Nonlinear Thinking

How Generative AI Will Change Marketing

 

Generative AI is rapidly reshaping the landscape of marketing, ushering in a new era of innovative strategies and tools that have the potential to revolutionize how businesses connect with their audiences. As this technology continues to evolve, it is poised to impact various aspects of marketing, including content creation, customer engagement, personalization, and data analysis. Understanding the transformative role of generative AI in marketing requires an exploration of its key applications and the profound implications it holds for the future of the industry.

 

1. Automated Content Creation

 

Generative AI enables the creation of high-quality, engaging content, ranging from articles and blog posts to social media content and product descriptions. By leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, AI can produce coherent and contextually relevant content at scale, reducing the time and resources typically required for manual content creation.

 

2. Enhanced Personalization

 

Through the analysis of customer data and behavior, generative AI facilitates personalized marketing efforts by tailoring content and product recommendations to individual preferences. This level of personalization fosters stronger customer relationships, increases engagement, and boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty.

 

3. Improved Customer Engagement

 

AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants enhance customer engagement by providing timely and relevant support, answering queries, and guiding customers through their purchasing journey. These conversational interfaces simulate human-like interactions, leading to enhanced customer experiences and increased conversion rates.

 

4. Data-Driven Insights

 

Generative AI can analyze vast datasets and extract valuable insights, enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions and develop effective strategies. By identifying patterns, trends, and customer preferences, AI empowers businesses to anticipate market changes, optimize campaigns, and target the right audience with the right message at the right time.

 

5. Visual Content Generation

 

In addition to text-based content, generative AI is capable of producing visual content, including images, videos, and graphics. This technology can generate visually appealing and customized marketing materials, enabling businesses to create compelling visual narratives that resonate with their target audience.

 

6. Streamlined Advertising Campaigns

 

By automating various aspects of advertising, such as ad creation, targeting, and optimization, generative AI streamlines the process of running effective ad campaigns. AI algorithms can continuously analyze campaign performance, make real-time adjustments, and allocate resources more efficiently, leading to improved ROI and cost-effective marketing strategies.

 

7. Predictive Analytics and Forecasting

 

Generative AI can predict future trends and consumer behavior based on historical data, enabling marketers to anticipate market shifts and proactively adjust their strategies. By leveraging predictive analytics, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and adapt their marketing efforts to meet evolving customer needs and preferences.

 

8. Market Research and Competitive Analysis

 

AI-driven algorithms can conduct comprehensive market research and competitive analysis by processing and synthesizing large volumes of data from various sources. This enables businesses to gain valuable insights into market trends, consumer sentiment, and competitors' strategies, facilitating informed decision-making and proactive market positioning.

 

9. Content Optimization and SEO

 

Generative AI can optimize content for search engines by analyzing SEO trends and recommending relevant keywords and phrases. This enhances the visibility of marketing content, improves search engine rankings, and increases organic traffic, thereby amplifying the impact of digital marketing efforts.

 

10. Ethical and Regulatory Considerations

 

As generative AI becomes more prevalent in marketing, it is essential for businesses to prioritize ethical considerations, ensuring transparency and fairness in data usage and customer interactions. Compliance with data protection regulations and ethical marketing practices is crucial for maintaining consumer trust and safeguarding brand reputation.

 

The transformative influence of generative AI on marketing is already becoming evident with its ability to automate content creation, enhance personalization, drive customer engagement, and provide data-driven insights. Embracing this technology enables businesses to optimize their marketing strategies, increase operational efficiency, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. As generative AI continues to evolve, its integration into marketing practices will be instrumental in shaping the future of the industry, driving innovation, and fostering sustainable growth in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Doughnut Economics

Via Doughnut Economics Action Lab:

The Doughnut offers a vision of what it means for humanity to thrive in the 21st century - and Doughnut Economics explores the mindset and ways of thinking needed to get us there.

First published in 2012 in an Oxfam report by Kate Raworth, the concept rapidly gained traction internationally, from the UN General Assembly to the Occupy movement.

