The Rise of Clairvoyant Marketing

The Rise of
Clairvoyant
Marketing
For centuries, business advantage has been
created by the ability to fulfill needs faster
than one’s competitors. But soon, marketing
strategies driven by rapid response—even realtime response—won’t be good enough.
The Trend
As the economy becomes increasingly connected,
several emerging technologies are joining to create
an entirely new definition of “customer experience.”
Consider these not-too-far-in-the-future scenarios:
Welcome to the world of clairvoyant marketing,
where soon, brands won’t wait even a
microsecond for buyers to raise their hands.
In this new, connected economy, customer-
An Uber car pulls up to your door anticipatorily
(because the system knows you’ve got a flight
in two hours).
obsessed brands won’t be battling it out in the
competitive landscape—they’ll be avoiding
it altogether.
In this piece from Razorfish, we explore how and
why the real-time marketer is naturally evolving to
the clairvoyant marketer, highlighting:
The Rise and Quick Fall of Real-Time Marketing
The Emergence of Clairvoyant Marketing
Recommendations
Your Nike+ app ships you a new pair of running
shoes (because the app senses you’ve put too
many miles on your existing pair).
Your Trunk Club app sees a friend’s wedding on
your calendar (and automatically lets your stylist
know you might be needing a new suit).
Your vehicle automatically plots a traffic-free
route home (knowing you’re likely headed there
after a day at the office) and alerts you to the
location of the nearest gas station (given the
pending snowstorm).
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The Transformation of Sense
and Respond
The Quick Fall of
Real-Time Marketing
When Jack Welch made his famous observation—
that competitive advantage lies in the ability to
respond to needs faster than competitors—he was
looking through a 1980s lens and living in an era
when concepts like smart machines and artificial
intelligence resided exclusively in ivory towers and
science fiction films.
It’s been said the best way to win the game
is to not play the game. By changing the
game’s fundamental rules or by altering—even
crushing—the game’s working parameters, clever
entrepreneurs in the connected economy joyfully
watch established, century-old players lose market
share to their disruptive, game-changing ideas.
But then came the Nexus of Forces, which
introduced social media, mobile platforms, big data
and the cloud, and created a sort of electronic
looking glass that today provides previously
unimaginable visibility into the buyer’s context—one
in which people share where they are, whom they
are with and what they are doing. The breadth and
depth of the information available to marketers
today empowers them to make offers that are far
more intelligent and relevant than ever before.
It’s this type of thinking that led Uber founders to
respond to “I need a ride,” instead of “I need a taxi.”
Or Airbnb’s game changer, “I need a place to stay,”
instead of “I need a hotel room.” Zocdoc makes
doctors’ appointments that are cancelled at the last
minute available to those willing to pay a premium
for immediate care. In all these cases, entrepreneurs
took a page from Clay Christensen’s jobs-to-bedone playbook: “Address the problem to be solved
and nothing more,” using data (digitally visible for
the first time) to form irresistible value propositions.
The Rise of Real-Time Marketing
But even these disruptive examples rest on the
model of using rapid response as a primary
differentiator.
The initial triangulation of keen buyer insight,
informed by data from the cloud, social media and
mobile platforms, launched a movement (albeit one
not heralded by a great deal of thunder) known as
“RTM,” or real-time marketing. RTM’s fundamental
assumption was that deep analysis of past and
present behavior, combined with such techniques as
location awareness, would award a brand with the
ability to respond faster than its competitors.
Many times, this race to respond isn’t even
necessarily won by the brand offering the superior
product. In their eagerness to have their needs
fulfilled instantly, buyers frequently show us just how
much value they place on time and convenience.
“Solve my problem, and solve it fast,” has become
a common rallying cry of the digital customer (and
especially of those who identify time poverty as one
of life’s leading constraints).
But now, “Solve my problem fast” is giving way to
“Solve my problem before it ever even exists.”
