The blog

Have you taken your first steps into the magical world of business design thinking? This customer-centric approach to problem solving is omnipresent; however, you might find it difficult to get the hang of it. But don’t worry, in order to get you started right and well, we drafted a little cheat sheet with 8 business design thinking dos and don’ts. Let’s dive right in!

Hyper-personalization takes experiences to the next level. They are the result of personal, behavioral and transactional data processed in an intelligent way, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The combination of data and technology enables companies to provide an advanced one-to-one experience at scale.

While I was taking part in the Great Breweries Marathon last weekend, I realized that there are a lot of comparisons between running a marathon and setting up a Marketing Automation tool, so I listed the eight comparisons I saw (yes, during a marathon you have quite some time to think…).

We recently shared thoughts about business design thinking with Professor Marion Debruyne, Dean of Vlerick Business School and author of the award-winning book 'Customer Innovation', for our 16th Yearly Marketing Survey. Watch the video for her expert opinion about the innovative approach.

Dear Nathan, Zach and Adriana, You’re heartily welcomed into Generation Alpha – Digital Natives born after 2010!  Arriving in 2014, 2015 and 2018, you guys are definitely the newbies.  The title “Screenagers” is truly appropriate to describe you - Nathan, you learned how to turn the iPad/iPhone on and watch YouTube at only 8 months old – we would have never imagined!

Today, marketers are facing the challenges of increased competition, new distribution channels, proliferation of media channels and changing customer preferences, all of this to make data more scattered and more difficult to convert into meaningful information that supports decisions on how to allocate your marketing budget – and most importantly to measure and report the return on the investments made.  But it is possible to link information about customers needs, preferences, habits and behaviors across all channels to the performance of a business’s sales and marketing activities. It all comes down to making sure the right things are being measured and visualized. By defining and tracking your marketing KPIs on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, you as a marketer can act on the data to immediately improve marketing performance – and this is exactly where digital marketing dashboarding comes into play.

“The ocean is rising, but so are we”, “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic”, “I’ve seen better cabinets at IKEA”. The sight of young and old raising their voices and signs during climate protests has become a familiar one over the past months. And then there’s the latest #TrashTag challenge that has taken social media by storm. Initially targeted at bored teens, the action encourages people to share pictures of littered areas before and after clean-up. As society recognizes the environmental challenges we face, consumers are becoming more mindful of their buying behavior. The #TrashTag challenge.

Every year, numerous quantities of research try to estimate the size of the Belgian e-commerce market. Most of the time these high-level estimations are derived from the consumer perspective to tell the story on how Belgian e-commerce performs. We believe, however, that there are always two sides to a story, and that we should also pay attention to the merchants’ perspective. Therefore, The House of Marketing together with SafeShops.be explores this black hole of merchant-based facts through the E-commerce Barometer. As opposed to other research, the E-commerce Barometer brings forth accurate information on Belgian e-commerce based on real transaction data, in collaboration with payment service providers in Belgium. A payment service provider or PSP is a third party that facilitates and helps merchants in the acceptance of payments.

Customers are or should be, at the heart of every organization. We segment them to personalize our offering and approach them differently to satisfy their needs most efficiently and effectively. However, in this day and age, are we really doing the best we can? Are traditional segmentation techniques still the way to go, or are we missing something? We all want to get personal and communicate the right message at the right time at the right place to the right person. This is where traditional segmentation techniques might not be effective enough to enable organizations to offer this kind of personalized experience. We all understand the value of segmentation as a means to better target our effort, but should we continue using segmentation when technology and big data has paved the way for hyper-personalization and one-on-one offerings?

2019 will most likely be another year of growth for most organizations, as the global economy is on the rise. Many businesses, however, are already facing the next challenge: how can they grow faster, or at least as fast as their competitors?