Kate's 2017 book, Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist,  further explored the economic thinking needed to bring humanity into the Doughnut, drawing together insights from diverse economic perspectives in a way that everyone can understand

The Doughnut's holistic scope and visual simplicity, coupled with its scientific grounding, has turned it into a convening space for big conversations about reimagining and remaking the future. It is now being discussed, debated and put into practice in education and in communities, in business and in government, in towns, cities and nations worldwide.

Think of it as a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century, with the aim of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet.

The Doughnut consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth's life-supporting systems. Between these two sets of boundaries lies a doughnut-shaped space that is both ecologically safe and socially just: a space in which humanity can thrive.

 

Disruptive Business Model: Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)

Mobility as a service (MaaS) incorporates the options/elements of an emerging and new transportation model—particularly in urban areas—that removes the need for private vehicle ownership by offering bundled transportation options as a service. Through an integrated effort of public and private organizations, riders can embark on personalized and optimized transportation routes using a variety of different transportation modes including cars, buses, trains, bikes and scooters.  MaaS promises to revolutionize transportation by building and lkeveraging platform technology to connect and improve all aspects of travel. The philosophy can be applied across a broad range of technologies from autonomous cars through to connected cities. For businesses, MaaS initiatives aim to unify all modes of transport for a business into one simple and easy to use platform with the objective of improving cost and efficiency through shorter travel planning and cost comparison. For families or solo travelers, Mobility-as-a-Service aims to improve the planning and management of travel into a customized journey without the challenge of searching through multiple booking search engines.

 

Every business model requires a monetization method. Mobility-as-a-service on the surface has a straightforward model: MaaS providers charge either a fixed-rate or variable rate for different service options. However, things get complicated due to the interconnectivity of the system. While specific roles maintain traditional revenue models such as manufactures wholesaling, transportation providers rely on a complicated method for dividing up payments.  This method hinges upon many variables including rides per day, distance traveled, cost per trip, etc. These organizations will need to evolve towards a equitable system that makes MaaS profitable for all those involved.

Microgrids

Innovation in the generation, transmission and, most importantly, storage of electricity continues apace.  Going well beyond interest by sustainability-oriented consumers, microgrids are emerging as an efficient and effective distributed generation option.  This recent Time Magazine article outlines the potential this technology may hold.

Microgrids have become increasingly popular across the U.S. in recent years, embraced by everyone from community developers to military officials. They have been installed as part of a 40-solar-panel infrastructure project atop a peak in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains; used as a way to deliver power to the 2,800 residents of Borrego Springs, Calif.; and implemented at the U.S. Army's Fort Carson in Colorado.

The reason is as simple as the bottom line: the technology offers a way for communities to collect, store and use their own energy, rather than pay for it to be shipped from miles away. In the U.S., microgrids often include batteries, a localized renewable energy source like solar panels, and sophisticated software to determine when to buy energy from utility companies and when to sell any excess power back.

The rise of microgrids comes as part of a broader shift in the ways Americans think about electricity storage and delivery. The grid, long associated with large infrastructure such as transmission lines, power plants and substations, also functions at the community and neighborhood levels. Indeed, microgrid capacity is expected to double by 2020, totaling 4.3 gigawatts in microgrid potential, according to GTM Research, an industry analyst.

 While this is sure to be of global interest, particularly in less developed countries where reliable power is always suspect, the U.S. appears to be on the forefront as an estimated $3.5 billion will be invested in micrograms between 2015 and 2020 with 54% of global microgrid capacity already located in the U.S.

 

The Life of Cheese

 

 

Smart Grid: The 5 Minute Overview

 

 

 

Business Models and the Internet of Things

Two topics close to my heart - Business models and the Internet of Things

 

Eluding the Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: [tsīt’gīst’, zīt’gīst’] n. The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.

