Neuromarketing is a commercial marketing communication field that applies neuropsychology to market research, studying consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing stimuli. So far, neuromarketing is still an expensive approach that requires advanced equipment and technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), motion capture for eye-tracking, and the electroencephalogram.

The potential benefits to marketers include more efficient and effective marketing campaigns and strategies, fewer product and campaign failures, and ultimately the manipulation of the real needs and wants of people to suit the needs and wants of marketing interests.

Collecting information on how the target market would respond to a product is the first step involved for organizations advertising a product. Traditional methods of market research include focus groups or sizeable surveys used to evaluate features of the proposed product. Conventional research techniques used in this type of study are in general the measurement of cardiac electrical activity (ECG) and electrical activity of the dermis (AED) of subjects. However, it results in an incompatibility between market research findings and the actual behavior exhibited by the target market at the point of purchase. Human decision-making is both a conscious and non-conscious process in the brain, and while this method of research succeeded in gathering explicit (or conscious) emotions, it failed to gain the consumer's implicit (or unconscious) emotions. Non-conscious information has an enormous influence in the decision-making process.

In general, the concept of neuromarketing combines marketing, psychology and neuroscience. Research is conducted around the implicit motivations to understand consumer decisions by non-invasive methods of measuring brain activity. These include electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking, electrodermal response measures and other neuro-technologies. Researchers investigate and learn how consumers respond and feel when presented with products and/or related stimuli. Observations can then be correlated with participants surmised emotions and social interactions.

Market researchers use this information to determine if products or advertisements stimulate responses in the brain linked with positive emotions. The concept of neuromarketing was therefore introduced to study relevant human emotions and behavioral patterns associated with products, ads, and decision-making providing theorization of emotional aspects of consumer behavior. (Source: Wikipedia)

By MediaBUZZ

New advertising spend forecasts for 100 markets worldwide show that the global ad market has thus far largely weathered the impact of COVID-19 and is on course to reach a value of US$1trn in 2025, with more than half of this money paid to just three companies: Alphabet, Meta and Amazon.

This is according to WARC, the international marketing intelligence service, which publishes the findings as part of its new WARC Data Premium suite.

Following on from a meteoric 23.8% rise to a total of US$771bn this year – the strongest growth in WARC’s four decades of market monitoring – advertising investment is forecast to rise by a further 12.5% and 8.3% in 2022 and 2023 respectively, with e-commerce platforms set to lead this growth.

The findings are accompanied by a proprietary survey recently carried out for WARC's Marketer's Toolkit 2022, of 1,500+ marketing practitioners, which shows that two in three already committing budgets to Amazon are intending to increase that spend. A full 66% of advertising professionals are planning to up spend on TikTok next year, while YouTube (61% of surveyed practitioners), Instagram (60%) and Google (57%) are also set to benefit from higher spend in 2022.

Currently though, WARC finds that all product sectors are projected to top pre-COVID investment next year, while most sectors were able to record a full recovery this year. Notable exceptions include transport & tourism, which led growth with an absolute increase of $12.5bn this year but is still almost $2.9bn down on pre-pandemic spending levels.

“Despite potential headwinds, market data show that we are currently witnessing a boom in advertising trade like none seen before, led by increased demand for retail media and ancillary publishers such as Google and Instagram, which is now the world’s largest social platform. Our projections show that this trend is set to continue, with Alphabet, Meta and Amazon now on track to account for more than half of an advertising market worth $1trn in 2025”, James McDonald, Director of Data, Intelligence & Forecasting, WARC says. “New coronavirus variants – such as Omicron – may have a negative impact on our current outlook, and while our base scenario assumes that impact is muted, we will continue to review that position each quarter”, he concludes.

Trends by online media and format

• E-commerce: The sector is expected to lead growth to 2023, by when the market’s value will have more than doubled from 2020’s level to a total of $137.2bn. Growth in China’s advertising market is cooling but in the west it is booming, with Amazon on course to amass over $57bn in advertising revenue by 2023 (up 72% from this year and 308% from 2019, prior to the pandemic). Two in three practitioners already committing budgets to Amazon are intending to increase that spend, while heightened advertiser demand is pushing up the average cost-per-click. 
• Social media: This was the fastest-growing online sector in 2021, with spend rising 41.9% – or $55.7bn – to a total of $188.8bn this year. Instagram grew to become the largest social media platform in 2021 after overtaking the core Facebook platform for the first time. Instagram is forecast to grow to control over a third of the global social media market in 2023. TikTok saw ad revenue rise 151.5% this year and is expected to record growth of 75.4% in 2022. Two in three marketers surveyed by WARC say they intend to up spend on TikTok next year, the highest rate across all online platforms.
• OTT video: Premium online video platforms – aka over-the-top (OTT) – such as YouTube and Amazon Prime Video, were worth a combined $63.7bn to advertisers in 2021, up 41.6% from a year earlier. Further growth, of 19.7% and 14.2%, is projected during 2022 and 2023 respectively, with YouTube leading the charge and set to be worth $41.4bn by the end of the forecast period.
• Paid search: Alphabet is the world’s largest media owner and Google the largest individual platform: its advertising revenue rose by 40.6% to $146.3bn this year, taking 79.7% of all search spend and 19.0% of all advertising spend worldwide. Google’s growth is set to ease to 14.8% in 2022, though 57% of practitioners surveyed by WARC are planning to increase spend on the platform next year.
• Online audio: Advertising spend on online audio rose by a third to $5.4bn in 2021, with podcast spend up 50.9% and streaming up 28.4%. Both formats are expected to see gains to 2023, by when the online audio sector as a whole is expected to be worth $8.3bn. Spotify is one of the main players, it is set to see ad income top $2bn for the first time in 2023.    

