MarTech: There is humanity beyond marketing and technology

Ipsos insights sharing session - MarTech Giving New Insights into Consumers

The end of the US TV series "Mad Men" marked the end of the era of "ad mad men" – an era represented by creativity, copywriting and media has given way to a new marketing era driven by technology and data.

What kind of era is this?

As the media connecting brands and consumers becomes increasingly fragmented, the Internet demographic dividend comes to an end, consumers become increasingly picky with their personalized needs, more and more brands begin to use internal teams to replace agents, and the traditional 4A (America Association of Advertising Agency) system gradually collapses .....

Behind all this is the result of technology. The comprehensive development of mobile Internet, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and other technologies, which are synchronized with the integration of marketing industry, has spawned a new marketing era with MarTech as a key word.

In fact, MarTech is not a new concept – it has become popular in North America 7 years ago. The market's initial cognition of MarTech is a marketing technique that improves the efficiency of purchase decision and supplements the lack of data in the purchase process from advertising technology to sales transformation.

With the continuous development of technology, the concept of MarTech is becoming more and more popular and applicable to more and more scenarios. In the context of shifting from "incremental economy" to "stock economy", for the long link industry with long decision-making path, high customer unit price and low purchase frequency, MarTech is a digital ark to dig new increment in the inventory. Especially in such a economic downturn, MarTech is of special significance for promoting high-speed growth of enterprises. As Mr. Chu Jingbo, general manager of Baidu Index products, said at the insights sharing session held by Ipsos, the growth rate of China's sales market of the Internet far exceeds that of netizens, which means that the marketing cost per unit of traffic continues to grow. How MarTech can reduce the marketing cost of enterprises, improve efficiency, expand more marketing scenarios and bring about effective growth is what a lot of enterprises want to know.

Therefore, from November 9th to December 6th, Ipsos launched 3 campaigns of "MarTech Giving New Insights into Consumers" in Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, trying to redefine the word "MarTech".

MarTech is not simply marketing technology but more of an idea.

The year 2018 coming to an end is widely regarded as the "cold winter" of enterprise. Some even predict even that it will be "colder" in 2019. Because as the Internet demographic dividend is fading, all industries are facing the dilemma of higher CAC (customer acquisition cost), and they are beginning to discuss the shift from the thinking of traffic to stock.

Technology brings promises. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, big data and cloud technology, MarTech can give full play to its value, especially in the industry with long purchase decisions and high per customer transaction, MarTech can tap from stock to increment.

In this regard, Mr. Jiang Qi, President of Ipsos SIIT, believes that MarTech is not only a technology but more of a marketing idea – "MarTech, technology-based, people-centered, with AI as the means to achieve the integration and flow of information stream, ultimately provides users with a perfect shopping experience". He believes that with the extensive use of marketing technology, MarTech will be used in more scenarios in the future.

In other words, the core of MarTech is still "people", namely, "consumers". According to Mr. Jiang Qi, it is neither trading up nor trading down, but the increasingly rational decision-making process of consumers. Marketing moves from traffic thinking and free mode to the process of creating user experience and achieving ROI through experience.

Due to the growing proportion of technology in marketing activities, when we talk about marketing, we first think of data and technology. In fact, marketing is a top-level design, and we need to make more users identify with our values and culture. Like attracts like. We must make sure that more users like our brand and identify with the brand culture at spiritual level. Under the guidance of unified values, brands can start content systems and user dialogue.

Scott Brinker, a well-known scholar in the field of MarTech in the United States, once suggested that MarTech involves three aspects – technology, management and strategy. In this regard, Mr. Ouyang Chen, CTO of iPinYou, explained that the core of MarTech is technology, and AI, big data, algorithms, cloud platform and IoT can be used for marketing. For example, there are about 16 sensors in a mobile phone that can collect enough data for marketing innovation. Besides, MarTech puts special emphasis on the need to be agile to make enterprise architecture simpler, lighter and faster in iterations. Agility is the core element of management. As for strategy, MarTech drives the growth of an enterprise, so it must start from strategy and push forward from the management at C levels (CEO, CMO, CIO, etc.). Only in this way can an enterprise get better returns.

MarTech is people-oriented

Mr. Jiang Qi further proposed the concept of "warm MarTech", that is, MarTech is people-oriented. Warm Martech is a closed loop providing user policy mechanism, which is a matrix with centralization-decentralization, and intelligence-humanization as the two poles, and change as the core.

Centralization is the consistency of data, products, services and content, which reflects the efficiency of an enterprise. Decentralization represents to be user-centered, a greater degree of user engagement. Intelligence represents a high standardization of output, and humanization is the interactive contact between people and service words, decoding human nature and culture.

In this matrix, centralization and intelligence are cold, decentralization and humanization are hot. Intelligence and centralization represent the efficiency of enterprise – corporate communication can be faster and more effective. Decentralization and humanization represent a kind of humanity – it is an action plan that enterprises need to give more warm customer care, so that users would like to purchase and repurchase.

