Data Tracker: Expect the unexpected

Five technology-driven changes in the marketing environment will lead to a different outcome

Five technology-driven changes in the marketing environment will lead to an outcome that is different from what marketers may have previously expected, research analytics firm Gartner predicts, in a study on the big changes in marketing in the year ahead. To stay ahead, “marketing leaders must tune their antennae to the signals of change and resist accepted wisdom if they aim to benefit from what technology transformation has in store for them,” said Charles Golvin, research director, Gartner for Marketers in the report

1. Twenty per cent of brands will abandon their mobile apps by 2019

1. Despite significant investment and hopes for positive return on investment (RoI), mobile applications are not paying off for many brands. Competition for consumers is high amid the millions of options offered in app stores, and apps are expensive to support. By the end of 2018, the cost of marketing a non-game application as a function of the number of downloads will at least double

Action: Assess the mobile marketing strategy against the ‘mobile-centric’ and ‘mobile-extender’ strategies; measure app performance against original RoI calculations

2. Ad blocking will increase advertising effectiveness by 50 per cent by 2019

1. Brands and consumers are caught between ad blockers and publishers. Today’s ad blockers are not very selective about which ads they block, and publishers try to engineer workarounds to show their ads. Unconventional strategies will emerge as a result of the unsustainable cat-and-mouse game between ad-blocking software and publishers 

Action: Elevate the importance of choice in consumer experience, communicate with users about what data is collected about them and how sharing data benefits them and segment the audience according to customers’ privacy preferences

3. 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality by 2020

1. Retailers and brand marketers deploy AR applications to enhance the shopping experience. The heightened emphasis on customer experience means that by the end of 2017, one in five leading global retail brands will use AR to enhance the shopping process

Action: Engage customers in a way that is unique to the AR experience; don’t duplicate an experience that customers can get better, faster or more conveniently via another medium

4. Virtual agents will participate in a majority of commercial interactions by 2020

1. Digital platform providers such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are creating new business ecosystems through cutting-edge conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to attract consumers. As marketers experience pressure to invest in virtual agents, they’ll struggle with the complexity of how to train and deploy AI agents effectively. Because virtual personal assistants  will mediate access to consumers, agent-to-agent proxy web interactions will be crucial marketing elements that marketers will need to consider.

Action: Develop an overall understanding of the broad role of AI in marketing, pay particular attention to how interactions among AI systems — both within and outside your organisation — might disrupt marketing at many levels

5. Twenty per cent of global 2000 CIOs will report into marketing by 2020

1. Marketing organisations have primary or substantial responsibility for driving company growth. The marketing mandate is broad and highly dependent on technology. Eighty-one percent of organisations now have a chief marketing technologist (CMT) in name or role equivalent. As marketing begins to own or drive customer-facing and revenue-centered functions, the CMT and CIO roles will begin to merge

Action: To align the CMO with IT, review the marketing technology resources, governance and operations relative to the corporate IT resources. Assess the current alignment among IT, marketing and overall business objectives

Source: Gartner Predicts 2017: Marketers, Expect the Unexpected,   

Reprinted with permission from Gartner