Seems that every turn this past two weeks has met the fascinating and dynamic morphing of communications. We are learning and applying "new rules" of interactive communications — rules well articulated by David Meerman Scott. The rules spawn of Web 2.0 are exciting and breathtaking.
For a war horse like yours truly, the effort to comprehend it is dwarfed only by the challenge of execution — and it’s been execution that’s captivated my attention until today.
I just finished reading an exceptional article by Roger Meyer on Trendpointe: To BI or Not to Be: That is the Question. Competitive Business will Depend on Business Intelligence.
Meyer periscopes a marketing future that invites
- redefinition of brand management
- transformation of executive leadership
- revision of tour experiences as consumers
He talks about business intelligence (BI), a major force waiting in the wings that’s not well understood nor easily practiced, but when it becomes so will power the bulleted transformations noted above.
"BI is the capability to understand the interaction of multiple business activities, in order to more accurately communicate to the present and predict trends and outcome." He’s quick to point out that a current problem is lack of a universally accepted definition. (I’m as equally quick to point out that there is no universally accepted definition of PR either, but that has not stopped progress. But that’s another story.)
He continues, "BI marches across every possible business process, whether it’s marketing, human resources, customer service, pricing optimization, or anti-money laundering. BI is not a trend or a fad. It’s more than a tool. It’s a powerful lens that enables leaders to see deeper into the true nature of the problems they face."
It’s a tough notion to wrap your mind around, as it’s neither intuitively understood or humanly scaled. It takes a lot of machine computing to produce.
Meyer’s point is as BI gets up and running, it will be a force in remaking branding. Instead of brands being based on yesterday’s observations, BI will enable companies to track changing preferences and, in turn, communicate about what people want to those who are interested. The implications:
- companies will compete on analytics
- BI will help turn brand strategy into real-time process, guided by forward-facing intelligence
- brand personality will be a dynamic and interpersonal experience
- the analytic marketer, a hybrid go-to super-user, will help steward the evolution of the marketing process toward a deeper understanding of the customer and market relations
All of this had profound implications in communications, moving digital media into increased relevance and traditional paid media further from importance.
In addition, I believe that the practice and tools of PR will be an important part of the mix. I mean the new PR, which goes beyond publicity. The new PR publishes useful and interesting information, makes it available to individuals and groups that have an interrest, and then maintains a dialogue with many of them.
PR practitioners will be a part of the human team that makes use of the multi-variate intelligence. Indeed, I can see where BI may well become part of the very content played back to consumers, just as opinion survey data has done increasingly for several decades.
Roger Meyer http://trendpointe.com/article-archive/another-article
David Meerman Scott http://davidmeermanscott.com
