Reimagine Marketing: A podcast from SAS

BRIAN ALFOND: Hello, folks. Welcome to this episode of the Reimagine Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Brian Alfond, and I'm part of SAS's Global Customer Intelligence group, where I work with customers to find elegant and creative solutions to their marketing problems. We are well into the new year, but I hope we're not too late to make some New Year's predictions.

Now, personally, I am not much of a prognosticator, but I have the good fortune of working with an excellent one, Mr. Mike Turner, principal business advisor here at SAS. Mike recently published an article on martechseries.com entitled, "2023-- Will It Really Be Different? Yes. Yes, It Will." In it, he cites four areas where things in marketing may just be different this year, or at the very least, continue the direction they were heading, but at an accelerated pace.

Mike has over 30 years of marketing experience. And during that time he has been everything from the guy going on the coffee run, all the way up to being the CMO. He has led teams and marketing agencies, consulting organizations, supply and demand side commercial businesses, and a couple of startups. In fact, he still provides support on two digital marketing MSC courses.

And he's graciously agreed to join me on the Reimagine Marketing podcast to talk about his article, and to dive a little deeper into the four main areas of marketing where he sees change happening in 2023. Hello, Mike, and thanks for joining me today.

MIKE TURNER: Hey. Hi, Brian. How are you? So you made me sound fantastic. I love it. Sounds really cool.

BRIAN ALFOND: [LAUGHS] Well, you have earned it, sir. You've earned it. Now, as you mentioned in your piece, we all kind of view these predictions with a grain of salt. But I personally think you've really hit on some trends here.

And I'd like to talk to you first about the increase in the convergence of the real and the digital worlds-- a topic that sends my mind immediately to the metaverse, which I think it's fair to say is really still in its infancy. Is that part or involved in the convergence you're referring to?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, it is. So when I look at that convergence of data and real world, or digital and real world, I'm always immediately led down the path of this will be the year that AR and VR will become reality for everybody.

But, of course, we all know that whilst a number of organizations are still playing around with those technologies, they're not really mainstream. It's very hard to imagine anybody walking down the street with an Oculus Rift strapped to their face experiencing some sort of virtual world, while the rest of us walk around in the real world.

So yeah, I was leaning more towards that convergence of what we're seeing happen in the metaverse. And we are seeing a number of really large organizations who are seriously moving into that world. And they're starting to develop strategies that cross over between the real world and those metaverses.

BRIAN ALFOND: I have to admit, I am-- my sole experience-- well, maybe I have two experiences with this type of thing-- is one was from the Pokemon Go that my kids used to play, where you kind of had that virtual reality there.

But more so, when this first came out, I logged on to a Roblox account and started playing around with that a little bit, which had me being accused of playing at work. But that's really it. And you mentioned a couple of large organizations that are doing this. Are you comfortable citing an example or two?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, of course. So I think there are a couple of really interesting examples. And I think Nike probably leading the way in this world. And it does seem to have really sparked interest in the world of fashion, in particularly, high fashion.

So Nike were early entrants into that Roblox world. And they allowed customers to create branded Nike goods, to wear those goods, to actually trade them for real money. So they moved towards a US dollar model, not towards a cryptocurrency model, which in itself is an interesting trend.

But other organizations like Gucci have entered into that market. They've created their own trading environments. And I was fascinated to read in January, having made those predictions, that Gucci, in fact, managed to sell a virtual copy of a handbag for more than the real item in a store.

BRIAN ALFOND: Seriously?

MIKE TURNER: So it gives you an idea that--

BRIAN ALFOND: [LAUGHS]

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, seriously. So there are people out there that will trade in real dollars in those environments. But it's not limited there. And I think if you look at financial institutions, who would have thought a financial institution would look to the metaverse? But HSBC last year sponsor a very large international concert in Asia-Pac.

And what they did alongside that was created at a virtual concert in the metal world to sit alongside that real world concert. So they opened up their market. They changed audience perceptions of what that environment was about. And they created an experience for customers that brought in a whole new audience for them. And I think that is a fantastic use of a new channel-- and opening up of a new potential audience in a very different way.

BRIAN ALFOND: Oh, I am trying so hard, but I'm not going to be able to resist the urge to bring up Neal Stephenson here. Because one of the things-- he's credited with inventing this whole metaverse thing in Snow Crash. And they were virtual concerts, where there was a concert, and it was all over the metaverse. I just-- wow.

