e4m Video Story:  A counterpoint to the attention economy is the trust economy: Rajesh Iyer, HCLSoftware

A big challenge marketers face today, is staying relevant across multiple dimensions, amidst a proliferation of channels, increased competition, while looking to grab the audience’s attention. Rajesh Iyer, Executive Vice President & Portfolio General Manager - Business & Industry Solutions, HCLSoftware says, “In today’s attention economy, one of the biggest problem marketers have, is how to get heard; and to get heard you need to be relevant; to be relevant, you need to have the right message and to have the right message, you need to understand the audience better. As you start to unravel the issue, it presents itself in a sequence of capabilities that you need. The first thing is relevance.”

The second big challenge is internal relevance within the organisation. With marketing budgets increasingly under pressure, marketers are accountable for money spent and the resulting RoI, i.e. attribution on the money spent across channels and the impact generated. The third challenge, says Iyer, is agility and whether the marketer/brand can adapt quickly to the changing market and audience preferences.

As a demographic, Iyer says that GenZ is ‘not one but many demographics and a very conscientious generation when compared to the earlier generations.’ The key to connect with this cohort remains the same – relevant messaging across channels; however, to build a deep connection, the brand must align according the values and cause that resonant with the GenZs. Iyer states, “With Gen Zs, the marketer's problem becomes one of not only attention, but also how do to connect to a cause that that audience cares about?”

Building A Trust Economy & AI Application

A key priority is to create communication that sustains the consumers’ attention through the entire marketing funnel driving the consumer through the mid-funnel and the buying process to drive the desired outcome.

Iyer says, “A counterpoint to the attention economy is the trust economy. Trust is about building that rapport with your customer to a point that when you give them that one message on that one channel at the right time, the chances of them acting on it are 80-90% versus attention economy, where you'd be lucky to get a 2% response rate.” He adds, “That’s what we talk about, how do we move from the attention end of the spectrum towards the trust end?”

With the emergence of AI as a key tool in marketing, it is not a surprise that looking ahead, the application of AI will be used beyond content and creatives. One use is in the data domain; typically, the colossal amount of customer data sits in multiple repositories and AI could be used to extract meaningful insight. AI can be used right from data intelligence, data transformation to customer data platform where first-party, second-party, third-party data can be reconciled and harmonized to resolve identities and automated segmentation. Marketers can also use AI for propensity modeling to directly influence the actioning and the decision layer of the MarTech stack.

Iyer explains, “If you think of data as the new oil, AI can be the refinery that extracts that high-octane fuel of insight which then enables you to precisely target your customer with highly relevant message. Depending on their propensity, we can wrap it up in an experience that is very memorable.”

The second is in customer engagement where AI can help in determining customer preferences and engage with them in real time. A fundamental part in the intelligence economy is context – knowing where the customer is currently in their buying process, what is happening in their life - to then help the brand track the customer across all the brand’s physical and digital channels.

Iyer explains, “Omni-channel customer journeys, automatically figuring out the channel propensity and delivering that next best action at the right time, collating all the customer signals and driving the insight that maximizes the effectiveness, this is where we see tremendous value of AI.”

Another domain of AI usage is operations where AI can help scale experience. While marketers talk about data and insights and metrics, ultimately there is a feel-good and ineffable, unquantifiable aspect to an interaction between a brand and customer – and that’s experience.

Iyer says, “It's how the brand creates moments of magic when a customer interacts with a brand. A brand that can deliver magic repeatedly will hold the customer’s attention and stand out in the noise. How does the brand take moments of magic in a customer's journey and replicate it across bigger cohorts.” He continues, “Similarly, how do I not have the brand hurt the customer? We call this a moment of struggle. How do I take moments of struggle in a customer's experience and mitigate it thoughtfully and empathetically.”

Composability: A Value Proposition

A problem area for CMOs and CIOs is composability. A “value proposition” from HCLSoftware is its martech platform is HCL Unica+ - an integrated stack built from modular, self-contained business capabilities that can be easily integrated, updated, or swapped out without disrupting the entire system, wherein a customer does not have to buy an entire stack and can customize the stack as per requirements.

Iyer explains, “Composability is all about, do you have a stack that works out of the box end-to-end? Can I plug out certain aspects of that stack and plug in my own or a third-party vendor into that? The answer is yes and we call it integrated composable. The customer has the flexibility to substitute specific aspects of the stack. We provide well-defined APIs and mechanisms to integrate our stack with whatever else the customers might have.”

He continues, “Composability plays a big role to deliver real outcomes in relevance, attribution and agility. We call Unica+ the Martech for the intelligence economy stack. We reimagined the stack with AI at the heart of it. It's AI first, data-driven and hyper-personalized. It's available on multiple clouds, including ours, and gives customers the flexibility on which platform they want to deploy it on. It's a complete stack.”

Using the acronym ABCDE, Iyer explains that A is AI, B for brand new customer experience, C for composable cloud Native, D for data-first and data-driven, and E for easy to buy and deploy.

Conversation partner? The CMO, the CTO, Or CDO

When it comes to marketing, the conversation partner in a company is not just the Chief Marketing Officer. Depending on the organization it’s also the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Digital Officer. Iyer says that companies are now not just speaking about AI and have moved up the chain and looking at usage of AI applications that work. Customers are also reallocating existing funds, in high single digits, towards AI. 

On a final note, he says, “Do not inundate your customers with irrelevant messages. When you do reach out to them, be empathetic and respectful of their privacy. We've seen these behaviours produce good results in the long term. Deliver memorable experiences, amplify moments of magic and mitigate moments of struggle.”