Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, the world’s largest retailer, once said: “We don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help people make great purchase decisions.”
With mobile and digital technology fast becoming an integral part of everyone’s daily life, brands worldwide are fast catching up to reach out to their customers and to influence their purchasing decision.
From customer insights, analytics to Big Data, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, technology has found its deep roots in marketing. On top of that, the merging of buyers’ online, offline and in-person buying experiences means retailers are coming up with a successful omnichannel strategy.
But are marketers in the GCC region adopting the best technological ways to market to their customers? Are their customers technologically engaged? Gone are the days when buyers simply bought any product for its utility.
Today, omniscient consumers are aspiring for more, prompting the brands to reach out and engage with their customers where they are and build a lasting relationship with them.
An Ericsson research, titled ConsumerLab TV & Media Report, which surveyed 1.1 billion consumers, reveals that today’s consumers are largely moving to mobile video.
It notes that there is a massive scale of growth in mobile video viewing as the weekly share of time spent watching TV and video on mobile devices has grown by 85 per cent in the last six years.
Average viewing times on mobile devices has grown by more than 200 hours a year since 2012, driving up overall TV and video viewing by an additional 1.5 hours a week. The surge in mobile viewing is offset by a decline in fixed-screen viewing of 2.5 hours a week. Despite this, the appetite for TV and video is not waning.
Another report supporting how Internet-savvy consumers are becoming is from Winning the Moments that Matter, by Think with Google MENA (citing Google Internal Data, US, 2015).
In the past three years alone, the study reveals, multi-screen media consumption has increased by 500 per cent, with 90 per cent of web users moving between devices to complete a task, whether it’s to shop, plan a trip or browse content.
Changing digital Landscape
Marketers today are living in a time when their customers don’t have patience to spend time looking for answers; they brands to take care of that. How can brands make the most of this opportunity? What does this shift to marketing in a digital age mean for Middle Eastern brands? Consider the region’s retail sector, which finds itself in an era of dynamism and change. While consumers still appear to favour in-store shopping, the digital commerce market is dramatically altering the way they behave.
A report by Booz Allen Hamilton says that in developed markets, such as the US, the arrival of services such as True Fit (a computer program that crunches large amounts of data to predict the size and fit of garments for each individual consumer) and Trunk Club (a site that employs a stylist to pick out clothes based on customer preferences, before mailing them directly to the shopper) has increased the comfort and convenience of shopping online, taking the personalised experience once only available in brick-and-mortar stores and making it available to everyone through e-commerce.
With such technologies now in place, shopping services such as Amazon Prime, Google Express and Instacart are taking the customer experience further by closing the instant gratification gap between e-commerce and in-store shopping.
Again, the emergence of online giants such as eBay, Amazon and Alibaba has created an expectation of excellent and instantaneous service when shopping online. By leveraging the power of data analytics, Walmart’s efforts in extracting and acting upon important insights have resulted in a significant increase in e-commerce sales. Walmart collects an average of 400 terabytes of unstructured data from one million customers every minute. It also receives nearly 300,000 mentions on social media per week.
Disruptive evolution
So are brands based in the Middle East prepared to embrace digital disruptions?
It goes without saying that many leading regional retailers in the region have modified their structures and strategies, incorporating digitisation in general and customer analytics in particular, as key enablers rather than supporting capabilities.
For example, Majid Al Futtaim, the leading shopping mall, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East and North Africa, relies on continuously measuring customer needs and developing a single view of the customer – a ‘Golden Customer Record’ – across its 13 business units.
This allows the company to understand and predict customer behaviour, focus its marketing campaigns and, by doing this, positively impact customer experience and satisfaction.
The Booz study adds that the benefits of such services are yet to be fully embraced –and indeed be made available – in the region.
However, research indicates that 43 per cent of Middle Eastern consumers report making purchases online at least once a month, while statistics from euromonitor International indicate that e-commerce as a whole grew 21 per cent in MENA between 2011 and 2015.
Further, 66 per cent of MENA consumers use the Internet to research products and services before visiting stores according to a Wamda research.
“Next-generation social and digital marketing strategies are based on an in-depth understanding of customer behaviour throughout the retail shopping journey and even beyond. Using advanced data science and customer analytics, organisations are disruptively evolving their digital services from mass offerings (mass marketing, everything for everyone), to personalised (personalised marketing), to predictive (personalised predictive marketing),” says Booz Allen Hamilton’s vice-president Danny Karam.