MIKE TURNER: They were indeed. And I love-- I absolutely love the idea to imagine that there was somebody of my generation at a tender 30 years of experience who may have picked that book up when it first came out.

BRIAN ALFOND: Oh, I was there.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MIKE TURNER: Huh. This could be reality now. We could really create that experience that was first raised in that book.

BRIAN ALFOND: It seems though-- indeed, in taking that book-- and I know there's people cringing-- sorry. But read it if you haven't. But it seems like, whoa, the challenges to marketers are only going to increase. They're almost going to have to become semi-amusement park designers in order to develop these experiences.

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, without doubt. And I think this is why for me this topic area is really interesting. Organizations will sit there. They'll look at the metaverse, and they'll go, meh, is it really for me? And I guess if you sell canned goods or baked beans, my favorite example, is the metaverse really for you? Well, probably not.

But for others, they've looked at that environment and literally seen an opportunity to reach a new audience, an audience they don't touch today. Now, given the challenges in the world, economic not being the least of those, maybe these virtual environments are going to create environments for these particular brands to experiment with new ideas, new concepts.

And the thing about the metaverse is it's very quickly becoming a bidirectional channel. When Nike set up their environment, they didn't go in with a set of predefined products and say, hey, there you go. There's your product. It's much more inclusive. It's much more about us as individuals designing something within that brand.

And what you're starting to see is some of those ideas. And I was at a conference towards the end of last year, where one of the guys from Nike stood up and said, we are now seeing the emergence of some of those designs from the virtual world are being taken by our real-world designers and turning them into real product.

BRIAN ALFOND: Crowdsourcing product development. That's fantastic.

MIKE TURNER: Exactly. Yeah.

BRIAN ALFOND: That's really, really cool.

MIKE TURNER: Yeah, exactly. So you think five years ago, if you and I had been having the same conversation, sure, we'd have mentioned virtual reality and augmented reality and maybe the one or two examples that existed out there. But metaverse is really opening up to all types of industry.

Public sector-- I think it's Riga in Eastern Europe, have had schoolkids redesigning parts of the city in a metaverse environment to see what they can learn from those experiences-- really is a very different channel. And I think woe behold the marketers that don't look at it now, even if they can't use it today, and think about what potential it offers in the next year or two years.

BRIAN ALFOND: Yeah. At least start some test and learn. But I guess in order to do that, I'm just thinking, the data, the scope of data that's going to be added to the data that marketers are already dealing with. And in your article, you talk about 2023 being the year of-- I think you called it the dawn of data realization. And interestingly, you say that a big part of this is marketers looking beyond just the customer data-- beyond that to what?

MIKE TURNER: So I think this is a challenge that marketers are becoming more and more aware of. I think for, again, the last 5, 10 years, we spent a lot of effort on collating and curating data around this focal point of customer. But I find it infinitely interesting that while we collect a lot of data about our customers, what we tend to do is still act in a very product-centric fashion.

So in the last week alone, I've had conversations with a couple of well-known clients who very much want to move towards this model of customer centricity, and they collect a lot of data about customers. But every time you look at their marketing strategies or their plans, they're siloed into product-focused channels.

Now, one of the things that's beginning to change and dawn-- and, again, it is retailers I'm afraid that are leading the way a little bit with this-- is wouldn't it be great if we could be more dynamic with idea like content offering-- dynamic content instead of fixed content from a single source?

And as you know, in my history, I've worked in the publishing world. And many, many years ago, publishers started to think about the problem of, how do you repurpose what is essentially for hundreds of years been printed text? How do you repurpose information in those articles and start to break it into component parts so you can reassemble those parts, a bit like LEGO bricks, in different ways to appeal to different audiences?

And where we're seeing some of the top retail organizations go now is to expand data strategies and data models to incorporate contextual data, external data, economic data into the marketing data mart. So things that have traditionally lived in maybe planning or operational environments, those data sources are beginning to be merged into our marketing data sources.

And I think with that data, hence, my term "dawn of realization," is the realization that customer focus is a very different way of working and behaving. And in order to support it, you can't just have data about customers in isolation-- has to be more than that.

BRIAN ALFOND: That's very, very true. And it delves nicely into your next point, which I was actually very happy to see. I'm a big believer that context is crucial in these types of engagements. And you mentioned that the use of data is really going to be switching from the focus on a next best action-- how do we get them to buy this thing-- to a next best engagement, more of how do we deepen the relationship?