Trends by legacy media and format

• TV: Advertiser spend – inclusive on linear TV and broadcaster catch up services – is projected to grow by 3.3% to $184.7bn in 2022 following a 5.5% rise this year. Linear TV is set to remain larger than OTT – services such as YouTube and Amazon Prime Video – for the duration of the forecast period, though its share of global ad spend will dip below a fifth as broadcaster’s video-on-demand (BVOD) services attract incremental dollars.
• Out of home: The market recorded a recovery of 21.8% this year, though that was not enough to offset the 28.2% decline recorded in 2020 as the coronavirus outbreak first brought the world to a standstill. The sector’s fortunes are heavily dependent on the possibility of future social restrictions in response to emerging variants, though currently growth of 13.3% is expected in 2022.
• Cinema: Spend was heavily curtailed in 2020 as cinema chains had to shutter in response to the outbreak, resulting in a 71.2% fall in advertiser investment. Spend rebounded strongly this year, buoyed by a new James Bond film, to record a rise of 149.9%. Further growth, of 26.1%, is currently projected for 2022 but, as with the OOH sector, this is provisional.
• Broadcast radio: Investment in broadcast radio ads rose by 8.4% – or $2.5bn – this year and is set to grow by 3.5% in 2022 and a further 1.5% in 2023, by when the market will be worth $34.3bn. Consequently, it is the only legacy medium set to record continuous growth over the forecast period.
• Newsbrands: Advertising spend on print and online news dipped by 4.0% this year, with an 8.9% rise for online platforms negated by a 7.4% decline among print titles. These trends are set to continue to 2023, resulting in online platforms accounting for 42% of total newsbrand ad revenue, up from a share of 31% today. 
• Magazine brands: As with the news sector, investment gains for online titles were not enough to stymie print losses. Consequently, the total market was down 6.6% in 2021, with a 6.1% dip forecast next year and a 5.2% fall expected in 2023. The online component of the total will grow continuously, however, to command a 49.6% share of ad revenue in 2023. 

Trends by product category (Five largest in 2022)

• Telecoms & utilities: Helped by its double-digit growth in 2020, telecoms & utilities is the first category to record advertising spend above the $100bn mark in a single year (2021). Strong investment in online advertising will help fuel further rises, leaving the vertical’s total level of spend in 2023 more than double the pre-pandemic figure in 2019.
• Business & industrial: Spend grew by a quarter in 2021 and a further increase of 13.4% to a total of $94.1bn is expected in 2022. Growth from business advertisers in 2023 will be the second-quickest rate across all categories, behind telecoms & utilities, and this brings total spend above $100bn. The sector includes a substantial amount of classified advertising within real estate and recruitment – two bellwethers of wider economic health.
• Media & publishing: Advertising investment was largely flat in 2020 but surged in 2021, rising by 33.4% to take total spend to $83.6bn. Double-digit increases in the next two years will push investment above the $100bn mark by 2023.
• Retail: A cut of $5.4bn in 2020 will more than be recovered this year – investment will rise by 20.0% before easing to 10.1% growth in 2022. A further increase in 2023 will lift total spend to $89.5bn, by which point online media will account for more than three-fifths of all investment.
• Financial services: Mild growth in 2020 coupled with steep cuts to automotive advertising has pushed financial services into the top five largest categories. Total spend rose by almost one-third this year and this will take total spend to $63.9bn. Double-digit growth is expected in 2022 and 2023, by when investment will be two-thirds higher than in 2019.

A sample of the full report is available.

By MediaBUZZ

Quadient a leader in helping businesses create meaningful customer connections through digital and physical channels, announced the general availability of Inspire Flex Release 15 (R15), Quadient's flagship enterprise omnichannel Customer Communications Management (CCM) software solution. The new release advances Inspire's evolution from CCM technology to an expanded solution designed to foster greater Customer Experience Management (CXM).

