.png?width=1500&height=398&name=CO_Corporate%20Logo%202021_4C_HOR_FNL-1%20(1).png)
5 AI Trends Every CEO Must Act On
Earlier this year, I shared takeaways from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, which showed how AI is reshaping business at a macro level. Building on that, Google Cloud’s 2025 AI Trends highlights five forces that will directly impact companies in the year ahead.
AI is no longer experimental. It is restructuring markets, reshaping customer expectations, and redrawing competitive boundaries. Here are five AI trends CEOs are preparing for now:
Is Subscription Pricing Right for your Business? Four Tests To Reveal the Answer
Wed, Sep 4, 2019 — A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, most consumer enterprises were in the business of selling physical items that could be held, consumed, and bought again. Whether it was a cheeseburger at McDonalds, a quart of milk at the grocery store, or a stamping machine from an industrial supplier, the pricing model was simple: Take the cost to produce, add profit (plus padding for high market demand), and you’re done. Ship one unit, charge for one unit. Simple.
The Millennial Food Shift: How CPG Food Companies Can Rescue Their Market
Wed, Aug 28, 2019 — Never before has the kitchen been so lifeless. For generations, the once-centerpiece of the American home has become much less important – marginalized by Millennials and younger generations who choose to order up their nourishment with a few silent taps of the cell phone rather than the clank of pots and pans. Seemingly overnight, this phase shift in eating habits has roiled the business models of food-oriented consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. They can no longer count on being a key ingredient in the daily lives of today’s consumer. So how did this happen? And what can CPG companies—and the grocery stores that peddle their wares—do to regain mindshare in the public consciousness?
AI, With a Dash of Humanity: Three Ways That High Tech and People Partner for Smart Business Strategy
Tue, Aug 6, 2019 — We live at the dawn of some very technologically compelling times. Businesses around the globe have supplanted humans with artificial equivalents, in a bid to meet customer demand for greater efficiencies. Indeed, some of this Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been integrated into business processes so smoothly, that we barely notice anymore. As an example, someone was recently texting me, and in their query asked me where I was. My iPhone picked up on the context queues in the message and prompted me with my current location – I just tapped and sent. In fact, AI, and automated machines in general, are very, very good at particular types of work. Monitoring, for example. People are horrible at monitoring – it’s boring and repetitive, and by our nature, we can easily become distracted. In some cases, in fact, extended monitoring is essential to life itself – in places like the intensive care unit at your hospital, or aloft at 41,000 feet, keeping an airplane with 300 passengers stable and safe. By 2022, one survey says that companies will dump a whopping $79 billion into such cognitive and AI systems designed to save money, build efficiency, and foster profitability.
Reeling In Recurring Revenue: Three Steps to Sustained Success
Thu, Jul 18, 2019 — A fisherman, as a rule, has to work pretty hard to bring home the catch of the day—hours of grueling effort, in pitching seas, to struggle to reel in one tuna at a time. Imagine, however, a utopian upgrade to this model—simply navigating to the “hot spot,” and sitting back with a frosty beverage while the fish jump, willingly, into the boat. If you run a recurring revenue stream business, you get to inhabit this magical place—a customer signs up, and they keep paying you, month over month. But, simply having a recurring revenue stream does equate to perpetual hockey stick revenue growth—and I played hockey! There are a number of things that can cause your recurring revenue model to “flounder,” affecting your revenue and margin growth. In this blog series, we’ll look at the three issues facing recurring revenue businesses—churn, balancing acquisition and retention and creating a retention program. It is my hope that, by the end of this series, you will secure your recurring revenue enterprise against the sharks that could bring it down—and that’s no “Big Fish” story!
Four Steps to Creating a Data-Intelligent Strategic Digital Marketing Plan
Wed, Jul 10, 2019 — This eBook presents an approach to the development of a data-intelligent digital marketing strategy to drive business growth.
Demand vs. Lead Generation: A Strategic Approach to Creating Highly-Qualified Leads
Tue, Jul 9, 2019 — Generating leads for B2B companies is one of the most important responsibilities of your marketing team. The concept of demand generation vs. lead generation many times are considered the same, or that one philosophy rather than the other should be adopted. Cracking the code of generating highly-qualified leads to grow your business involves the right focus on both demand and lead generation.
Is It Time to Replace Marketing Staff with Automation Technology?
Fri, Jul 5, 2019 — One of the biggest challenges CEOs face, aside from hiring the right talent, is balancing the number of employees against the need for driving growth. Business leaders are always looking closely at their marketing departments and questioning the return on the human resource investment. With the continued evolution of technologies, marketing automation is generating vast amounts of performance data and reaching business prospects in ways never before possible and, frankly, in ways that humans cannot. It makes sense, then, that companies are increasingly investing in technologies to improve the speed and effectiveness of marketing efforts as well as to provide a direct data link demonstrating marketing’s impact on company performance. Now that artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated, technology will start to significantly shift personnel needs in marketing departments of the future.
2019 Top Internet Trends and How They Impact Your Business
Tue, Jun 25, 2019 — For at least the past decade, developments in digital marketing – and technology in general – have served to disrupt virtually every industry. Whether you manufacture a product or deliver a service, your business undoubtedly has been roiled by digital developments, and their impact on the expectations – and buying behavior – of your customer base. Keeping apace with forthcoming developments can help any business better prepare for what’s to come – altering practices to successfully navigate this digital-first world.
Moving to a Blue Ocean With Growth Gears: Five Steps to Chart a Course for Success
Thu, Jun 20, 2019 — Whether you are a seafaring sort or not, it’s fairly intuitive to expect that a peaceful, sparkling, blue ocean is much more navigable than one roiled by rolling tides, scary sea vermin and dangerous storms. This relatable parable constitutes the foundation of “Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing - Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth,” a book by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne which provides a series of waypoints by which to guide businesses into calmer seas. I recently successfully led a client through the Blue Ocean Shift process prescribed by Kim and Mauborgne, and realized how well the lessons align with similar ones espoused in “The Growth Gears,” a book authored by my Chief Outsiders colleagues Art Saxby and Pete Hayes. “The Growth Gears” does a terrific job of building a process around how to go from random acts of marketing, to a purpose-based method of marketing an organization, by following three pillars—Insights, Strategy and Execution.