The summit will host 100 Leaders from across UAE to Unify Brand, marketing and customer Engagement at the Address Dubai Marina on 26th May 2022.
The digital flux and the changed market dynamics forever. All companies have moved and made significant strides towards becoming more digital through the pandemic to stay connected and available for their customers. Whether the pandemic ends or not, the world of digital like everything else has changed forever.
Today, we live in an experience economy and Customers expect more and more. Leading brands want to provide cohesive personalized experience, brand loyalty has become a challenge and top brand, marketing and CX Leaders are grappling through the world of digital to unify their customer journey. Now, if you throw in the term Web 3.0, you can call it digitalization chaos of sorts.
For this very reason, Convergent Global is organizing the Unbox Summit on the 26th of May 2022 at the Address Hotel Dubai Marina, Dubai UAE to enable UAE’s leading enterprises brands to make sense of this digital landscape, understand the current and emergent technologies; and most importantly benefit by forging partnerships with the right technology leaders to build Future-proof Enterprises.
For the very first time, Epsilon a world-leading Technology, Solutions, and services company that has been helping marketers from the world’s top brands personalize experiences for millions of people, will be showcasing to over 100+ leading UAE Brand, Marketing, and CX Leaders at the Unbox Summit. We decided to catch up with Mr. Ashish Sinha, Managing Director: Epsilon – India, APAC & MEA, to understand some of the customer behaviours and how they pose a challenge to brands?
He was delighted to oblige us, Ashish shared stating that “A single consumer today uses multiple devices for different purposes and brands end up reading this as many consumers, but that is not the case; this is a single consumer across different screens. This is one of the biggest challenges to brands, especially from a personalization perspective.
Brands have not really spent time identifying the consumer. A significant amount of technology innovation is happening in the world of identity. Fuzzy logic is one big case in point, and also the ability to drive resolution, which ensures you are talking to a real individual.”
This got us intrigued, so we pressed further to understand if Brands can profile consumers or customer across multi-device or screens. What then of the privacy of the user. He was happy to share, Ashish explained to us that “Many technologies allow companies and brands to ensure that the consumer is absolutely consenting to allow their data to be used by them. That value exchange and the technology that drives it is going to be crucial in the year ahead. Essentially, technology players are investing heavily in anything that enables the interaction between the brand and the customer to be very private and secure.”
Ashish took a pause, and this time around turned to ask me if I have ever felt recognized by a brand as an individual? He continued “In my experience, absolutely not. Many brands talk about cutting-edge technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and how they have fantastic customer engagement strategies. But as a consumer, I don’t see much personalization for myself. One reason for this disconnect is that there has been too much hype. There is a big delta between theory and practice. It is important now to see how we make all the promises come true. That’s going to be the focus for the next few months. We have to take out the hype, realistically look at what is possible, and then slowly but surely, focus on the personalization game. It is eventually about execution, which is getting the right technology, the right people with the right pragmatism and a good plan to get things going.”
If this is the reality of the emergent technologies, then what is this ruckus about the “experience economy” I asked, to which he smiled and replied “consumer prefers experiences over stuff. Experience economy is the latest mode of the economy, following the agrarian economy, the industrial economy, and the most recent service economy. The idea is that modern marketers need to create memorable events for consumers, where from the memory itself becomes the product: the “experience.” Brands need to think differently about how they market their products and services to create an experience. Even if overall consumer spending is down, people still need stuff. And they’re more likely to buy stuff if their customer experience is as positive and memorable as a concert or an event they experienced. So, in my opinion, the future of the experience economy looks like a return to its roots: the customer experience. Today more than ever, brands need to step up their game.”
We finally asked about the reason Epsilon is sponsoring the Unbox Summit in the UAE as a Gold Sponsor, to which Ashish explained that “Consumers in UAE are tech-savvy and are hungry for what’s next – brands must make innovation more than a buzzword and ensure it drives real value for customers, which will naturally lead to business growth. This is why we are joining the Unbox Summit. We are aware that marketers know their brands and consumers better than we do. Our job is to enable. At the root of it, we are a brand & customer engagement platform. Our job is data hygiene, governance and ensuring that data is captured in a privacy-controlled way. A brand is then ready to leverage this data to its fullest and offer deeply personalized experiences to consumers. Our role is also to ensure that performance is monitored and reported transparently so that brands can measure how their marketing strategies deliver on defined outcomes.”
Ashish, concluded that “Epsilon is the global Leader in Loyalty, one of the key thought leadership initiatives we showcase will be ‘Value Led Loyalty’. We bring an instance of Epsilon Loyalty Labs to the event and this will give participating marketers a chance to interact and and co-create to drive true value for their customer as much as to their brand.”
Article received on Mail
International Business Magazine is the official media partner for the event