Having the proper customer analytics capability as well as an unstructured data analytics technology environment, he adds, allow retailers to tap into the deluge of Big Data streaming from their customers’ social media exchanges and derive meaningful and actionable insights.
According to a report by marketreportshub.com, despite challenges relating to privacy concerns and organisational resistance, Big Data market investments continue to gain momentum throughout the globe.
In 2016, Big Data market vendors will pocket more than $46 billion from hardware, software and professional services revenues. Big Data investments are further expected to grow at a CAGR of 12 per cent over the next four years, eventually accounting for more than $72 billion by the end of 2020.
Experts say that in the Middle East region, however, many of the marketing pros are yet to get themselves ready to handle Big Data and tech disruptions.
“I think there’s a lack of marketers challenging themselves to do something different with Big Data; they tend to go for the safe approach.
The opportunity available to do something special is far greater than many are willing to do,” says the client services director of Prototype, Elias Markopoulos.
The same is true when it comes to adopting omnichannel strategy in the GCC region, he adds: “The main challenge is getting the support of the board while hiring the right talent that understand and can implement omnichannel strategies. I feel that, in some cases, organisations have lost sight of doing what’s right for the customer and don’t spend enough time using the data available to them to help customers make educated decisions.”
The managing director – UAE Group at FP7 UAE, Sasan Saeidi, agrees: “Marketers have already adopted an omni-channel strategy, but only some are doing it right and really ensuring that the content they are producing is fit for the purpose and helping their brand experience be connected through the right dots and messages.”
Are marketers connecting digitally?
Things are however changing for good, both from the customer as well as brand perspectives.
“We’re fortunate here in the GCC to host some of the most tech-savvy customers anywhere in the world. Our customers’ high Internet and mobile penetration rates are a natural incentive for our marketers to experiment with and adopt new technologies,” says the vice-president, marketing and communications, IBM Middle East and Africa, Gregory Ellevsen.
The senior solutions consultant at Sitefinity – Progress, Grisha ‘Greg’ Karanikolov, adds: “What I’ve noticed is that, especially in the GCC region, people have stopped jumping into every new trend, but carefully and wisely analyse the impact, cost and efficiency of every new twist of marketing tools, channels and approaches.”
He says marketing pros from the GCC already have the right mindset and the right skills in place: “All they need to start doing is challenge the traditional approach that we’ve all gotten used to and see things from a different perspective. There are already tools that can help with this and facilitate changing the game very, very quickly.”
According to the Think with Google MENA report (citing data from Ipsos’ Moments that Matter Research, June 2015, UAE), 38 per cent of consumers in the UAE said they had discovered new products or brands while watching online video. Also, 85 per cent of web users in the UAE use YouTube when trying to find out how to do something.
Although most of them have a rough idea of what they want to find, just 18 per cent of consumers researching on a Smartphone have pinned down the exact brand or product when they start their journey online.
Another interesting finding was that 75 per cent of consumers in the UAE who researched products on their Smartphones have thought about purchasing a brand they would not normally consider because of relevant information available on their device at that time.
“This provides a huge opportunity for advertisers to aid brand discovery and shape preferences early in the purchase journey with search, online video and display ads across the web,” the Think with Google MENA report said.
Demographic targeting is just the tip of the iceberg; today, brands can go much deeper by leveraging signals – focusing on real and recent online user behaviour, rather than speaking to audiences based only on what might be known about their age, gender and claimed interests, it added.
Miles to go
However, despite the changing consumer preferences in the region, experts accept without mincing words that the MENA region is still lagging behind in data science capabilities and is still relying on importing these from either Europe or the US.
“Most retailers in the region have not yet fully embraced the power of customer analytics to better target customers and by proxy enhance the customer experience. A cohesive team composed of data architects, data scientists, business analysts and retail industry experts should provide end-to-end expertise and support an actionable customer analytics strategy,” reasons Danny Karam of Booz.
Most organisations, he says, are still unclear about the value data analytics can bring and are reluctant to dip their feet in the water before engaging into any sort of analytics program.
