Notes from Gartner's Digital Business Conference in London, UK on Sep 4, 2014

My notes from the Gartner’s Digital Business Conference “Taking the Business Digital: Your time is Now” in London, UK on Sep 4^th, 2014.

The presentation was divided into two subjects facilitated by two Gartner leads,
> The State of Digital Marketing – Jennifer Beck
> Social and Mobile Marketing – Jennifer Polk

The following is the random scribbling from the (well-presented) Gartner conference for your reference. Kindly ignore the grammar and structure. 

THE STATE OF DIGITAL MARKETING

The digital organisation today, in collaboration with marketers and IT, plan on investing their budgets on,

• Building a seamless Consumer Experience (CX) journey for their consumers 
• Developing a robust Content Marketing strategy for context relevant engagement
• A Loyalty program that craves for advocac
• Data, yes you read it right. This is the holy grail of everything an organisation needs to know about a piece of content or track their consumer's digital footprint
• Developing program standards for the marketing of two speeds - reactive campaigns and full blown projects
• Conceptualising experience across touch points across multiple channels to connect with the consumers anytime, anyplace, with relevant content

CONSUMER FIRST

• The latest battle that the brands fight today is that of developing a seamless consumer brand experience across all channel touch points. 
• The buyer journey today is no longer linear. Consumers are looking for a “great experience” across channels. However, the definition of “great experience” keeps changing. It extends beyond brands’ products & services. And the line between products & services is non-existent.
• Gartner says, by 2016, 91% of companies will compete on the basis of the customer experience. 
• Brands & vendors/agencies must constantly evolve their capabilities around UX, content strategy to keep pace with the digital and consumer trends, else they will be left behind. Remember your competitor is just a click away!!

STORY SCAPING

• To succeed in digital business build the dream and vision for your clients, excellence is in the delivery. Tell constructive stories to your leads to elevate your pitch.
• Rethink your sales model by focusing on solutions than talking about pain points. CxOs know their pain points, they want to know what you are going to solve for them and how you are going to solve for them. Focus your pitches on these aspects.
• One question that every CxO’s would ask the sales account directors – What are you here to do for me? Why should I be spending my valuable time with you? This is not new, and always existed. Articulate your value propositions clearly.
• Today, CIO's are looking to engage with vendors who have clear visibility on how they are helping brands solve their challenges rather than talking about just technology and systems. Back to the first point - it's about story scaping!

IT’S AN AD, AD WORLD

• Marketing world is all about ads and engagement. 
• Buyers are channel blind. They don’t see channels, they see engagement, they experience.
• More and more brands are looking to evolve content marketing into their digital strategy - offline or online, across channels.
• They want to enable the discovery of intellectual, contextually relevant content in-house for their employees or curate contents to meet their consumer needs across channels.

LOYALTY IS GOOD, ADVOCACY IS BETTER

• A set of consumers who may have been loyal for many years, and some of who may have been inactive, will only generate a fraction of revenue and brand impression as compared to a recently  acquired consumer who talks about the brand with friends and families. Target such consumers. They are the one's who will build advocacy, and ultimately resulting in more revenue and brand impression for you.
• Get it right with the right team. Focus on tracking the consumer behaviour through marketing automation programs to deliver contextually relevant content to consumers.

BE SOCIAL, BE MOBILE

• The young today is always connected – on mobile, in social. 
• Gartner says, 71% of consumers use their smartphones atleast 5x per day
• Gartner says, online search using mobile device continues to be the leading trend followed by social
• Gartner says, Mobile traffic drives 22.3% of the revenue, whereas Social traffic drives 18.3% of the revenue

Brands and vendors who talk about mobile first, social first have to act fast. Just being mobile first, social first is thing of the past. Today you need to be talking mobile always, social always.

THE CMO vs CIO CHALLENGE

• CMO’s have always hunted for profits and demanded results. Gartner says, CMO’s will spend more on technology than CIO’s by 2017. Whereas CIO’s have always focused on business case and demanded cost optimisation & technology consolidation. 
• They both are right, but the stairway to heaven is in focusing on a digitally led organisation.
• The digital organisation structure today is being promoted in many firms to bridge this gap. The primary digital roles with budget, control and where digital marketing is critical to success are,

o   Consumer experience leader

o   Digital commerce leader

o   Marketing technology leader

o   Marketing analytics leader

o   Multichannel marketing leader

GARTNER DIGITAL MARKETING

Access to more (and much accurate) details from Gartner on http://www.gartner.com/marketing/digital/

...IT Outsourcing & Trends - The Closure

As it just got interesting, I decided to finish this blog with some research comments and give my opinion to the HECian Strategic Consultant I met. We had debates and arguements, all moving in the positive direction, talking about how the future trends could be shaped up. Taking these information into account as well as the market research work from various sources, I recommended and stressed on the following points as the key trends in the near future for IT Outsourcing to my HEC network.

• IT Outsourcing could reach USD $ 200 Billion by 2010.
• Of 25 Global “Breakout” companies identified by Fortune Magazine in 2005, 22 are in IT and Bio-Tech.
• The list of 10 richest people in the world in 2006, 6 came from IT or invested in IT and bio-tech area.
• Information Technology can create more jobs than other fields. One job in IT can facilitate more than 25 jobs growth in other areas.
• IT workers in China & India are pushing their regional economic levels to new highs.
• Asia’s IT outsourcing business continues to grow > 20% annually
• Russia’s outsourcing business predicted to grow a little over 30% in 2007 and could compete with leading IT giants in India & China within next few years

One thing is for sure...information technology is everywhere and the outsourcing trend is here to stay. You cannot just ignore it. The important point is that how you embrace the technology and based on the business model, use it to make your business much more profitable and reachable to the different consumers. With IT, it's a matter of winning in this Flat Flat World. After all it brings in the global competitiveness. It is a major force that can help you change your business as well as to adapt your business globally. IT outsourcing trend will continue to increase due to business conditions (e.g. cost, quality, skills, access to market). Some companies will move fast in the value chain and occupy a key advantage in IT industry. Companies that prepare to do business globally will succeed when others may fail - in the long term. Continuous education & training are the keys to succeed in the fast changing Outsourcing world.

I hope the experience of this conversation was informative to some extent, atleast it helped me reach my audience at HEC academic management, as I went on to meet the director of Fortis to discuss on more current issues and global concerns. I also remember having similar conversation with a Economics professor of the Said Business School, until I met the representatives of IE :)