Emerging technologies are poised to personalize the consumer experience radically—in real time and almost everywhere. It’s not too early to prepare.

reads the intro in McKinsey’s “The coming era of on-demand marketing” report. The topic at hand is a known one :

As new & emerging technologies (e.g. smartphones, NFC, augmented reality, social media, internet of things etc.) become an integrated part of our daily lives, companies must adapt to this new reality and figure out how to change and/or evolve the existing means of reaching out to and convincing prospective customers.

The report analyzes this in detail – it’s an interesting read. However for those in a hurry, looking for the gist, it recognizes the following three high level guidelines for companies in this new era:

1. “engaging customers in manifold new ways by designing interactions that are grounded in use cases” (Yes that’s the Engage-Engage-Engage mantra. For some examples take a look the previous posts discussing Loyalty schemes, innovative marketing campaigns, augmented reality )
2. “assembling data offering new lenses on the behavior of consumers by pulling together and evaluating all their touch points with a brand” ( nothing is complete these days without a BIG DATA reference 😉  I’ve been guilty of that reference in a previous post )
3. “developing new processes and skills across all functions (not just marketing) to transform the delivery of brand experiences” ( one of my favorite subjects – i firmly believe that this is the most important element, as discussed here for CMOs & CIOs or “Five_steps_to_better_relations_between_CFOs_and_CMOs” )

These should come as no surprise and are essentially topics that the entire Marketing / Advertising industry has already recognized and is actively debating (hence the links to previous article on my blog as well).

The following diagram puts all of the aforementioned elements into a “real life” example:

Read through the report, to understand how this new reality affects all of us. You’ll get to see two examples of how a major European Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and a Bank responded to this challenge.

As a bonus item see how the Digital technology is shaping all markets and categories in the following chart (taken from McKinsey’s “Tough_choices_for_consumer-goods_companies” report)

Are you already moving towards this direction? How many of the three key elements are you actively addressing in your company?