The bandwagoneers that comprise and embrace much of the Silicon Valley monoculture have increasingly not been among the vanguard of enterprises that are delivering real change and innovation within and across traditional value chains and business models.  Perhaps that is the result of a zeitgeist that manifests in the Valley on a regular basis in which the thinking goes that if one successful business launch makes sense, then several dozen more incremental versions of said business make even more sense.  Paypal founder Peter Thiel has even commented: "There is so much incrementalism now."  Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Labs, discussed the problem in a Harvard Business Review article back in 2008, lamenting that “… the malaise is deep and systemic. Many of you may disagree – but I’m vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today’s crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.”

In a zeitgeist market, the number of new entrants is usually high, the ability to create differentiated offerings with unique value propositions (the strongest predictor of new product success) is more difficult to achieve, and new forms of business model innovation are required for success (e.g., service and solution innovation rather than product and process innovation; experiential innovation; legal rights and bundling innovation; privacy rights innovation; agency innovation, where businesses act on behalf of customers).

There are reasons for this creeping incrementalism and much can be blamed on the democratizing nature of the Internet as the ultimate platform for idea sharing.  Additionally, the ability to rapidly access formidable compute capacity, other technology infrastructure and agile development tools via the cloud allows today’s garage startups to create stepwise iterations of already buzz-worthy offerings in record time.  The “sharing” economy dynamic has already become over-saturated with new enterprises springing up to compete with the innovators that broke trail in the space – uber, lyft, airbnb, Getaround, Zipcar, Homeaway, TaskRabbit, Liquid, Dog Vacay, Fon – you get the idea.

Innovation Zeitgeist, a book by entrepreneur/author Alistair Davidson, drilled deeply into this dynamic several years ago. 

What I have observed is in the rush to make individual companies and product successful, managers have missed a larger trend - a Zeitgeist influence on what is getting developed and launched. Simply put, there are more entrepreneurs launching similar products than ever before. And because of the Internet, these product leak into other markets quickly.

Far more companies in Silicon Valley think they are creating viable business models and services that deliver real economic and societal value than those that truly are creating something both lasting and impactful.  Eluding the zeitgeist and focusing on addressing real issues, problems and opportunities is the challenge that needs to be met.

Diverse thinking is critical to an effective culture of innovation and Silicon Valley’s challenges with respect to diversity, particularly when it comes to enterprise leadership, has been well-publicized.  That issue/challenge may be the central contributing factor in a culture that eschews business model innovation for incremental uniqueness and a “me too” entrepreneurialism.

When we stop and ruminate on the many macroeconomic and core societal problems the world faces today, can we really say that there is a need for yet another social network variant that succeeds only in chewing up time and mindshare – Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t know.  Perhaps these are only the cynical musings of someone who thinks we can do much better, must do much better.

The Social Enterprise of the Future

We have discussed the impact that social media and the channels that have emerged based on social technologies will have on the enterprise previously here and here.  Rob Harles, of Accenture Interactive has a nice article on the social enterprise of the future on CMO.com, including a terrific graphic of what that enterprise might look like.  From the article:

Within five years, “social enterprises” could completely redefine customer value. We will see organizations emerge that will go way beyond polishing their presence on social networks and channels. Instead, they will make social media–the channels, the data, the users, the approach to collaboration–a part of every activity that zooms in on the customer.

The future of social enterprises (see figure, below) will be defined by how these organizations incorporate a real-time stream of predictive insights and personalized messages into their businesses, and how they define customer relationships and experiences by the level of complete digital integration and influence. Social enterprises will notice the redefinition of management roles, with each part of the business responsible for managing, synthesizing, and acting on ongoing torrents of digital information and content received in real time.

 

Additionally, they will depend more on the integrated views of the customer across multiple touch points and channels–such as combining social with physical call centers–to maintain customer happiness, with access to the most up-to-date customer data in real time.

As new technologies and digital strategies need to be developed almost every day, social enterprises will need to constantly adapt to their evolving landscape and anticipate what the social enterprise of the future will look like. This moves away from social strategies that are siloed within the business, focused only on expanding reach and “engagement,” and closer to a landscape where social is everywhere, driving real-time actions tied firmly to measurable business objectives.

If companies get this right, social can increase intimacy and relevance with their customers, which can become the tipping point between buying or not buying and remaining a loyal customer or going elsewhere.

