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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:
Does Your Customer Delight Take Flight?
Mon, Jun 17, 2019 — Let’s assume, like most businesses, that you have a keen focus on pleasing your customers. You have plans, people and policies that ensure you are offering a great experience, and you are doing everything you can to make it easy to do business with you. That’s all well and good -- congratulations! However, it’s important to note that there are brands committed to going beyond “pleasing” their customers -- they are moving up to “delighting” their customers.
Be More Chill: Teaching Us All How to Market with Intention
Wed, Jun 5, 2019 — A wise person once told me that sometimes “no” simply means “not yet.” Easier said than done, particularly in the CPG world, when huge stakes are riding the new products that constitute our company’s lifeblood. Coming from a consumer marketing and product background—working with industry leaders including Disney, Mattel, Hasbro, Lowe’s and Rubbermaid—I encountered many such inflection points when we felt the market was saying “no” to a new product launch. In fact, our modus operandi seemed to be as follows: Build it, push with promises, and pull with traditional media—and then abandon it if it did not immediately hit. But one thing I can say with certainty, particularly in today’s marketplace—the “cut and run” approach is not nearly as universal. Sometimes success requires us to commit to a longer-term relationship with our consumer. And, as we’ll see, the platform of social media can be the soapbox that can turn the spark into a flame.
4 Tips to Achieve Quantum Growth with Expansion into Retail
Wed, May 29, 2019 — Whether your brand/product is sold purely on-line, through healthcare professionals or other professional channels, retail offers an opportunity to achieve quantum growth. Indeed, the rewards of selling through retailers can be enormous. Depending on the outlets you pursue, a successful retail launch can generate opening orders of 200,000 units or more. I recently launched a medical product primarily into the big three drug chains and Walmart that achieved that delightful opening order size. And, appearing in front of millions of consumers on retail shelves couldn’t hurt brand awareness. Some experts estimate that retail shelf presence alone can increase brand awareness by 20% or more.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Seven Simple Steps to Delighting Your Customers
Tue, May 28, 2019 — People pleasing—for as long as there have been sellers and buyers, there have been efforts by sellers to get those buyers coming back for more. If we think all the way back to the dark ages of retailing, we can imagine that there was heavy competition for those stone-chiseled wheels—and certainly the stonemason with the best service (and ratings on Yelp) had the most robust business. Of course, most businesses will SAY that THEY have a keen focus on delighting their customers—that THEY are the best at building retention and ongoing loyalty. “Of course we do,” they say. “It’s a company virtue! We’ve been doing it for years!” Yet, when you examine the actual processes and procedures used in the interaction with their customers, you will often find the opposite. This is not necessarily willful—it likely is a function of a reliance on tried and true business processes in a selling environment when the business situation may have changed. (Pity the stonemason who was beat out by Goodyear to put rubber treads on those wheels!)
Avoiding the “Popcorn-Tin” Syndrome: Three Steps to Strategic Marketing Success
Thu, May 23, 2019 — This post was written in collaboration with Tom Niesen, Sales Made Easy. “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu I had an epiphany about marketing strategy recently – and I’d like to credit it to this quote from the great Sun Tzu, but instead, it happened thanks to a large tin of popcorn. Let me explain: I was working with a client that, shall we say, was not focused on strategy, and the head of marketing, shall we also say, was, instead, keenly focused on doing stuff to show their worth. In this “Marketing of Things” mindset, this marketing leader (who shall remain nameless) felt the best marketing ploy du jour was a large tin of popcorn. Across the country, clients received multiple varieties of popcorn, along with a note asking for more business. I’m sure plenty of people enjoyed sharing the kernels of this marketing leader’s labors – but few, if any, made the connection to the company’s services – and even fewer picked up the phone.
The Digital Crystal Ball: Three Ways to Use Predictive Analytics at Your Company
Fri, May 17, 2019 — The crystal ball—oft spoken of in folkloric terms, but never available when you need it—has entered the realm of the possible. In our switched-on world, where digital interaction is present virtually every moment of an individual’s life, we as marketers now have the tools to peer into the future—using data, and not crystalline, to gaze forward at where our business is going. Predictive analytics—the process of using new and historical data to foresee the result, activity, behavior, and trends of our consumer base—is the key that is making successful businesses, well, successful. Enterprises primed for growth in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace are using predictive analytics to gain a deep understanding of the customer base to maximize revenue, efficacy of marketing budgets, and, of course, profits.
A More Perfect Union: Four Keys to Credit Union Profitability
Thu, May 16, 2019 — U.S. credit unions are in crisis. For years, buoyed by a “hometown banking” distinction and bolstered by government regulations allowing for the expansion of their membership ranks, credit unions enjoyed unprecedented growth. In fact, just two years after President Clinton signed the 1998 Credit Union Membership Access Act, more than 10,000 credit unions dotted the landscape. But then, the technological age arrived in its full fury, delivering tools and benefits that traditional banks used to restore their edge. Though credit unions enjoyed a higher level of customer satisfaction, they were not as keen to what their customers and members were needing. This allowed the traditional banks to use enhanced technologies to raise the customer expectations bar—and close the gap.
When the Economy Turns Down, Will Your Company Be Ready? A 10-Step Practical Guide to Preparing Your Go-to-Market Program
Thu, May 9, 2019 — John C. Maxwell, the American author, speaker, and pastor who has written many books on leadership has a wonderful quote about growth that says: “Change is inevitable, growth is optional.” There may be another version of this we should be paying attention to, and I think that version is: “Change is inevitable, so is an economic slowdown.” With the long economic growth we have been experiencing sometimes it’s challenging to remember that we will not always have the economic tailwinds that have been boosting us along. The most recent ITR Trends Report (April, 2019) continues to forecast a cyclical market slowdown. Their latest report states that “The U.S. economy has moved a little deeper on the backside of the business cycle….and the shift in momentum and outcome will feel more pronounced the further we go in 2019. Our analysis continues to point to a probable first-half-2020 bottom for this business cycle.”
The Net of Profitability: How to Use the Net Promoter Score Now to Grow Your Business
Tue, May 7, 2019 — Hollywood has long taught us that a crystal ball can be a mystical, wondrous – and completely fictional – way to gaze into the great unknown. For businesses looking to better understand the world in which they exist, it doesn’t take a magical orb or other divine intervention to do so. Enter the Net Promoter Score, or NPS – a simple gauge of consumers’ ongoing satisfaction that can, like the soothsayers of the silver screen, tell the future. The Net Promoter Score methodology is genius in its simplicity. By asking a singular question – usually along the lines of, “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague” – a brand can actually foretell the future – more to the point, according to Survey Money, “the likelihood of both repurchase and referral.”