IBM Watson Predicts Changes in Marketing and Loyalty

IBM has announced a report from IBM Watson Marketing identifying a new breed of marketers coming to the forefront. Driven by a growing need to meaningfully structure data to enable actionable, real-time decision making, IBM’s “2019 Marketing Trends Report” provides insights for businesses to stay ahead of the forces driving these changes.
 
“It’s not often an entire profession experiences a sea change the likes of which has profoundly impacted all facets of marketing, but we are in that moment,” says Sylvia Vaquer, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of SocioFabrica. “This transformation fueled by AI-powered inferential connections provides a rare opportunity to rearchitect the whole ‘marketing house,’ but it’s critical to have practical knowledge to capitalize on it.”
 
The report’s findings provide insights into how CMOs and digital agencies are reimagining the marketing function. The following overview offers a blueprint for what marketing will look like in 2019:
 

  • More than ever, consumers are likely to engage with brands that are authentic, meaning the brand holds strong convictions and delivers on them, versus experience alone.
  • Until now the greatest advantages for marketers have been in the order of budget, tools, and talent. That model is now inverted, driven by the rapid growth of new skills and customer expectations.
  • The proliferation of data and compartmentalized marketing stacks has put AI- and machine-learning-based marketing tools at the center of deep personalization. This will change how marketers make decisions and deploy campaigns as AI analyzes and delivers personalized content with massive scale.
  • Growth of marketing data roles will continue as they drive human and technology connections across organizations. This will enable AI- and machine-learning-based marketing tools to analyze data and customer behavior, make recommendations and predictions, and become smarter based on the data fed into them.
  • Organizations driven by culture change and agile mindsets will widen their lead and create first-mover advantage, especially where AI-powered marketing technology enables the right set of tools to align and measure the proper objectives and metrics.
  • Marketers will increasingly focus on improving data hygiene processes, leading to better targeting and higher quality interactions. With similar regulations already in certain parts of the United States and the potential for US-wide legislation, marketers will proactively improve privacy, security, and data management as a catalyst for new business models.
  • Marketing transformations will increasingly focus on creating differentiated customer experiences. This will be supported by more experimentation using contextualized understanding of aggregated customer data across other areas of the organization such as commerce and digital teams.
 
“As marketers ourselves, we felt it was critical to dissect the industry dynamics that are reshaping the profession to help our peers set a strong vision for their organizations,” says Michael Trapani, Marketing Program Director for IBM Watson marketing. “By understanding the transformative trends—from team structure, to the advent of AI-powered marketing, to heightened expectations for the discipline—the findings in the ‘2019 Marketing Trends Report’ will be indispensable for marketers.”

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