MIKE TURNER: Yeah. Yeah. And, again, you're right. It does follow on from that last idea. So my challenge here is if you are a product owner, a line of business product owner, of course your world is focused around your product. That's the way you're asked to behave. And you will be responsible for the profit and loss of that product. You'll be responsible for the way in which that product goes to market.

Now, here's the challenge. What we typically do when that is our problem is we look at actions or trigger points that entice a customer to buy our product. And again, look at the language here. It's a product-centric language.

Where we need to switch to, and where we are seeing some customers switch to, and particularly startups, who don't come with that legacy, is to think about, well, actually, what does my customer want next? How do they want to engage? What channel do they want to come in through?

What do they want to talk to me about? What is it? Is it service communication? Doesn't have to be a product or a selling communication. Is it information? Is it sharing? Is it-- what is it they're doing?

And if you think about it from that perspective, you think about the idea that traditionally, actions are driven off of a set of behaviors we want the customer to exhibit. Engagement is understanding what the customer is doing and responding to it.

BRIAN ALFOND: Mm-hmm. I know that when we had a conversation a while ago about different engagement, or even loyalty models, I'm curious, from a generational standpoint-- we talked about this. You and I think are solidly in Gen X. And I don't think we're used to thinking about anybody thinking about what we want, right? We're Gen X. We grew up latchkey kids.

It's interesting for me to engage with an organization that does actually seem to be curious about how I want to interact with them. I'm having a recent experience with an auto insurer to fix some damage on a car. And I never thought I would have a pleasant experience trying to get a quote to fix my car. But they've met me on my terms.

Starting with, OK, I went through their app and took the pictures. But I can talk to somebody if I want to on the phone. The whole interaction-- they have met me where I've wanted to be.

And there hasn't been that, oh, we're just going to cut you a check. It's, are you OK? What can we do to make you happy? What can we do to make you whole? I'm not used to being treated this way by my own family, let alone by another company.

And I'm wondering-- sorry. I didn't mean to be quite so flip there. But I'm wondering if maybe the expectations of subsequent generations are helping to drive this realization. Because certainly, it's driving the behavior.

MIKE TURNER: I think you're probably right. And yeah, you're right. We are of a generation where we're used to maybe not receiving that level of service or that level of interaction.

So I think you hit on an interesting challenge. And the challenge for anybody looking at an experience-based model is what are the drivers of individual need of experience? So we see generations that come after ours are very comfortable in digital worlds. And we hear the term that they want to engage in digital first, or that they're mobile only or mobile first, and so on and so forth.

I think engagement is much more than that. It's about the experience. And you just articulated that in your experience. It's what is that empathy that you are showing through that engagement and making it real. You can't fake this stuff.

You can't nominally say, well, hey, Brian. Sorry about the accident. How are you feeling? And then you respond by saying, well, awful. You know, I've got whiplash. I got this problem. I got that. And then go, yeah, yeah. That's fine. About your claim-- that doesn't work. It doesn't gel with the customer.

So I think empathy and engagement and this whole idea of real world interaction is driven from what we see in the behavior of those Gen Zed, Gen X individuals, in a world where they have taken to generating their own content, sharing their own content.

And if you look at the way people share, they're on Instagram, YouTube, et cetera. It's about peer resolution of that data. Do people enjoy what they're putting out? If they don't, they change it. They move. They flow with it.

If you think about action versus engagement, actions are very rigid. They fall apart. So you either stay on the path, or you drop out of the process. Engagement-- we have to flow with the customer. We have to move with them.

And that links back to that problem of data. How do we sustain enough data around content, around messaging, around information to share with those customers, in order to make that dream a reality? And the only way we can do that is to utilize some of these much-lauded AI or scalable solutions using mathematics or engineering at the bottom end to do that. Because no company can hold one million concurrent conversations with human beings. It's not feasible. We have to rely on technology to support this ambition.

BRIAN ALFOND: Yeah. And that's not-- it's not necessarily easy. It should be a little bit challenging. What you're doing is hard. But if you get it right, I think the rewards are there both for the organization and for the customer.

MIKE TURNER: They are. But again, you think about the modern companies we see out there, the organizations that are out there that are doing these sorts of things, the one challenge with this is when you get it wrong, it becomes very visible to everybody that you've got it wrong.

So with a next best action, I've never in all of my years, 30 years of marketing, I have never had a customer ring up and complain about the marketing message they didn't know they didn't want.

BRIAN ALFOND: [LAUGHS]

MIKE TURNER: OK?

BRIAN ALFOND: True. True.

