The Future of Marketing

Scott Brinker uses the example of SCRUM to explain an agile planning method for marketing.André Morys, the initiator of the Conversion Summit, called out to the participants in his welcoming speech: "Anyone who is still testing buttons has only themselves to blame. "Bryan Eisenberg, the bestselling author of "Waiting for your cat to bark," an intimate expert on Amazon, explained some exciting growth principles. In the past twenty years, Amazon has mutated from a (ridiculed) online bookseller to a global online retailer that is becoming a serious threat to Walmart!It's also interesting to know that in the U.S., 30% of online commerce now takes place at Amazon. There is no simple panacea for this gigantic growth through basically one channel. However, it is worth taking a closer look at four principles and three targets that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has laid down and dogmatically demands from his employees:Principles:- Customer centricity is the central guiding principle - continuous optimization as a basic attitude - culture of innovation as a raison d'être - corporate agility to secure the futureTarget sizes:Range: 7 times larger than competitorsPrice: 5 to 13% cheaper than top 5 competitorsExperience: 13% higher customer satisfaction indexIn addition, it should be noted that Amazon invests 6.5 billion dollars annually in research and development. This compares to Apple's $4.5 billion.What does successful content management look like?Another central topic of the conference was content management. Here, Swede John Ekman, one of the content conversion gurus, outlined the most important blockers on the way to a purchase. For Ekman, the "success mechanism" is simple. Content marketing is really inbound marketing when the following aspects are considered in the application:- The content created and distributed focuses on problems and challenges of the targeted prospects- The prospects search and find the content and visit the website or Facebook page- Here these prospects can be identified and subsequently engaged in an ongoing dialog.More flexible planning requiredIn another notable post by Scott Brinker, one of the top U.S. marketing technologists, it became clear that marketers today still work with the waterfall-like working model that then results in the classic annual marketing plan. He argues, rightly in my opinion, that the unpredictability of today's world demands a much more agile approach to marketing management and in particular to marketing planning.His recommendation is to apply the SCRUM method, tried and tested in software development, to marketing planning. What is exciting about this idea is that applying this method to marketing would help cooperation and mutual understanding between marketing and IT. The two functions will move closer together anyway due to the galloping digitalization (mobile, social, big data, cloud) or even merge one day..."Conversion optimization" has not yet arrived in SwitzerlandThe 5th Conversion Summit once again delivered what it promised. Top speakers, relevant content, a cool location, good organization and moderation by founder André Morys of webarts.The event, which was once again fully booked with 300 participants, was able to attract just five participants from Switzerland - two of whom were representatives of the press. To my regret and astonishment I have to state that my last year's conference report has caused limited reverberation.Exactly one year ago I wrote that the highly relevant (online) marketing topic "conversion optimization" has not yet found its way to Switzerland. Further, I stated: "Open the floodgates for this relevant topic in Switzerland. I don't know how the abstinence of Swiss marketers from this topic can be explained and why Switzerland was so thinly represented this year. It's not too late - the topic is hot and relevant as this year's many presentations have shown and the Conversion Summit 2015 in Frankfurt will definitely come. As an incentive, I'm offering the Swiss marketeers arriving a beer in a pub in Frankfurt the night before!