Business Ecosystem Redux

“Business ecosystem” may be a relatively recent entry into our business lexicon but it is, perhaps, not an entirely modern concept.  Confederacies of market participants have allied around delivering comprehensive offerings to markets across epochs.  One could imagine Christopher Columbus, operating in the context of emerging western imperialism and economic competition between European kingdoms bent on establishing trade routes to access raw materials, devising a business ecosystems of sorts – ships, private equity, spice merchants -  to reach the East Indies and gain a foothold in the spice trade.

That those collections of interdependent actors were not identified as a business ecosystem matters little as the basic construct existed within the business, industries and markets of their particular time.  The strategic planning idea of “business ecosystem” is more contemporaneous and could be grouped with all the other management buzzwords of the recent past if its practical application in the science and process of strategy development wasn’t so damned profound.

Technology-focused organizations were among the earliest to understand that the connection and interdependence of all the actors in an industry, or sub-segment of an industry, could provide tremendous insight into market dynamics and uncover potential white space/blue ocean opportunities for their products, services and solutions.  While the concept has remained resonant over the past two decades, its use has seemed to vacillate between being a primary pillar of strategic assessment or languishing on the periphery as new ideas have taken their turn at center stage.  Lately, it seems to be achieving a higher profile and once again assuming, what I consider, its rightful place in the portfolio of core market and strategic planning tools.

The concept was codified in a 1993 Harvard Business Review article by James F. Moore, "Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition".   In that article, Moore cited the anthropological process of coevolution and the biological model of ecosystems to provide context for his definition of business ecosystems.

“To extend a systematic approach to strategy, I suggest that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies coevolve capabilities around a new innovation: they work cooperatively and competitively to support new products, satisfy customer needs, and eventually incorporate the next round of innovations.”

Moore expanded on the concept in his seminal book, The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems.  In the book, Moore did not suggest that competition was going to vanish.  His thesis was that the old notion of competition, where like-minded competitors match wits in pursuit of a prospect company’s business, was no longer as viable in an increasingly connected world.  As vertically integrated enterprises became less and less common and the extended enterprise business model increasingly took its place, understanding the broader environment in which the business operates became the foundation for holistic strategy development, more interdependent partnering structures and management of assets – human, intellectual, capital and financial – that cross traditional enterprise boundaries.

An important consideration here is that, for a business operating in a world of constant change, what you do is not as important as how your capabilities relate to what others are doing.  In this accelerating business environment, strategy-making involves having an awareness of the big picture and finding ways to play a role in it.  For some, the rise of ecosystems thinking is an opportunity to create powerful new competitive advantage.

There is a real “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” idea at work here.  Many ecosystems are created to pursue objectives that would be beyond the effective scope and capabilities of any of the individual ecosystem members.  Also important to recognize and incorporate in ecosystem thinking is that business ecosystems emerge, operate and evolve over time.  Key to achieving some level of success and stasis is that all members of the ecosystem either evolve or are replaced so that the ecosystem continues to deliver the value proposition(s) it was founded upon.

In the connected economy, the value of interdependent relationships – partnerships, alliances, collaborations – continues to grow and ecosystems thinking provides a discipline and framework for understanding where active and latent opportunities reside.  Identifying and delivering the value proposition that addresses those opportunities can be done more effectively, efficiently and expeditiously when understanding and leveraging the power of the business ecosystem in which the enterprise finds itself.

Ecosystem thinking is also about leverage.  As the enterprise better understands its role in its business ecosystem, they can more effectively integrate their operations with those of partners/allies and have more influence on how partner assets are deployed and employed to deliver a more robust solution to a broader customer base.

A recent report by Deloitte highlighted the impact business ecosystems might have as they become more recognized and utilized.

The rise of business ecosystems is fundamentally altering the key success factors for leading organizations, forcing them to think and act very differently regarding their strategies, business models, leadership, core capabilities, value creation and capture systems, and organizational models.

If you have not read The Death of Competition, I encourage you to seek it out as it remains as resonant and contemporary today as when it was first published.