Inspire Flex R15 integrates more than 300 robust enhancements that empower users to elevate and accelerate their ability to meet customers wherever they are through their preferred communication channels and on the devices they use.

Based on customer feedback and market data, Inspire Flex R15 is designed to help companies respond to the increased mobility of both employees and consumers. The new release is part of the company’s continuous drive for innovation in its cloud-based suite of advanced software solutions that is bringing together CCM, customer journey mapping and orchestration, document automation, accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR). Inspire Flex is the only fully integrated, any-premise enterprise CCM solution that enables organizations to create and deliver personalized, compliant customer communications across all channels from one centralized platform.

Today, many companies are combining the power and versatility of Inspire Flex with the benefits of cloud operations to reduce capital outlay, accelerate return on investment and deliver peace of mind. For companies interested in moving to the cloud but don't want to manage the application or infrastructure, Quadient offers a Hosted Managed Service (QHMS) allowing customers to focus on using the power of the latest version of Inspire Flex without having to worry about the technical complexities of operating and maintaining the infrastructure and applications themselves. Additionally, to help companies meet storage and audit needs, Inspire Flex integrates with Quadient Archive and Retrieval, a software solution that enables quick and easy access to past communications and data across all channels.  

"Quadient's latest Inspire release continues to raise the bar on the customer experience with intelligent communication automation," said Marci Maddox, research director, Digital Experience Strategies, for IDC, a global market intelligence and advisory services firm. "Quadient brings empowerment and interaction to the forefront with a modernized user interface, data-driven journey decisioning and features designed to help companies give business users more control over content, expanded delivery channels and faster time to value."

Inspire Flex R15's streamlined, modern user interface empowers faster adoption by new users, the ability to analyze key business metrics directly in customer journey maps to promote better decision making and more relevant communications. Inspire Flex also offers the ability to create, manage and execute cross-channel communications delivery workflows, including message distribution to WhatsApp users, extending its reach to more than 2 billion consumers. Additionally, users can build responsive HTML5 emails using a drag and drop interface with reusable design components and proof email communications in more than 100 different email clients through its integration with Litmus, a leader in email marketing.

Users can also speed up template design by importing content from the latest versions of InDesign and QuarkXpress and design Inspire Dynamic Communications faster and easier leveraging more than 60 of the most popular design objects from Bootstrap 5, a front-end opensource toolkit. To accelerate time to value, deeper integration points and accelerators simplify deployment to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

"We are excited to be rolling out a new release of Inspire Flex as we know our customers will be just as excited to see that their investment in it continues to be enhanced and protected with capabilities that respond to the many ways people work today," said Chris Hartigan, chief solution officer, Intelligent Communication Automation, Quadient. "This release is another demonstration of Quadient's commitment to customer-driven development and underscores our dedication to ensuring our solutions effectively respond to a dynamic marketplace, evolving as our customers' business demands do." (Source: Quadient)

By MediaBUZZ

Today’s customers demanding seamless cross-channel experiences, convenience, reassurance, and commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) values and the list keeps growing, states Forrester in one of its latest reports. Not to mention that the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and the “Great Resignation” remains challenging.

To fight the rising tide of entropy that has disrupted customers and employees, business leaders in Asia Pacific (APAC) will embrace controlled, positive change in 2022 — implementing future fit technology strategies, such as cloud-native approaches to improve business agility, and ushering in a new era of regionally aligned, hybrid work strategies to build customer trust and tackle climate change.

“2022 is a year to be bold. The old ways of working no longer work. The future is up for grabs. Leading firms will use the crucibles of 2020 and 2021 to forge a path to an agile, creative, and resilient tomorrow”, Forrester states, besides providing the following forecasts:

• Consumers see the world as all digital and have rapidly increased their technology adoption and usage since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Forrester data, 66% of Chinese consumers say they are buying more things online than they normally would. Even consumers who were once considered digital holdouts anticipate continuing the online behaviors they adopted in the pandemic. As a result, consumers have higher expectations that digital experiences work well. Although they’re generally willing to forgive companies struggling with pandemic-related disruptions, consumers expect them to double down on building a successful and sustainable digital customer experience. Given that almost two years have passed since the onslaught of the pandemic, it is not surprising that consumers believe that companies should have figured out by now how to manage pandemic-related disruption.
  
  
• Tech execs leap from digital- to human-centered technology transformations. So-called “digital transformation” efforts have come and gone. In 2021, one in four APAC firms nominated digital transformation as a key action to address business model change. That number will drop to less than 15% in 2022, but that doesn’t mean pandemic-sparked technology acceleration will slow. Ongoing digital sameness and falling returns on IT investments are forcing firms to seek new means to demonstrate business value in crowded markets. Leading firms will unlock the creativity of their employees and surround them with intelligent technologies such as automation and predictions engines that focus on outcomes, not just financial results. This shift will establish a new era of transformation, comprising human-centered technology initiatives that form a tight link between customer experience and employee experience, drive competitive advantage, and deliver a 3% to 5% net gain in productivity. In 2022, 10% of technology executives will prioritize investments in strategic partnerships and innovation practices at three times the rate of their competitors to radically expand their organization’s creative and innovative capacity.
  