Mr. Li Jian, head of digital marketing for Dow Chemical Asia Pacific, putted forward a corresponding view that "experience is more important than efficiency". Companies often adopt MarTech to improve in-house processes and efficiency, but ignore the experience. Mr. Li Jian asked at the session: Are customers really want to receive your mail? To see your ads? Not necessarily - he may prefer you leave him alone. Therefore, personalized care is more important than automated one. MarTech is not just for in-house services, but to better collect data, it is to create a better customer experience. If a you can't create customer experience, then it doesn't matter if you use MarTech or not.

Data and technology are dimensions

From left to right: Lifeng Liu, President and CEO, Ipsos China; Shen Hao, Professor of the School of Journalism, Communication University of China; Song Xing, Founder and CEO of iCDO; Xu Shijia, Business Consultant, Ipsos China

Traditional marketing services can be divided into market research, advertising, promotion, user management, etc. However, Mr. Lifeng Liu, President and CEO, Ipsos China, believes that all these units will undergo new changes, and in the future, it will be an era of data-driven marketing. "In the MarTech era, everyone is the source of data".

So how to turn data into what we use - technology. This is another dimension of the MarTech era, including AI, deep learning, etc. Companies can use these technology platforms to reach new users, conduct promotions, after-sales experience management, etc.

Mr. Lifeng Liu believes that the core of MarTech is precision. By describing user personas or learning about the tags accurately, it is possible to precisely push the most appropriate content and minimize the process of users being interrupted, which is the power of the combination of data and technology.

How should companies apply data and technology?

Mr. Shen Hao, professor at the School of Journalism, Communication University of China, proposed that the core of data mining is precision marketing. Now in an era of data intelligence, it is different from traditional data analysis methods. Relational data has become mainstream, and geo-spatial location data allow companies to better observe a consumer's footprint, even if they don't know the consumer personally. Moreover, big data must be visible, and their production and application are often at the same time. "We never collect data for business, but our business automation generates massive data storage. All big data analytics can be understood, and visualization becomes an important feature of big data. Of course, data visualization itself has become a very important part of the data industry chain, which can also be called business insight.

Mr. Ouyang Chen recommends that companies take three steps to apply data: Firstly, spare no effort to collect data, online or offline. Secondly, activate data incrementally and use them to get good business results and find good indicators. Thirdly, explore not only drive data, but go all out to achieve indicators of data if the enterprise has the ability, platform, technology and goals.

Mr. Song Xing, Founder and CEO of iCDO, analyzes from the advancement of technology and proposes that "in the past decade, technological progress has brought about profound changes on three levels: link, response, and intelligence. Among them, link and response have been done well in the marketing field, and intelligence is also developing rapidly.

Looking at the link first, the biggest difference between the mobile era and PC era is that in the mobile era, we can continuously track a specific consumer without invading his privacy because of the device number and ID, and based on continuous tracking, a person's behavior and related activities can be tagged. This is a change brought about by the development of hardware technology.

Secondly, since companies can continuously track and understand a person, they can respond to the person's needs at the right time. The response used to be manually – sending the same E-mail to hundreds of thousands of people. But today, based on the link of the consumer's personal data, and continuous tracking of the ID, emails can be sent by machine, and this typical application is response.

Thirdly, intelligence. Because data generates links and helps machine learning from front-end to back-end, machine learning based on this can promote the development of AI. Like AlphaGo can beat the champion at Go, which is a typical development of future intelligence.

MarTech's use and development

Companies adopt MarTech in the hope that it will help reach new customers and promote growth. This is what the traditional marketing unit is not good at, and it is now done by the power of MarTech.

Mr. Li Jian summarized three applications of MarTech: Firstly, it can nurture sales leads via the platforms. We can interact with new sales records to develop sales opportunities and get a real sales lead. Secondly, it can generate better content. In addition to helping to better understand the needs and demands of consumers, MarTech is able to produce relevant and interesting content – these tasks were previously assigned to social media companies and now solved by technology. Thirdly, critically, effectiveness. It can integrate the previously disparate market inputs with scattered data and tell CEOs and CFOs "the value of these things, which may prompt consumers to make final purchasing decisions".

As for the development direction of MarTech and the technologies behind it, Mr. Shen Hao and Mr. Song Xing referred to artificial intelligence in particular. Shen Hao believes that artificial intelligence is endowed with a certain power of action. If this power of action is combined with the wisdom of people accumulated over a long period of time, namely, the fusion and insight of big and small data, it will play a greater role.

Mr. Song Xing also advocates "human-machine integration" and gave an example: "When we look at the images of lung tomography, the accuracy of machine scanning is only 70% and that of human alone is about 90%. But when machine and human are combined, the accuracy is more than 98%". At present, in the field of technical application, data and technology greatly improve the efficiency of thinking; while people are more experienced, know where to play and guide these data; the combination of "directionality" of human and "efficiency" of machine is most effective.

Finally, Mr. Liu Lifeng said: Technology makes things impossible in the past possible, but whether it is artificial intelligence or global data and other MarTech-related application and development direction, they are around service, the essence of marketing, that is, to understand human nature. Because only by understanding human nature, can let the target audience and your brand be relevant to achieve sales and accumulation of brand equity. How to more effectively discover and activate insights, and shorten the distance between users and brands through technology and data is what we need to constantly review in the future when we keep moving forward at a high speed in the MarTech era.