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The buzz of Lacoste’s Capsule polo line replacing its iconic croco logo with endangered species sends a positive signal to all brands: sustainability can be sexy! Designed to cast attention to the fragile equilibrium of biodiversity at the Paris 2018 Fashion Week, the line sold out immediately. For Lacoste, ‘The Save Our Species’ polo shirts mark the beginning of a three-year partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Cynics will argue that Lacoste could work on a greener production line instead of selling polos. I asked myself the same question. But got pleasantly surprised when reading the brand’s extensive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitments. Next to Lacoste, Lego recently announced they’ll market a range of eco-friendly bricks made from responsibly sourced sugar cane. The group wants to reduce its plastic waste by fully replacing current raw materials with eco-plastic by 2030. Not later than this year you’ll be able to buy the first set of sustainable plant shaped collection…raise your hand if you want to be a child again! However, it is not just about owning a historical fashion item or some eco-friendly bricks. As marketers, we are sensitive about what customers want. Part of their expectations now includes a commitment from the brands they buy from on issues of general concern. The pull is dubbed by a push coming from employees who are themselves on the lookout for more purpose and positive impact in their jobs. Are we entering an economy of ethics? I’d dare to think so. Today the circular economy is in a full scale-up phase. While initially encouraged by smaller, somehow marginal actors, big players like Coca-Cola, Unilever, L’Oréal and Mars are joining the movement. OK, to be fair there has been a decent amount of pressure from world leaders at the Economic Forum in Davos asking multinationals to step in. But who doesn’t need to be pushed to start to change…? Ethics should be considered as a competitive advantage, a determining factor of choice between two comparable options for a picky customer. All organizations will have to confront sustainability. And this is not a boring nor a moralizing message anymore, but an exciting realm to explore. Winning on the 3Ps leads to opportunities such as supply chain optimization, employee retention, new product development at low CapEx and risk mitigation in the innovation funnel. But how? If CSR is only considered within organizations in an isolated manner, CSR will fail. Stories of customers discrediting shady make ups of multinationals got a lot of harmful press exposure (Shell, Coca-Cola,…). Sustainability needs to run in the corporation’s veins. What we see today is that many companies are still missing out because CSR is not integrated in key departments, namely marketing. The Lacoste and Lego stories are sexy because they are so cohesive with their respective corporate long-term vision. These brands understood how to integrate good causes into their brand building strategy in order to win on all 3Ps and have involved their marketing departments closely to get there.  CSR is not philanthropy. It starts with a clear business strategy. Social promises should meet business targets that are clearly communicated with internal and external stakeholders. No promises to be made before assessing how CSR investments support the organization’s objectives and practices. In this context marketing can be the guardian of market success by providing relevant customer insights and preserving the brand identity when integrating a CSR dimension. If no customer-centric thinking is applied to the roll-out of sustainability policies, it will not have the desired effect on the bottom line. The rise of viable sharing economy models as well as changing consumers’ and employees’ expectations create a positive climate to include more ethics into business models. Examples show that integrating sustainability factors can increasingly be achieved without compromise on financials targets and even reinforce brand equity. The most it takes is to start to look at things differently and find a cause that resonates with the brand’s core values. Adding this little effort, let’s make marketing make sustainability sexy and make sustainability a priority for marketing. As a marketer, I sign for it. And you?

Digital advertising allows you to measure (almost) everything, optimize quickly and provide great reports. This is especially useful when you are an active advertiser on platforms such as Facebook and Google. If you have a look at a campaign performance report your conclusions will probably be:

Creative assets ready. Media budget booked. Online campaign started. Online campaign ended. Results in mailbox. Key metrics presented to management. Repeat… More than often the routinely process of setting up a digital campaign has become a habit within marketing departments.  Especially when relying on an external agency for media buying parts, marketers tend to be less critical about the tactics behind their campaigns. But resting on your laurels won’t increase conversion rates. Are you your agency’s most docile client never asking for change? When you are contemplating, your competition is acting. Result: your leads convert elsewhere. Sad.

Lightening bugs transform chemical energy into light in a process coined bioluminescence. The metamorphosis serves to attract mates and acts as a natural defense against predators. Glowing is thus a key survival feature for such insects that come out in the night. Looking at your network, have you ever noticed that some people seem to be positive energy magnets? Whenever I come across such individuals I can’t help it to imagine those persons ‘glowing’. They radiate a sense of openness and confidence that attracts peers and make you want to stick around. In a business context, they seem to find their way through any situation by deploying their charismatic personalities. Hence the question, is ‘glowing’ the key to informal authority?

In addition to being an enthusiastic marketer, I am, of course, also a consumer. Paying extra attention to promotions and marketing messages; I love to shop and am not afraid to buy online because it is easy, convenient and fast. Or maybe I’d better say: it should be easy, convenient and fast. I must admit that since I started shopping online, I have had my fair share of experiences where things did not go as smoothly as anticipated.

All good things come to an end, also our GDPR articles… But we would not close without a happy ending! In this last article, we describe our framework for managing GDPR compliancy which can be used across different industries and different levels of data privacy maturity. After reading, we hope you will be able to continue (… or to start) building your own GDPR roadmap within your organization. We promise to not blow you away with a revolutionary and complicated framework. Because we like to keep things clear and simple, we focus on a 4-step approach: (1) define your data protection strategy and describe your data processing activities (2) assess your level of compliance (3) set your priorities and (4) define the project plan towards GDPR compliance. 