  
• Brands dance and spar with marketplaces. In China, 98% of B2C e-commerce sales flow through marketplaces today. For years, Western brands have leaned most heavily on Alibaba/Tmall and JD.com for online sales in China, along with closely integrated payments, logistics, delivery, and more. But marketplaces are as much enemy as friend, amping up sales volume at the expense of stealing a brand’s soul. So, in 2022, brands will fight back with every technology and weapon in their arsenal. Western brands will follow the lead of some mature (often luxury) brands and spend 2022 vetting and courting niche marketplaces as well as mini programs via companies such as Douyin, Little Red Book, and WeChat. Globally, brands will make direct relationships and better shopping experiences a priority to keep customers away from marketplaces and coming back for more. The mantra will become “Anywhere Commerce” as first movers and fast followers alike pursue presence in every possible shopping moment, from an owned website to an influenced marketplace or social slot to a paid retail media placement. Brands will also invest in the commerce building blocks of their experience architectures; order management, payments, and inventory control will make every touch a shoppable moment; investments in immersive experiences will turn browsing into virtual inhabiting; and subscription billing will make loyalty a business model pivot.
  
  
• APAC is well on its way to becoming a digital society. APAC governments lead the world in implementing the three pillars of a digital society: digital identity, digital currency, and data interoperability. The region also leads the world in central bank digital currency rollouts: e.g., more than 20 million Chinese consumers use the digital yuan, and trials are planned in the retail and wholesale industry in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Interoperable, connected government data frameworks like the Singapore-Australia Digital Economy Agreement and India-Singapore payment link are still new and thus fragmented. Nonetheless, tech innovators should seek opportunities to leverage all three pillars to build and offer differentiated capabilities to deliver better experiences for their customers.
  
  
• Trust becomes a key business imperative. The world is in a major crisis of trust, driven by concerns over public health, cybersecurity, data privacy, and sustainability. In response, companies and governments will use trust to demonstrate their commitment to customer relationships. In APAC, financial services will be the first industry to act. As prior crises have shown, people’s financial well-being and trust in financial institutions is a matter of systemic economic risk. In 2022, four to six financial services pioneers will begin measuring and codifying trust, as NatWest Group does with its net trust score linked to business KPIs like customer deposits. Some firms will also take advanced measures to protect trust, like the consortium of 25 financial services and tech firms participating in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Veritas initiative, which sets out principles for the ethical use of AI in credit risk scoring and customer marketing. Companies that ignore the trust imperative will lose 10% to 40% of their customers, starting with those unwilling to forgive firms for breaching their trust.
  
  
• Companies adapt to climate change or face extinction. Values-based consumers have furthered firms’ awareness of corporate social responsibility and sustainability, with 42% of senior business leaders in APAC reporting that these initiatives have increased in corporate importance due to COVID-19. Unfortunately, the sustainability plans of too many firms have remained performative and were put on hold during the pandemic. Only 30% of firms are taking real action, such as making their sustainability efforts more transparent and reducing their carbon footprint or e-waste. For most firms in APAC, sustainability efforts are driven by compliance and investor pressure, not strategic planning and risk management. This shortsighted approach checks the box but will not materially affect climate change. Forward-looking companies will appoint a sustainability leader and create a dedicated funded function — or risk alienating empowered customers who see right through merely performative actions.
  
  
• B2B marketers accelerate technology investments, with uneven results. Persistent digital engagement will become the norm, with 70% of marketers adopting an “always on” digital engagement strategy in 2022. For instance, three times as many B2B buyers (17%) said that the competence demonstrated during the buying process was the most significant driver of purchase choice, far ahead of the relationship with the sales rep (5%) or customer references (6%). To meet their always-on goals, marketing leaders will turn to “smarter” (more autonomous and automated) solutions with complex tech stacks. Marketing technology’s slice of the marketing budget, which has dropped to 19%, will increase to 25% in 2022. But 75% of efforts to create automated, personalized engagement won’t meet ROI goals because of inadequate buyer insight. In 2022, only 10% of B2B organizations will identify metrics to measure the value created for buyers during the buying process. B2B marketing leaders need to instill customer centricity into planning and execution processes to meet personalization goals.
  
