Stories by Brad Howarth

It's easy to forget in the face of consumer marketing's data revolution that B2B marketing has also been going through a digital and data transformation.

The rapid march of technology and changing consumer expectations are driving organisations to release new products and services at an ever increasing rate. In marketing, this translates to delivering campaigns and interactions at greater speed, with flexibility and customer responsiveness to match. But if handled poorly, such rapid product and process development can also translate to a drop in quality.

In 2002 Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that all teams in his company were to expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. The edict gave rise to the creation of a service-oriented architecture within Amazon, with all interactions managed through application programming interfaces (APIs).

While many Australians know eBay as an ecommerce powerhouse, fewer know that the company also supplies the technology powering many other online retail experiences – and increasingly, a number of offline experiences as well.

As anyone who has renovated a house may attest, no matter how good the starting point is, it takes more than a new coat of paint to get results. For Jon Satterley, the task of digitally renovating multi-faceted Australian entertainment company, Village Roadshow, started by pouring new foundations.

The pace of change in ecommerce can mean decisions made only a handful of years ago quickly restrict a retailer’s ability to adapt to new trends.

Computers long ago surpassed human beings in logic-based tasks such as computation. But it has taken much longer for them to even passingly mimic human beings in many of the chaotically-structured tasks that we undertake each day. So can artificial intelligence really contribute anything of value to a process as personally oriented as sales and marketing?

Newcastle-based company, Port Container Services, is proving you don’t need to be big to get value out of customer relationship management.

In this era of automated online marketing, it is easy to forget there are still human beings at either end of the transaction.

Our obsession with all things digital in marketing may come at the cost of early insights into other more exotic concepts, according to Phil Phelan, national strategy director for Australia at SapientNitro.

It’s been a long-held dream of many marketers to better engage with customers within their physical premises. But even the old solution of employing more floor staff is unlikely to help if there is no way easy of first identifying who each customer is.

The prominence of digital agencies within the roster of major brands has increased markedly in the past decade, reflecting in part the rise of digital to become the most lucrative individual advertising category in Australia.

Social media provides a window into consumer sentiment, and is proving to be a highly effective advertising tool. But can it actually drive sales conversion?

The concept of retargeting consumers in the hope they might complete an action – such as finalising an abandoned purchase – is now common practice among many online retailers and other transaction-based organisations.

The rapid adoption of mobile devices has led many organisations to accelerate plans for content delivery via apps and optimised Web pages. For marketers, however, this is creating headaches around developing multiple variations for different operating systems and form-factors.