IoT and other disruptive technologies are still in their infancy stages and are more prototypes for retailers to concern. Within a year or two some of these technologies will make their way to products for retailers to further enhance the predictive nature of their customer digital services.
The head of revenue, MENA region for Twitter, Benjamin Ampen, emphasises the need for key shifts in the mindset of brands despite the fact that the rapid growth of the ICT sector has created an unprecedented opportunity for brands to build relationships with customers in new, and more authentic, ways.
He says a brand’s tone of voice should be adapted to the platform that it’s engaging its customers on. Although logos are now able to talk to people, these logos should in fact sound like people, to create an unintrusive experience for the customer when exposed to these ads.
“One example would be a Twitter ad product that we call Conversational Ads; this is where Promoted Tweets include a call-to-action button with a campaign hashtag to encourage retweets.
For example, clients like Jeep used the format recently in the region. The copy can read anywhere from ‘Show us how you #getouthere’ to ‘Choose your allegiance #BatmanvSuperman #BattleOfTheRenegades vote now!’, sounding ‘conversational’,” he adds.
Another challenge, he elaborates, is adapting different creatives when applying them to digital. This may sound obvious, but at a time where video content is most popular in terms of consumption, video formats (such as those used in TV) need to be adapted into a specific digital format when used online (such as desktop and mobile).
And finally, Ampen says, the biggest challenge may be that what is best practice one day may not be the case in a matter of weeks. Refining strategies, campaigns and creatives in real-time requires an iterative process and therefore actively monitoring and reacting to campaign performances is key.
A campaign for example might work exceptionally well with one target group so a shift in budgets may be required mid-campaign.
From a regional perspective, although ICT is widely available across the globe for marketers, the digital experience itself varies from one market to another.
Online networks and platforms are still considered conveyors but what they convey should be adapted to the region; it’s not one-size-fits-all.
For example, Twitter, a global company headquartered in the US, has very high adoption in Saudi Arabia.
This is because people in Saudi Arabia have made it their own by creating Arabic content specific to their culture. Once people make it their own, brands then build on these nuances and start talking to people; as part of a Saudi-driven conversation, Ampen adds.
In terms of where, he says brands should be on mobile. Brands should follow their customers and, in this day and age, customers are almost always connected to their mobile phones, on different platforms.
In terms of how, brands should communicate with customers in real-time. Having conversations in real-time with customers through their mobile devices will ideally drive what all marketers want, he concludes.
However, this raises another aspect related to privacy and security of digital data that needs to be plugged, say experts.
“I believe that the number one disadvantage of ICT in the region, which is no different than the rest of the world, is privacy and security. As companies move quickly to cloud-based ICT platforms, they risk security and information privacy challenges,“ says the global director – digital of Publicis Media, Brayden Ainzuain.
Another disadvantage of using ICT for businesses, he says, is the sheer number of options that businesses have to communicate. “Before, we heavily relied on phones and emails to do our business. Nowadays the options are countless. Since we have so many choices, you create inefficiencies in the market – there are companies that have moved fully to platforms like Slack and others that still communicate via email only. This creates a market disadvantage as people who work together may be using email, Slack, Basecamp, WhatsApp, GoToMeeting and Facebook Workplace to run their businesses,” he adds.
All in all, brands and marketers in the GCC region are developing a customer base by adding purposeful, meaningful and honest value for consumers through technology.
Nevertheless, they need to communicate with customers scalably and cost-effectively and help customers make a purchase decision on a personalised basis.
This way digital and ICT can help brands and marketers reawaken and deliver a strong long-term competitive advantage.
Interview:
“Brands should have adequate understanding”
Sasan Saeidi, managing director – Group UAE, FP7 UAE, says a lot of brands think they are doing omni-channel marketing, but they are actually implementing a multichannel approach.
Are you seeing brands in the GCC and the broader Middle East implementing adequate social and digital marketing strategies? if not, what more needs to be done?
It’s no secret and every single media industry and business publication is and has been talking about the growth of digital and social business year on year; 2016 has not been any different. The focus on digital has been even more evident and today digital and social investment for a lot of major clients can be more than 30 per cent of their total marketing budget. With all this said, we are still way behind certain markets like the UK and the US, where more than half of their advertising spends go into digital.
Brands should have an “adequate” understanding of the effective usage of digital and social platforms when it comes to their communication and how via good content and smart content – I repeat, smart content – they can reach their audience in a much more measured and cost effective manner.