  
• Automation is emerging out of the back office to become a potent enabler of new business and operating models. Companies with advanced automation programs will obliterate the competition if they defined an automation fabric — a framework to build, orchestrate, and govern a hybrid workforce of human and digital workers — that links AI-based and traditional automation components, along with a proactive program for innovation. As automation technologies such as robotic process automation, integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and digital process automation/low code converge on the supply side, expect a significant number of organizations to embrace an automation fabric to develop innovation culture, create business models, take new products and services to market, or rethink their customer experience.
  
  
• APAC’s future of work looks different compared with the rest of the world. As the pandemic stabilizes and vaccination rates rise, workplaces are gradually opening. Globally, Forrester expects that 70% of large firms will embrace some form of anywhere work in 2022. But region-specific pressures will force more than 60% of APAC firms to prepare to bring the vast majority of workers back to the office full-time. For example, only 32% of workers in the region’s large manufacturing sector can work anywhere. Similarly, outsourcing firms with purpose-built, secure campuses and high-availability facilities cannot provide the same level of service in remote locations with poor infrastructure. Employees, unions, and regulators will also push back on contact center operators that insist on surveilling employees working from home. Additionally, Forrester data found that 65% of APAC information workers are eager to return to the office, with high-density extended-family living likely accounting for this trend: 58% of employees say they are less productive working at home during COVID-19, compared with 46% globally. In response, firms operating in APAC need a region-aligned anywhere-work strategy that balances employee expectations with the feasibility of hybrid work approaches.
  
  
• Cloud native gains momentum. The scale mandate will reform as companies experience new levels of cloud scale considering the pandemic-fueled digital acceleration. Global cloud-native adoption rose in 2021 as developers reported increased usage of containers (33% to 42%) and serverless (26% to 32%) at their organization. Instead of adopting cloud solutions only for new workloads, some APAC firms will prioritize container-based, microservice-oriented architectures with distributed capabilities in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. They will use service mesh for microservice support, a key to increased business agility, as well as use cloud-native platforms to power tech- driven innovations. By embracing a cloud-native approach, these firms will accelerate enterprise modernization and implement future fit technology strategies. But this shift will be slow compared with the other regions and limited to organizations that also commit to modernizing their practices, such as infrastructure as code, DevOps automation, and composition over customization. Firms not embracing cloud-native strategies will see limited benefits as their cloud-first plans stall.
  
  
• Third-party risks escalate as “just-in-case” supply chains gain ground. In 2020, 27.8% of organizations reported 20 or more supply chain disruptions, an increase from 4.8% in 2019, according to the Business Continuity Institute. Firms are looking to make supply chains more resilient without dulling their competitive edge, transitioning from “just-in-time” efficiency to the “just-in-case” contingency necessary to ward off disruption and volatility. At the same time, firms are accelerating innovation. The collision of these two priorities means that firms are effectively doubling the size of their third-party ecosystem, resulting in more security problems. While 87% of security pros in APAC say they manage privacy and security risks in their partner ecosystem, Forrester data reveals that 38% still reported that their organization experienced an incident or breach involving supply chain or third-party providers in the past 12 months. With cyberattacks continuing to target smaller vendors and suppliers, SolarWinds-style headlines will plague organizations that don’t invest in the risk management trifecta: people, process, and technology. Smart companies will ensure the tech stack includes risk assessment, supply chain mapping, real-time risk intelligence, and business continuity management.

By Forrester

IBM just announced its acquisition of Envizi, a leading data and analytics software provider for environmental performance management that builds on IBM's growing investments in AI-powered software, including IBM Maximo asset management solutions, IBM Sterling supply chain solutions and IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, to help organizations create more resilient and sustainable operations and supply chains. Financial details were not disclosed.

Companies are under mounting pressure from regulators, investors, and consumers to progress toward more sustainable and socially responsible business operations – and to demonstrate these measures in a robust and verifiable way. In fact, corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability risks tied as the third highest concerns for organizations, as ranked by large corporations in a 2021 Forrester report. However, the various types of data companies need to understand and report on sustainability initiatives remains highly fragmented and difficult for all relevant parties to access.

Certainly, IBM is already using Envizi to help streamline tracking and reporting of its progress against the company's own goals in renewable electricity procurement and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction.

Envizi's software automates the collection and consolidation of more than 500 data types and supports major sustainability reporting frameworks. Its user-friendly and easily customized dashboards enable companies to analyze, manage and report on environmental goals, identify efficiency opportunities, and assess sustainability risk. Envizi's solutions help streamline the management of these tasks as part of broader Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting initiatives, while also providing users with valuable sustainability insights to inform business strategy.

By using Envizi with IBM's broader AI-powered software, companies will now be able to automate the feedback generated between their corporate environmental initiatives and the operational endpoints being used in daily business operations – a crucial step in making sustainability efforts more scalable.

