Why a Marketers’ imagination & creativity is a super power in a world dominated by data and AI

Imagine this: you are in a project, where a company is implementing a new customer data platform that ‘unifies all its data across all systems in one single customer view’ so that it can ‘empower its marketers to deliver seamless, personalised, customer experiences’. Sounds familiar? Now this customer is voraciously working to identify and bring together all it’s data sources and all its customer profiles in one place to support ‘use cases’ like ‘unify customer profiles’, ‘allow marketers to segment on any data’, ‘personalise experiences in every channel’ and many more. Again, sounds familiar? But also, now once this (probably multi-month, if not longer) endeavour is ‘completed’, the company is looking at what they have build and what they have exposed to their marketers to only find them staring at the product like rabbits caught in the headlights. They have no idea what to do with it. And what they are doing with it only unlocks 1% of the potential of what has been put together. Sounds familiar?

You could say that the above scenario is bad practice, and it is. But you would be surprised how often it still happens. Customer Data Platform projects are often still largely IT driven (which they shouldn’t), with very little business involvement. And even when Business is involved, the creativity and imagination of how to unlock the data and capabilities in a customer data platform, is often lacking.

Imagination and creativity in customer experience are the bedrock of any successful customer data platform project.

With all the rage nowadays with Data and AI empowering marketers it’s easy to overlook the importance of applying imagination and creativity to envisioning a distinctive and differentiating customer experience that is unique for your brand. At Salesforce we do our share in revolutionising the enterprise world with our AI-powered CRM and Data Cloud, unlocking trapped data and providing unprecedented access and ability to marketers and business users in unlocking and activating that data. However, the true power of these technologies lies not just in their ability to unify and analyse data, but in the creative ways marketers can activate this data to create unique and differentiating customer experiences.

Owning (micro) moments that matter

How marketers should think about this is that every data point, every combination, every calculated insight, every AI model can identify, trigger, inform or inspire a small creative idea on how to create a unique and distinctive customer experience at a moment that matters: Multiple visits to an FAQ page on how to end a contract combined with declining use of services? Boom, trigger a customer retention flow. A customer browsing various beauty and clothing products in a category they shop more often? Maybe that’s a trigger to inspire them to find their style. Vehicle IOT data showing an imminent failure? Trigger a service experience.

Once marketers start to grasp this opportunity, they will then start to move beyond a couple of large campaigns and automated journeys annually, to launching dozens and dozens of small experiences, for very specific needs and moments that matter. For sure, in a not so distant future AI will help you identify and surface those ‘segment opportunities’ and support you in creating (the contents for) those experiences. But for the time being, coming up with these ideas is still very much a marketers craft of bringing together what customers uniquely desire from your brand, what is valuable to your business and what is feasible. Although in a world of data and AI, when done right, feasibility should come within reach.

Start with Customer Experience

So with any technology innovation, marketers should start with customer experience. Start with imagining what problems you are solving as a brand, what needs you can fulfil, what moments in a customer lifecycle you want to win, and how you want to uniquely show up. For sure, you can have your data inspire this thinking, because often data points lead to interesting insights and creative ideas on how to activate that data. But it all starts with imagination, and creativity. So as we move into a world dominated by data and AI, let’s not forget the importance of creativity and imagination. After all, it’s not just about the data, it’s about what you do with it.

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