Today, the average campaign response rate is less than 1 percent and with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), traditional marketing is wading into troubled waters because the waves of strategic campaigns, the retargeting, the real-time media buying, and personalized emailing are not moving the marketing needle as they used to. The robotization of shopping and marketing is changing how brands compete for consumers. The real opportunity in marketing today lies in redefining the customer relationship rather than in cutting costs.

In the future, humans might only be needed in the consumption phase of the buying cycle and purchasing decisions could be left to IoT-connected bots that order products for the customer. These products will then be delivered by anticipatory systems that understand when orders are to be made. For companies to succeed in this environment they need to make the marketing, ordering, and delivering process as seamless as possible, not just for the humans who will consume the products but also for the bots who will order them. 

Published November 2021

Capacity planning or capacity management is the process of determining the production needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products and services. For marketing departments, the key to capacity management is to counterbalance the right number of users and the right performance at peak usage to ensure a great end-user experience. Rather than waiting for a dream solution to materialize, marketers need to find a system that enables them to make better decisions and support those decisions with verifiable data.

The Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report showed that organizations were wasting 30 percent of their cloud spend. IT capacity planning, which involves estimating the storage, computer hardware, software, and connection infrastructure resources required over some future period of time, should be able to help reduce wasted capacity. A common concern of enterprises is whether the required resources are in place to handle an increase in users or the number of interactions. Capacity management is concerned with adding CPUs, memory, and storage to a physical or virtual server. This has been the traditional and vertical way of scaling up web applications, however, IT capacity planning has been developed to forecast the requirements for this vertical scaling approach. In the context of capacity planning, design capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization is capable of completing in a given period. In a nutshell, capacity planning aims to reduce unnecessary resources while utilizing necessary resources at full optimization.

This paper explores a capacity planning solution that can predict upcoming costs with advanced predictive analytics and forward-thinking what-if scenario modeling that can produce a healthy ROI as well as help companies go green.

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We seem to be living in the age of AI. Everywhere you look, companies are touting their most recent AI, machine learning (ML), and deep learning breakthroughs, even when they are far short of anything that could be dubbed a breakthrough. Unfortunately, this excitement can’t always be translated into quantifiable success; only 1-in-3 AI projects turn out successful, and it can take up to six months to go from concept to production. These odds might be low, but they and well worth it because the potential payoff could be huge if one chooses to forgo the rules-based way and take the much more effective AI-powered way. AI can be broken down into five different types – sound, time series, text, image, and video – and it can be used in everything from CRM, ecommerce, customer recommendations, security, voice assistance, and Natural Language Processing for customer understanding.

Today, AI needs to be the basis for a level of customer personalization that will not only be recognized but soon be demanded by fickle customers everywhere. Today, it is imperative for brands to utilize AI in their marketing because it allows them to have both a single view of the customer as well as a single view of their media.

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The days of China simply being a country that copies, pirates and counterfeits US and European technology is coming to end. Platforms like social and mobile are at the forefront of China’s current technological revolution. We are truly living in an interconnected world and this interconnectedness is creating a whole host of ways to market a product and/or a service. Chinese blogs, micro-blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds are leading this new technological revolution. Companies like WeChat, QQ, Weibo, Hexun, Youku, Jiepang, Qieke, Ushi, Taobao and Ku6 are all experiencing exponential growth.

In China, the competition for consumers is incredibly fierce, especially in the social media space. This competition, however, does have a dark side: many companies regularly employ ‘artificial writers’ to seed positive content about themselves online and attack competitors with negative news they hope will go viral. On the e-commerce front, Taobao has formed a synergistic partnership in which store owners on Taobao create accounts on Weibo and utilise it as a channel to market their products and communicate with customers. On the virtual social world front, China might also be leading the world with sites like yy.com, which have figured out a way to monetise karaoke. Technology has always moved at the speed of light, but today the barriers of culture, language and communication are falling by the wayside and China is finding itself at the forefront of this new technological revolution.

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In 1999, ’The Cluetrain Manifesto’ warned that ‘markets are conversations’. Finally, some 15 years later, software, hardware, mobile and social media vendors have come together to provide tools that allow companies to join and manipulate the conversation. This paper provides a quick overview of the available hardware and software solutions; a discussion of the in-memory landscape, including the strengths and weaknesses of the competing products; and a summary of the latest developments in the social media monitoring space. Given the importance of personalisation and one-to-one advertising for increasing traffic, raising customer conversion rates and increasing average order value, these systems can either be a company’s best friend or its worst enemy.

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While the traditional model of blasting messages to customers and potential customers is fading, a new model has emerged. The same customers who are tuning out the formulaic advertising messages of yesterday are now tuning in to their own personal world of social media for product and marketing advice. Being ‘social’ means being available for real-time marketing, real-time customer service and real-time user analytics. The combination of mobile and social media marketing is powerful because it represents an interactive cross-media channel that allows consumers to move instantly from ad placement to point of sale, anytime, anywhere. Together, mobile and social technology are not only transforming how people communicate with each other but also how advertisers and marketers are communicating with them. By mining conversations across multiple social channels, sentiment analysis can help create strategies and engage new customers, while also revealing important insights into a company and its products. This new reality offers a great opportunity to any company willing to step into the world of mobile and social media marketing.

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