WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

The Marketing organizational survey 2020 provides marketing leaders with the latest insights to optimize their organizational structure and build a more scalable, flexible, and resilient marketing organization

The Marketing Operations Survey uncovers best practices for the marketing operations leaders' role’s current scope, future mandate, and provides insight into the most critical key performance indicators, development priorities and operational marketing technologies.

Business leaders who measure how their consumers map to Forrester’s Empowered Customer Segmentation and evolve along these critical dimensions will understand and anticipate customer demands for new services and experiences. Armed with that information, business leaders can prioritize their investments in digital innovation, pinpoint the customers most likely to reward innovation with new revenue, and identify which consumers threaten to churn.

An in-depth guide to understanding and optimizing your recurring revenue pricing strategy.

The MarTech marketplaces that RSG covers continue to evolve rapidly and have become more complex (with more overlaps!) this year. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) market is no different - with new vendors, more investment, emerging niches, and evolving use cases.

Most brands must improve the customer experience for omnichannel service--and this has less to do with tech than many think.

Leading CMOs make measurement the centerpiece of their growth strategy.

Advertisers that raise their digital game report cost savings of up to 30% and revenue increases of as much as 20%.

By now you understand that AI is mainstream. We carry it around in our phones, it’s installed in our automobiles and household appliances. But how should you be thinking about using AI in your business? Start by considering the data managed by your company. What can your data teach you about your business? What can you automate or streamline using your data? If there are repetitive processes in your business, AI can be used to automate those processes.
For example, if you have large customer data sets, it is likely you can use machine learning to let the data tell you more about those customers, give you intelligent insights that will help you to create a more customer focused offering. Examples: Retail banks use AI to offer appropriate banking products tailored for individual customers. Insurance companies use AI to verify identity, assess risk profiles and recommend coverage. Companies are using ML to sort though massive resumes to find the best matches for new employees.

Companies transforming to become customer-obsessed are using customer journey analytics to help them become customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected, and to ultimately be more effective in acquiring, serving and retaining customers.  

This report from leading global research and advisory firm, Forrester, identifies the 12 most significant customer journey analytics platform providers today, and reveals how each measures up based on 26 different evaluation criteria, to help you make the right choice for your organization. You'll get a complete overview of the current customer journey analytics market, including;

• The two primary journey analytics provider categories, visioning and orchestration, and four core capabilities: (1) data fusion, (2) journey design & planning, (3) journey testing & optimization, and (4) journey automation & orchestration
• The 2018 Forrester Wave Journey Visioning Platform rankings and scorecard
• A breakdown of each journey analytics provider’s offering, strengths, specialties, and customer base
• Key criteria that helps leaders stand out from the pack

Legacy structures and operations are keeping companies from taking full advantage of technology to modernize marketing.

Marketing has been on the front lines of the digital revolution, but the landscape has become much more complicated, requiring a focus on marketing-growth strategy, data, and new modes of creativity

LUMA is the leading investment bank focused on digital media and marketing. We provide strategic advice, proven M&A expertise, and extensive industry knowledge to optimize outcomes for our clients.

Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

According to Marketplace Pulse research, Amazon-owned private label brands are not nearly as successful as many paint them to be. Amazon has been successful in creating generic items at low prices, but only when using the Amazon brand name (i.e., AmazonBasics and Amazon Essentials). Otherwise, the hundreds of brands and tens of thousands of products launched are not resonating with customers.
On the surface, Amazon is utilizing its knowledge of its powerful retail machine to steer shoppers toward its in-house brands and away from its competitors. The goal of this research was to check if this was true. To validate if the success of AmazonBasics batteries could be extrapolated to other brands and different categories.
We analyzed over 23,000 products launched by Amazon under more than 400 different brands. Some of those brands are private label brands built by Amazon, and some are exclusive brands made by a third party. All under the “Our Brands” umbrella, a collection of Amazon private brands and a curated selection of brands sold exclusively on Amazon.
According to our research the Amazon-owned Top 10 most successful private label brands, including the likes of AmazonBasics and Pinzon, contribute estimated 81% of the total sales. Amazon added more than 100 brands in 2018, but none of the recent launches are category leaders. Amazon has attracted much attention with every new brand they launched, however the assumption that every new brand will be as impactful as AmazonBasics is unfounded. It is Quantity vs. Quality - AmazonBasics represents less than 5% of products launched, but more than 57% of sales.

Digital transformation is a long game. At the same time, it has to start somewhere. Over the years, the biggest digital transformation priority for companies has continued to be the customer experience. That work is aimed at fixing and modernizing the customer journey. Once this happens, digital transformation tackles more sweeping efforts that involve multiple groups. This is why the organizations who are further along the six stages of digital transformation develop customer-centered roadmaps and then divide and conquer against those initiatives across the enterprise.

Digital transformation was initially intended to modernize technological infrastructure, migrating costly, dated, and complicated hardware and software solutions to more agile and scalable cloud and mobile platforms. But since the early days of digital transformation, the speed of technology innovation has only increased. Now the digital in digital transformation has to keep up with all relevant technology trends as they represent disruptive threats and competitive opportunities. This is likely a key driver of 2018’s dramatic rise of substantial digital transformation budgets.

The Marketing technology category is growing in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, our most concise view into the category was built in 2011. While companies have been added highlighting new entrants, the Lumascape inspired view has been used primarily to emphasize how complicated and fast growing the space is.

2017 was the year where the marketer's role in e-commerce changed drastically and retail businesses (both pure-play and omni-channel retailers) had to come to terms with a new playing field that required them to disrupt their own strategy at every turn.

The diminishing effectiveness of conventional advertising and the rise of social media have led more and more brands to embrace content marketing. More and more companies are seeing themselves not just as advertisers, but as publishers, launching digital newsrooms, podcasts, and other forms of branded content in order keep their brands, perspectives, and value propositions in front of customers.

Digital transformation is one of those terms that seems to mean, well, everything. That's because different groups within organizations are investing in innovative technologies to modernize business operations. Whether it's IT, marketing, CX, HR, service and support, etc., each group, in their own right, is investing in advancement. It's not [...]

We've seen the media hype about beacons. We've read about proof of concepts and how they are the latest and sexiest devices to hit the Internet of Things. Beacons are here to stay. Now's the time to get serious in your business about the impact of these devices. This year alone beacons are set to influence over 4 billion US dollars of retail sales, and that number is set to grow tenfold by next year.

The Top 100 Digital Agencies Report, sponsored by Telerik Sitefinity, is the definitive guide to the UK's biggest digital agencies. Consisting of a 64 page report and an interactive agency navigator tool, this data will provide invaluable for both clients looking to select an agency partner, and to agencies looking to understand the competition and the challenges within the industry.