The aim of this Point of View is to cut through the hype and see how marketers and AI can work hand-in-hand. In part 1, we listed a few areas of marketing where AI is already applied today . In this second part, we’ll give you some tips on how to get your company ready for AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with the Internet of Things (IoT) and Marketing Automation, is one of the technologies that marketers plan to use most in the coming two years.[1] AI can provide customers with a superior experience by allowing marketers to engage in a hyper-personalised and individual way. Machines can do incredible things and often be better than humans: think about IBM’s Deep Blue computer beating Kasparov at chess in 1997 or Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo’s victory over go star Lee Sedol in 2016. But despite what Elon Musk is saying, AI is not the Terminator-like machine that will one day dominate humanity and replace your (marketing) team. So, stop worrying and start getting excited. The objective of this Point of View is to cut through the hype and see how marketers and AI can work hand-in-hand. In part 1, we will start by listing a few areas of marketing where AI is already applied today. In part 2, we’ll give you some tips on how to get your company ready for AI. Artificial Intelligence Marketing As there is no way to write an exhaustive list of AI-powered marketing practices (this Point of View has not been written by a robot…), we will stick to four areas: Marketing automation Marketing automation lets computers do a variety of manual and repetitive tasks, it helps marketers save time, target prospects effectively and optimise different stages of the customer journey. As marketers, we already love marketing automation. But AI can take it to another level. According to a report[2] based on an analysis of over 235 million emails, the open rate for AI-powered emails was 228% better than that of the regular ones. How is that possible? Well, machine learning can run through countless of points of customer data and establish what the most effective times to make contact are, what words in subject lines are likely to speak to the audience – and much more.  Let’s take segmentation for example. In most cases, segmentation is done manually based on broad buckets such as personas. For “Women aged 30 to 40”, we can easily use a different subject line than for the “Men aged 50 to 60”. But what if you could personalise each and every email based on your customers’ interests, current location or even preferred time of receiving your communication? Wouldn’t that take the customer experience to another level?  Content marketing Algorithms can map thousands of data points, such as a user’s website experience, browsing data, time spent on a page and topics of interest with the aim of creating and recommending hyper-contextual content most relevant to that person. WordSmith, a natural language-generation platform, produced 1.5 billion pieces of content in 2016 and is expected to grow further in popularity in the coming years. WordSmith is capable of generating insightful content based on raw data (see how it works here). Spotify’s Discover Weekly is a good example of how AI can keep customers engaged and continuing to subscribe with personalised recommendations. Each week, Spotify’s 150 million users receive a curated list of 30 songs that they have never listened to before but will probably love. Most of the time, it is so relevant that you have the impression that the Spotify team has handpicked the songs just for you; what a great feeling! Predictive modelling Predictive modelling turns large amounts of data into tangible insights and predictions towards future actions. Propensity models can be trained with data you already have and cover a large range of areas in marketing, such as churn prediction, conversion probability and lead scoring[3]. For the latter, AI can learn to score leads according to defined criteria so the sales team knows whether those leads are worth devoting time to. Vidora.com puts AI in the hands of everyone within a company, from marketers to C-levels, by providing them with a simple platform for asking questions and using the answers to automate and optimise business[4]. Questions such as “Find all users 75%+ likely to churn & identify what new features should be sent to each over email” can be asked to Vidora. The algorithm will then run through the data and provide the requested list. Customer service interactions (chatbots) Chatbots, fuelled by AI, are dramatically changing customer service interactions. They seek to provide answers 24/7 to a demanding audience without them having to hunt down the information themselves. Chatbots can interpret consumers’ queries and complete orders for them. You might think that chatbots are extremely difficult to develop and only large corporations with massive budgets and a big team of geeks will be able to develop them. Think again: at The House of Marketing, we have developed a chatbot for a client where each jobseeker is asked a few questions before the bot shows a list of vacancies the jobseeker might be interested in. In the very near future, we will see chatbots moving from text to speech, providing a whole new way of interacting with companies. What a time to be alive! Now that you have seen some of the applications AI has to offer, you might want to start it off right away. Go to the second part of this Point of View and read about practical tips on how to get started with AI. References [1] Salesforce Fourth Annual State of Marketing - Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution [2] Boomtrain, The State of AI-powered email marketing in 2017 [3] Robert Allen, 15 Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing [4] Vidora on Crunchbase Here Is Why You Will Love AI In The Next 6 Mins AI is enhancing the roles of marketers in progressive companies 8 Ways Intelligent Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence

The GDPR requires controllers to keep a record of their processing activities (handling personal data).  Before the GDPR we were already aware of this concept in which a register had to be submitted to the CPP (Commission for the Protection of Privacy). However, let’s say it was a principle that was not always followed by many companies, or maybe at one point these processing activities were published but not kept up-to-date.  With the GDPR, you are no longer required to publish this register. For those of you who are already cheering because you think you have found a way out… wait for it…

A lot is happening in the world today and unfortunately it’s not all good news. War and violence make it into the headlines every day, climate change is real and threatening, the #metoo campaign showed that sexual intimidation is affecting women all around the globe. In short, the world is in a really bad state and our future doesn’t look so bright either.   But then it’s that time of the year again when love and warmth are everywhere and when we try to contribute more to society than we usually do. It’s not only on an individual level that we undertake all sorts of actions, but also brands are putting in an extra effort these days. Some of them even go a step further and do not restrict their efforts to the end-of-year period alone. This year, an increasing number of brands have included societal causes in their marketing campaigns. Look at the ‘We Accept’ campaign by Airbnb, in which the brand uses a specific tone to strengthen its commitment to diversity. Or how P&G promotes racial equality with its ‘The Talk’ commercial. This ad shows parents from an Afro-American background having “the talk” with their children about the difficulties of growing up as a minority in the U.S. Closer to home we have the collaboration between Alpro and WWF, in which the brand donates 10 cents for every bottle sold to support WWF in its battle against deforestation.