For instance, Envizi will integrate with:

• IBM Maximo asset management solutions, which help companies extend the life of their critical assets, reduce environmental impact by providing intelligent asset management, monitoring, predictive maintenance and reliability in a single platform.
• IBM Sterling supply chain solutions, which help companies gain supply chain visibility, cut waste by right-sizing inventory, reduce the carbon footprint of shipment and logistics, and ensure responsible sourcing with blockchain-based technology for traceability.
• IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS), which helps companies increase resiliency by assessing and planning for the impact of environmental conditions on their operations, assets, and supply chains. EIS uses advanced AI and weather technology from IBM, the most accurate forecasting provider globally.
• IBM Turbonomic and Red Hat OpenShift capabilities, which help companies automate decision making when considering where to run enterprise workloads based on optimization of performance, cost and GHG emissions.

Envizi will also help expand IBM Consulting's growing sustainability practice, which is designed to help clients accelerate progress toward their sustainability commitments.

"To drive real progress toward sustainability, companies need the ability to transform data into predictive insights that help them make more intelligent, actionable decisions every day," said Kareem Yusuf, PhD, General Manager, IBM AI Applications. "Envizi's software provides companies with a single source of truth for analyzing and understanding emissions data across the full landscape of their business operations, and dramatically accelerates IBM's growing arsenal of AI technologies for helping businesses create more sustainable operations and supply chains."

Available as a SaaS solution and running in multi-cloud environments, Envizi is used by a number of leading brands, including Microsoft and Uber, and its software can be applied to activities across a variety of industries.

"As a leader and innovator in AI for business, IBM has decades of experience helping organizations around the world harness the power of their data and act on it," said David Solsky, CEO and Co-Founder, Envizi. "IBM's global reach, depth of resources and breadth of expertise will help us to scale at an unprecedented pace. As part of IBM, we feel more confident than ever that we can achieve our goal of providing clients and partners with the world class tools they need to reduce their operational impacts and optimize for the low carbon future."  

Beyond its ongoing investments in providing clients the most comprehensive AI software to help them accelerate their sustainability initiatives and support their environmental goals, IBM is also using its software to improve its own operational efficiencies, manage energy consumption and drive GHG emissions reduction. These activities support IBM's commitment to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2030.

By MediaBUZZ

Rakuten SQREEM Inc., the joint venture between Singapore-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions Company SQREEM Technologies and global leader in internet services Rakuten Group, Inc., announced the launch of a new advertising product that offers deeper insights and significantly more targeted media buying.

AnyMind Group announced the launch of Story Engine, a no-code feature on AnyManager that enables users to easily create, edit, manage and publish Web Stories, an open-source initiative by Google.

Nowadays, the first contact with customers is almost always through content. Quite simply because potential customers in search of a suitable solution, product or service initially consume a whole range of content anonymously – mostly online. They read website texts, professional articles or social media posts, watch videos or use industry portals. Based on the content found, they make an initial judgment about the respective provider. Therefore, companies can only lay the right foundation for a successful customer experience with good, memorable content.

Of course, such content must always be linguistically correct and understandable because it not only influences the first impression but ensures whether and how a potential customer builds a relationship with the brand or the company. This is only possible if it is considered relevant and useful by the consumer. In addition to usefulness and relevance, the aspect of emotionality shouldn’t be underestimated – even in B2B business. It is no longer enough to answer questions with facts only, rather it is important to go one step further in terms of content and to offer more than the customer expects. Companies should always make sure that their content is authentic, e.g., only make promises that can be kept.

Especially since customer journeys are usually highly dynamic: potential customers sometimes skip steps in their purchase decisions, go through them twice, or take a step back – and that across different touchpoints – so it is advisable to deal with the content thematically.

First of all, the topic must be of importance to the customer (relevance) and respond to a current problem (priority) with appropriate proposed solutions (utility). A company can of course only implement this if it offers suitable products or services in this area (competence). As trivial as it sounds, successful content marketing clearly starts with the right topic.

Once the topic is ready, it can be viewed from different perspectives, linked to specific customer questions, and served with appropriate answers – in short, filled with content. The more carefully this is done, the more comprehensive content is created as an almost seamless source from which companies can extract a wide range of content – prepared for different target groups and channels. As part of such a themed campaign, the content is given an overarching consistency and reliability, which in turn has a positive effect on how content consumers perceive its producers – across every phase of the customer journey and every touchpoint. The topic is crucial, and the content opens the door to a successful customer experience.

By Daniela La Marca

Communication and collaboration solutions have become an integral part of everyday professional life. In the future, they will prevail across all industries and company sizes.

The Business Messenger occupies a small but decisive niche in the market for communication solutions. Whether as an established tool, as a novelty or as a communication alternative, its mission is to simplify professional communication, make work processes more efficient and relieve employees.

Since the business messenger market is driving new developments at a rapid pace, we want to shed light on which innovations in business messaging will be on the agenda for 2022.