MIKE TURNER: When we're talking about engagement, we're dealing with real emotions, real people. And if we respond with the wrong step, we take that conversation in the wrong direction because of this media awareness of these programs and the way in which we interact, if we get that wrong it's very public. It's very open. And it's very much in that general highlight. So we've got to be careful about what we're asking these marketing mechanisms to do, what we're asking them to support.

BRIAN ALFOND: And I love that you said conversation because I always think of marketing as just a conversation. And when we're having a conversation, you know it's-- we are aware as human beings of all of that ancillary data of the context, of the surroundings, of the weather. We're just taking that in automatically. And, of course, in the marketing world we're using data and machines to do that. But it's the same concept, right?

You want to have a-- you want to listen. You want to understand where you're going. And when it goes wrong on the engagement side of things, it goes really wrong.

I mean, I can't help but draw the pun to the YouTube video of the guy getting on his knees in an engagement with his girlfriend at a ballgame and her running away. That's gone publicly really, really wrong. He misread some data along the way there. And yeah. I understand what you're saying about the engagement model can go wrong.

But I think what would help, and this kind of relates to your first point, is the brands or the organizations themselves need to be authentic. It can't be a cynical approach to customer engagement. They need to have an authentic sense of who they are and what the customer should be expecting from them.

And that ties into a little bit about one thing, one area where organizations are trying to be authentic. You're talking about sustainability, becoming more marketing mainstream. And when we talked previously as well, it can be a loaded term.

But I really loved the way that you kind of defined it and talked about it, especially from a brand to consumer point of view, which was not a question. It was a dot, dot, dot to let you pick it up from there.

MIKE TURNER: [LAUGHS] Yeah. And look, I think-- this is an area that I'm quite passionate about. And I hate being greenwashed. It's a lovely term.

But there are so many companies out there that you can almost imagine the conversation in the boardroom. We need a sustainability structure. We need a sustainability message. Great. What do you do for a living? Well, we consume electricity faster than any country in the world. Great. So this is going to be a hard sell.

BRIAN ALFOND: Yes.

MIKE TURNER: And it's very easy with the availability, the openness, the sharing of information, the knowledge that's out there, the wonders of the web and where that's going, for people to get found out very, very quickly. And I think when organizations talk about sustainability, they can't just have a marketing message around sustainability. It has to be a whole company strategy.

So we have a client at SAS, a well-known client, Levi. Levi's are fantastically aware of the damage that creating denim does-- the amounts of water it uses, the dyes, the reconstruction of items like zippers or buttons or poppers or various bits and pieces.

And so when they looked at the problem, they didn't start with, hey, let's talk to customers about how green our products are, not meaning the color. But they talked about changing a business model from a linear business model to a circular business model. How do we create a model that allows us to bring in a quantity of raw materials?

And then how many times can we create garments, recycle them, give them a second life, bring them back, disassemble them, and ethically, either reuse or dispose of those materials? Now, no marketing strategy in the way-- in the world, rather-- is going to replace that need for creating the business model that means sustainability.

And the other big challenge for me on sustainability is what does it mean to an individual customer? So we're back to the issue we just talked about. If I'm communicating with an individual customer, and I talk to that customer, and I say, hey, here is a locally sourced product. What does that mean?

To one customer that could mean within the same county, within the same state. To another customer that could mean within five miles of the store. And so we can't disengage these four concepts. They fit together, and they rely on one another to drive these different strategies.

And I think that really is the key to this. It's underpinned by data. It's underpinned by technology scalability. But if you want to create sustainable products, you've got to change the business model to be sustainable as well.

BRIAN ALFOND: Yeah. It's not just lip service, right? I like that. So really, you're using data about what your customers desire to drive your whole product development. I mean, you might even have crowdsourced it using the metaverse before. It is very-- it's very cyclical. I do love that.

Well, this seems like a good place kind of to bring it back to the present from the prediction side of things. And thanks, Mike, for your time and insights today. And it'll be interesting to look to see how these trends work their way through the customers that you and I both work with in the coming years.

So ladies and gentlemen, if you enjoyed today's show, or even if you didn't, you can head on over to sas.comreimaginemarketingpodcast-- that's all one word-- and join in the conversation. You can subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast platforms too. Just search for Reimagine Marketing. And if you have a topic or guest ideas, please email us at reimaginemarketingpodcast@sas.com where Reimagine Marketing podcast is all one word.

I appreciate you listening. And I hope you'll consider joining me next time. Until then, this is Brian Alfond for Mike Turner, hoping all the important things in your life are good.