Are you marketing products or marketing to people?

That question posed at last week’s Digital Summit repeats in my mind.  It can be easy to focus on what we are selling, instead of the actual person or team who will be purchasing it.

The subject matter for the tracks I attended were definitely different from last year.  Here were a few of the repeating themes I heard in multiple sessions:

Community.  EVERYTHING is about creating community! And woe are those brands today that don’t create and manage their own “community.” Without one, how will they survive?  

Culture.  Discussions about how brands influence culture today…. using their communities. Will Cady from Reddit showed a persuasive correlation between how one of their communities actually helped create conversation and “culture” with McDonalds last year, similar to the recent Popeye’s spicy chicken sandwich phenomenon.

Psychology. How cognitive bias can impact our marketing efforts, the influence psychology has on social media and using it for other channels, how internal bias influences wording, design, offers,

AI. Sterling McKinley said that Netflix has save $1 billion using AI! But AI can be used by all-sized firms today. Some ideas of how organizations can use AI in marketing efforts today include data analytics, search, and automating repetitive-mundane tasks (can you say chat-bot?). 

An example of many of these ideas combines was how hyper-personalization can make marketing 1:1, with examples of how Netflix shows different pictures for preview ads within the same family with different viewing histories.  

While I didn’t find the content as vibrant as last year’s event, the strong presentations gave me some future ideas to test. 

The journey continues–Cindy