The last two years have not only given the digital transformation of companies a significant boost, but also advanced internal communication in many places. To quickly and securely connect decentralized teams and mobile workers with one another, new communication channels have to be found, whereby GDPR-compliant business messengers are clearly on the advance.

Tobias Stepan, founder of Teamwire, identified and elaborated six trends in business messaging for 2022.

Trend 1: Push-to-Talk – from voice messages to walkie-talkies in Messenger

Direct voice communication via push-to-talk, which was previously only possible via digital radio, can now be implemented with the help of a business messenger. Additional devices such as walkie-talkies are supplemented by business smartphones. Push-to-talk enables direct language exchange, which not only makes communication more efficient, but also makes it much easier to interpret. At the same time, this new user-friendliness makes it easier to receive and send audio messages. Particularly mission-oriented teams, for example in the areas of BOS, rescue service, construction, logistics, delivery services and tourism, benefit from a push-to-talk function in the messenger, because in addition to audio recordings, images and documents can also be transmitted in the same communication channel, such as an operational chat during an observation. All communication relating to a process can be saved in the organization's archive and retrieved at any time, which, among other things, significantly simplifies the creation of reports and evaluations.

Trend 2: Implement the social intranet idea in business messaging

Messenger as social intranets not only promote the vision of integrating all employees in internal communication, but also accelerate the distribution of information and raise feedback cycles to a new level. Company news are shared with the aid of status messages, both for one-to-one and group chats as well as broadcasts. The color-coded messages are visible to all users of a chat. An additional overview allows you to filter chat histories according to message types, and thus also according to status messages, and to quickly find the information you are looking for. At the same time, employees can interact with the content by "commenting" on it using emoticons. The aim of this is to activate and promote team collaboration across the entire workforce, from mobile workers to desk employees, but also from trainees to C-level managers, and to guarantee optimal exchange.

Trend 3: New user interfaces and smart devices for messengers

Not only the messengers themselves are becoming more and more sophisticated, but also the end devices. In addition to smartphones, tablets and the like, which have long since established themselves as the standard for messaging apps, smart devices with new user interfaces will conquer the market. Smartwatches have developed rapidly and are widespread in recent years. They are light, robust and are particularly suitable for mobile emergency services such as police officers and rescue workers. But data glasses, so-called smart glasses, are already in the starting blocks. In combination with messenger apps, they can offer remarkable advantages. For example, you enable doctors to easily view patient files together with colleagues during an examination and to communicate at the same time, while keeping both hands free. Smartglasses also support logistics employees in locating stored goods and exchanging information about the transport. It is conceivable that the position of the goods to be loaded, including directions for a larger warehouse, can be called up and colleagues can be requested for support while the employee is on the move with the forklift. In this way, new smart devices make it easier and faster to implement use cases.

Trend 4: Even more sophisticated messenger functions

Sending documents, photos and videos, sharing locations, making VoIP and video calls are all part of the standard repertoire of a good business messenger, and the peak in terms of innovative functions is still far from being reached. Messaging apps integrate more and more functionalities to cover all use cases across industries and to make the exchange of information even easier:

• alerts to ensure direct emergency communication and coordination using acknowledgment options and alarm reports,
• surveys to easily create surveys and simplify scheduling, and
• image processing to anonymize data and make faces unrecognizable.
  
  

In 2022, the variety of functions will continue to increase, and individual functions will be refined – individually tailored to industries.

Trend 5: Geo-referencing in Messenger – live location functions reach a new level

Sharing locations in messengers is a popular feature, since it is ideal for sharing your current whereabouts, giving directions, and arranging meeting points. In everyday business, however, there are often use cases in which the whereabouts of the users change dynamically, and knowledge of the real-time locations or live locations can be of great importance for colleagues and business partners. Typical scenarios are the deployment of public order offices, police and rescue services, production employees as well as transport and delivery service trips. There will be the next stages of innovation here to further improve the geo-referenced coordination, such as progressive map applications or the provision of application-relevant location information through artificial intelligence are conceivable.

Trend 6: Messenger with maximum data sovereignty with simultaneous networking

Data sovereignty and security are two issues that are becoming increasingly important for companies. In lockstep with the continuously developing messenger functionalities and technical possibilities, the threat from cyberattacks is also growing. Federated servers increase the reliability against hacker attacks – after all, in the worst case only the attacked server fails. The federation is also a significant step forward in improving data sovereignty. For security reasons, in addition to secure containers on the end device, functions for holistic data and access management are becoming increasingly relevant. Further strengthening encryption algorithms for communication and establishing additional security functions are also among the central developments in business messaging. Compliance and auditing-proof archiving will be an important topic for all companies and industries in 2022. It is now clear that messaging is part of business communication, and therefore falls under the documentation obligations under commercial, professional and data protection law. Companies can easily implement their compliance and data protection requirements with leading business messengers – a key advantage over American cloud solutions.