Are all brands doing this today? No. The reasons are plenty: the lack of education on both client and agency sides, bad marketing, bad advertising, fear of doing things differently, the strive for “sameness” resulting in lack of innovation… These are just a few causes. More so, there needs to be more focus and more investment by agencies into digital/social video content and partnerships.
Facebook and Google own the media space today and they are already into a lot of content development themselves for brands. Where does that leave creative agencies? Agencies need to step up their effort and ensure they truly become publishers of brand content and are able to create fast, innovative and cost-effective ideas at scale. This should be a KPI for all creative agencies in the region.
And so all these steps and changes are needed in order to raise the region’s digital and social profile year on year.
What are the challenges marketers face in adopting omni-channel strategy in the GCC region?
Omni-channel is when a brand uses each platform to provide a seamless experience for the consumer; with consistent messaging, look and feel, and brand purpose, but executionally different where applicable. A lot of brands think they are doing omni-channel marketing but they are actually implementing a multichannel approach, which is not the same thing.
A multi-channel strategy just aims to use as many platforms as possible to connect with customers. In these cases, the customer lacks a seamless experience and consistent messaging across each of these channels. In most cases, the consumer is exposed to bad or incorrect content and content that is merely directly adapted for size and spec from one medium to the other and pushed out through massive frequency.
This results in ineffective communication, disintegration, fragmentation of marketing efforts and a lot of frustration for the consumer. The biggest challenge is that we need stop adopting a media approach to disseminating content and, rather, choose a creative one.
It’s not how many channels we need to plaster our idea on; its understanding what our brand objective and challenge are, coming up with a “smart” creative solution that directly helps it and then taking a step back and looking at the consumer journey and how each channel can be adopted to convert and create the necessary brand experience. But all of this must be done simply.
Interview:
A seismic change
Gregory Ellevsen, vice-president, marketing and communications, IBM Middle East & Africa
How ICT-savvy are marketers in the region? Do they need to catch up with the rest of the world?
The marketing profession globally is undergoing a seismic change. New technology is finally enabling us to achieve our goal of engaging with customers as true ‘segments of one’.
In a global context, we’ve all barely left the “starting line” in what will be a much longer race towards scientific, data-driven marketing – marketing derived from deep individual insight, consistently and automatically delivering highly personalised communication to every customer, driving superior customer engagement and loyalty.
So, here in the Middle East, we have a relatively equal opportunity – along with our global peers and competitors – to embrace, learn and grow.
Even at this early stage, we are seeing some of them moving more aggressively to gain a competitive advantage from MarTech (marketing technology) than others. Interestingly, the early adopters aren’t always the biggest brands or category leaders.
Many are challenger brands, using technology to seize more than their share of growth. That in turn is putting pressure back on the established companies to use technology and their customer data to develop deeper relationships and new revenue streams.
How can marketers in the GCC region use ICT effectively in their marketing strategies to help them stand out from the competition?
MarTech has a huge – and increasing – array of applications, from customer insight to omnichannel campaign automation. We’ve even started using artificially intelligence (AI) as sales reps, customer service reps and soon, marketing assistants.
It starts with data.
Marketers used to be constrained to using only the information they could cobble together from disparate internal systems or acquire through market research. Just collating and trying to make sense of it was a major time sink.
Now, we have intelligent agents that can collate “unstructured data” from across all of these sources, correlate it with social media data, weather data and other facts about our markets, and come up with completely new insights and revenue opportunities.
Once we’ve acquired new customers, we can also use technology to understand them on a more deeply individual level, predicting their future needs and automatically serving them always-relevant, highly customised offers and communications.
Technology is also helping us overcome budget and resource challenges. (Let’s face it, there’s never enough money or marketing staff to execute all the great marketing ideas we have!) Through detailed performance metrics, MarTech is helping us optimize our campaign ROI, and free up budget that might otherwise have been wasted.
Most importantly, from my perspective, campaign automation is freeing up more time of our time to think about our brand strategies, value propositions, customer journeys and engagement.
I mentioned AI. At IBM just last month we unveiled Watson Marketing, a way of using our Watson Artificial Intelligence to do everything from segmenting our markets to developing, executing and optimising our campaigns.
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