The blog

Last Wednesday I attended the Uplift Virtual Summit by Insider, a series of keynotes on personalized e-commerce experiences with speakers from NASA, Prezi, and Loewe. We took to the virtual stage ourselves as well: Dennis De Cat, Growth Marketing expert and Managing Director of our sister company Upthrust, presented together with one of our clients, Torfs. He and the e-commerce Manager of the shoe brand, Karl Bosmans, discussed the set-up and results of a scalable growth process. Another talk that particularly caught my eye was the one by Accenture’s Xavier Cardon, who talked about the current challenges in retail and e-commerce. He was asked about the recent questions they’ve received as a consulting firm. His answer? Customer experience, customer experience, and customer experience. Since my consultant colleagues and I fully recognize this demand amongst our own clients and the market in general, I’ll deep-dive further into this topic with a specific focus on customer retention and the retail industry.

Growth experts Oliver McAllister, Eva Dillen and Alicia Bandinelli share their view on and experience with Growth Marketing.  How do we do Growth Marketing? What is so unique about our team? Watch the video and tap into the world of rapid experimentation! 👇📽️

Had you told your friends or family in 1997 that you were buying a car online, you would have got some strange looks or even been laughed at. But what’s the story today, 20 years down the road? Would they still be laughing? This is where we are right now: The growth of e-commerce has been unstoppable for many years now already. People of all ages love to shop online and can easily find anything on the web they want to buy immediately. And there is still a long way to go! With all the current technologies, this growth is expected to continue and even increase to unprecedented levels.

Today, disruption has impacted almost every aspect of business as a new relationship between companies and customers has taken center stage. The retail industry has been undergoing a radical shift over the past few years. Driven by reshaped customer expectations, the availability of data and the rise of new tools and technology, new business models or market dynamics have emerged. Just take automated stores, virtual showrooms or D2C (Direct to Consumer) models, for example, such as Dollar Shave Club (men’s beauty-care), Barkbox (pet utilities) or Casper (mattresses). The go-2-market has also been impacted, as the customer experience needs to be increasingly personalized: Consumers today are hooked on the real-time, customized world of digital landscape, while retailers have to reach them in new and exciting ways. On top of that, customers are demanding more sustainable businesses (shopping local, healthy food, cultural diversity)… raising new challenges for marketers in the retail industry. Enters corona… For some retailers it means filing for bankruptcy, for others it means coping with the growth by fixing internal processes,… for all it means showing resilience, creativity and courage to reinvent the way they work and adapt to this new reality. Corona has clearly accelerated some shifts in consumer behavior that retail marketers should take into account. We share 6 trends to get you started!

Content strategy, marketing automation, inbound channels – these topics aren’t new anymore. In fact, more and more companies are getting their hands dirty in content production, as they understand the power of developing a new, future-proof and strong sales engine. Having had the chance to work in different sectors on the development of content strategies myself, I’d like to take a moment to discuss the evolution of content strategy with some examples, but also actionable advice for you to act upon today.

Like most other festivals, Tomorrowland is a no-go in times of COVID-19. Instead of skipping a year, the organizers have launched a digital alternative taking place July 25th & 26th: "Tomorrowland around the world, the digital festival".  Via their computer, smartphone or tablet, visitors of all ages can explore the digital festival site and attend sets of their favorite artists. All stages are built in 3D, although DJs perform live. Even the fireworks and lazer shows are translated digitally. Nevertheless, Tomorrowland remains an unforgettable experience that can be considered as a corporate religion. To stay in this spiritual mindset, we summarize the important marketing lessons of this spectacular event as we've known it before corona came along – in the form of 10 commandments. For eons the 10 commandments have been an important source of inspiration for believers and even for non-believers… so why not use this to show you the way for all your marketing initiatives?

How can businesses continue growing, at least as fast as their competitors? These are undoubtedly amongst the main challenges of the remarkable year 2020 has become.

First things first: What does innovation actually mean? We describe it as creativity, yet the kind that creates business impact. Yes, innovation covers brainstorms about new ideas and technologies, but the key goal is to ensure sustainable growth. An innovation strategy enables you to introduce both small-scale and radical changes in your processes and offerings to provide customer experiences that can sustainably outperform your competition.

The COVID 19 crisis has rocked our entire world, both personal and professional. We might not all be experiencing it in the same way. But as marketers, most of us are affected in similar ways: Either our business is thriving, or we are confronted with a downturn in demand. Both call for a reassessment of marketing strategies. At such times, do you focus on short-term or long-term growth?

With an overload of tools and techniques to implement innovation at your company nowadays, we have made it easy for you: we have curated a list of 12 tools we think you might actually use and like.