Professional communication will continue to change, and new technologies will accompany this change and drive it forward. Business messengers are already making device, time and location-independent collaboration within a team and between several teams possible – even from other organizations. However, their potential is far from being exhausted, which is illustrated by the expected trends. Business messaging is ready for the future.

By MediaBUZZ

The idea of designing creative advertising banners, captivating headlines, and trying to receive as many likes as possible for social media postings is increasingly giving way to a tough, data-driven mentality in marketing. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it”, the management guru Peter Drucker once said. And indeed, the shift in the customer journey and the associated development towards digital marketing channels brought with it a decisive factor – measurability! Marketing has changed, and it will continue to change, but what does that mean for required job skills in marketing?

Statistics on the use of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Cortana from Microsoft or Siri from Apple, point to the same direction, namely the fact that the users have focused on a small, sharply defined area of application that is far below what was expected at the height of the hype two years ago.

The evidence-based insights and consulting company, Kantar, just revealed the trends at play in the Asia Pacific media industry and what can be expected in the year to come. In doing so, Kantar is using its market-leading data, alongside evidence-based predictions and expert viewpoints to help media owners and brands build their plans for 2022 and beyond.

Customer loyalty is no longer just based on price or product quality, but on experience; hence, companies need to deliver seamless, secure, effortless, and personalized experiences anytime, across all channels.

Just take a look at a recent report from Salesforce, revealing that 84% of customers said the experience a company delivers is as important as its product or service. The creation of a convincing customer experience has therefore become a top priority for businesses in recent years and will most likely remain that way in 2022.

However, to offer an outstanding customer experience that creates a competitive advantage, it is crucial to fully understand each customer's individual journey with the company, including all relevant touchpoints and potential obstacles.

Customer journey mapping is a widely used method to understand these touchpoints, but it requires creating an analytical foundation for successfully optimizing the customer experience.

Customer journey mapping refers to the creation of a visualization that depicts every interaction that a customer has with a product, service, or brand. Companies use this common method to view their business from the customer's perspective.

All potential points of contact between a company and its customers and prospects are recorded to create a customer journey map. These can include online channels such as social media, the website or a display ad, as well as various offline channels such as shops, print mailings or recommendations from friends. User journeys are created that connect the various touchpoints in a specific order in which a customer will most likely experience them during their entire life cycle - from the first perception through the research activities to the purchase and subsequent customer loyalty activities. A common practice is to create different journey maps for different persona types.

Customer journey mapping is considered a standard practice and is a good starting point to better understand how customers interact with a company and how they move between touchpoints. It is particularly useful in internal communication to align employees with a more customer-oriented corporate culture.

Nevertheless, for various reasons, customer journey mapping fails to provide a complete picture of the actual customer journey, because:

• Even if the journeys of different persona types are depicted, these represent only a small, representative section of the journeys actually taking place. It is important to recognize that each customer's journey is unique. When you have thousands or even millions of customers, it means thousands and millions of different journeys. Since personalization is one of the most important drivers of the customer experience, a more detailed view of the individual journeys is required.
• Customer journey maps are usually created by a company's employees. It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that we know our customers better than we actually do. Therefore, “journey maps” often suffer from bias and represent an ideal or perceived journey rather than a realistic one. This makes it difficult to identify actual obstacles within a journey.
• Customer journey maps represent the customer journey at a specific point in time. With the rather static approach of customer journey mapping, however, it is very difficult to map the constantly changing market environment and customer needs. This becomes particularly clear when one considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on customer behavior. According to a recent study by Adobe, 56% of existing customers have changed the way they research and buy a product. In addition, over 50% have changed the average value of their shopping cart and are now interested in different products than before. While the pandemic is a special event that affected everyone, there are a number of other events that can, however, affect an individual's journey just as profoundly – pointing out the importance of personalization along the customer journey.
• Due to the generic nature of journey mapping, it is difficult to conduct specific actions while a single customer is already within the customer journey. This applies, for instance, to the detection and prevention of churn.

The significance of the limitations of customer journey mapping is confirmed by a Gartner study which revealed that 82% of companies use customer journey maps, but only 47% are able to use them effectively and achieve a return on investment (ROI) from the time invested in creating them. (Source: Apteco)

By MediaBUZZ

Microsoft just unveiled the latest cloud and IoT innovative technology at the inaugural 2035 E-Mobility Taiwan Exhibition, further unlocking potential of cloud computing for smart mobility industry, besides highlighting its partnership with MIH Consortium (MIH), global manufacturing leader Foxconn's electric vehicle (EV) software and hardware open platform. Leveraging the power of Microsoft's cloud service, Azure, the partnership delivers secure and innovative cloud-native solutions.