT TO SAY NEXT based on customer response. The machine transcripts every word, understand human intent and provides Real Time recommendations based on the customer’s tone and manner of voice, words used and more. The Agent therefore can now say things which can make the sale happen faster or serve customer in a manner that delights him or her.

While doing a pilot for NLP, Conversational AI as well as production of videos using AI, I am fascinated at how quickly the scenarios get built and the responses personalised. I have been tracking this space quite keenly as it is something that will change humanity forever, leave alone marketing. Now that it is here, let us all understand that it is here for good.

What does it mean for customers?

Customers get rich, personalised experiences from the brands they engage with. This leads to enhanced engagements and customer delight across various touch-points with a brand. What it also means is that the expectations from customers will keep rising and they’d constantly compare these rich personalised experiences from large brands with those where these don’t exist.

We also need to understand that customers themselves are changing. The Millenials are right now in their prime but GenZ is beginning to drive a brand new customer segment thereby disrupting marketing the way we know it. Their wants, desires, hangout places, definition of cool and their media choices are different. There are fabulous new places they hangout in like Discord or Twitch and Reels and Videos and Audio and Voice search and Voice notes are part of their lives.

The customers are also tired of long form content and want to consume what hits them quickly.

What does it mean for brands?

Brands and organizations need to understand that this growing customer expectation needs to be satisfied else a smaller new startup is gonna come and eat your cake even before you can spell CHANGE.

There is no doubt in my mind that companies will move from being MIS driven to ML driven where analytics will need to power personalised recommendation engines as well as experiences for the customer. I am already seeing that happen. At Talentedge.com, we are seeing a huge growth in terms of people looking to do Machine Learning and Analytics courses as they are all beginning to understand that this skill is what their companies need and hence if they don’t up skill, they’d become Dinosaurs instead of chameleons.

Brands will also start switching to AI based personalised Conversational AI to enhance customer experience and also to improve productivity of their sales and service organizations.

We’d all need to be aware and change our methodology for optimization of performance marketing spends as AI takes over.

We also have the opportunity to use AI/ML/NLP to drive costs down and enhance efficiency.

While creating Videos using AI at Talentedge.com, I realised that if we provide the right inputs in terms of the script and choose the right face and the right voice available on the platform, the videos that can be used to answer Human Intent questions can be rather powerful and also budget friendly. That helps us improve our ability to rank higher on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in the rich snippets section. Can’t get better than that now, can it? Lower cost, higher rank on SERP. That’s like music to my ears.

Now we can:

• Create better and more personalised personas using Data sets using Machine Learning
• Target them better using AI
• Drive better CX using Conversational AI across Website, CRM, Call Centre and more.
• Enhance customer engagement with us using Augmented Reality
• We can rank better using content that is truly helpful for our customers - all created using AI
• We’d be able to have complete automation for quite a few roles, functions and businesses using AI. e.g. Instead of having proofreaders, all you need is Grammarly and you’re sorted. Similarly for optimisation of ads, as long as you have the ability to look at the Google suggested optimisations and evaluate what is right and what’s not apt for your specific business use case, you’d be fine. You may not have to do manual optimisations ever again.

What should we do?

Adapt like a Chameleon yet again.

My sincere advice to all marketers would be to understand the impact of ML/AI/NLP on various aspects of the business and not just marketing. Then create the inter-linkages via a MindMap (Technology strikes yet again) of how you can either enhance efficiency or you can improve customer experience or you can generate more revenues and then fit the right technology based on the solutions rather than trying to force fit.

Please don’t fall into the trap of just trying buying into whatever technology comes your way. First create the solution and then use Technology as the enabler.

If Voice is becoming important, try and understand where all your business will be impacted and then use Voice as an enabler there. e.g. Voice Search is a play that brands should have enabled.

If ranking on google is vital for your business, then look at AI for videos. Essentially look at technology only as the enabler not the panacea of all ills.

For me as a marketer, I see Technology as a massive enabling force to my vision of improving customer experiences and driving revenue growth wherever I am. The advent of AI/ML and NLP is probably the most amazing new intervention besides Augmented Reality that I have tried and I can say with conviction - I AM LOVING IT!