Source: zocdoc.com
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Getting at
the Heart of
Clairvoyant
Marketing
Big data plays a role in the success of most, if
not all, disruptive digital companies. By joining
the customer insight derived from data with
a compelling value proposition, new startups
regularly reach billion-dollar valuations. But business
models, as innovative as they have become, still
overwhelmingly depend on an offer-acceptance
paradigm in which the brand makes an offer and
the potential customer then decides whether to
consider and/or accept it.
In clairvoyant marketing, however, the marketer
either gets in front of the acceptance phase (as
when your Trunk Club app alerts your stylist to the
fact that you might need a new suit) or bypasses
it altogether (as when the Uber car shows up
unordered in anticipation of your flight).
Behind clairvoyant marketing lies emerging
technologies, many of which are rapidly maturing,
that work together to obliterate the classic senseand-respond model that has fueled business
fundamentals for centuries.
The Datafication of Location is a
Marketing Breakthrough, but it’s
Only Half the Solution
Circa 200 BCE, the Greeks came up with a grid
system, which led to codification of longitude and
latitude. But it wasn’t until 1978 that the next real
breakthrough came—when a satellite interacting
with ground receivers pioneered GPS, or global
positioning system. Now, Wi-Fi routers and cell
towers deliver even more accuracy, overcoming
the traditional challenges to GPS functionality that
arise from being cloistered indoors or surrounded
by tall buildings.
Knowing your buyer’s location gives you a big
advantage in determining how best to position your
product. But that information by itself can’t fully
inform your next best offer. For that, you need to
marry location with context, which together create
the magical ingredient for making clairvoyant offers:
“The smart refrigerator you’ve been eyeing for the
past few weeks is on sale at your neighborhood Best
Buy.” When brands connect these types of dots, the
result is an experience buyers find irresistible.
“One approach solves a problem
after it has occurred; the other
prevents the problem from
happening in the first place.”
Today, Microsoft, Apple and Google now have their
own geolocation systems to complement GPS and
use them to track and analyze the ways in which
people interact with objects. The level of insight
gained from these tools will become more and more
useful to clairvoyant marketers. For example, a
customer’s vehicle might soon be able to inform him
or her of an alternate insurance provider that, based
on the customer’s driving behavior and profile, could
save him or her $800 per year. Simply responding
“yes” to the vehicle’s inquiry would allow the
customer to terminate his or her current insurance
contract and sign with the alternate provider.
Today’s UPS drivers don’t wait to experience engine
trouble. Thanks to similar “smart car” techniques,
they avoid it altogether, simply by taking their
vehicles in for service when the vehicles themselves
signal that service is needed. UPS Process
Management Director Jack Lewis says, “Prediction
gives us knowledge. But after knowledge comes
wisdom and clairvoyance. Soon, the system will
correct problems before the driver ever realizes
anything was even on the verge of starting
to go wrong.”
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The Role of Wearables in
Ubiquitous Commerce
The Datafication of Interactions
and Moods
Wearables pioneered by the health and fitness
industry are already transmitting vital sign data
automatically to clinicians that are used to inform
treatment plans. Consider a future scenario in which
your watch alerts you to a sale on protein bars after
noting a protein deficiency in the nutritional analysis
it performed on you the week before. Or perhaps
your Basis, another fitness device, might note that
you’re dehydrated and responds by directing you to
a store that carries Gatorade.
If we can quantify context, why not quantify our
relationships, moods or experiences? While this
gets a bit more personal and sounds futuristic,
social networks essentially already do this today,
with the social graph. Twitter quantifies sentiment
by letting people record and share thoughts and
attitudes. LinkedIn practices clairvoyance whenever
it suggests a job we might want or people we might
know, or might want to know. In the future, brands
will practice clairvoyance using rich data sets from
social networks versus counting likes or tracking
pictures on Instagram.
These symbiotic experiences are far more seamless,
transparent and frictionless than the marketing
model that has preceded them for centuries. While
one brand might use intelligence to make an offer to
a buyer in the moment he or she becomes aware of
needing the product, a competitive brand may seize
the marketing advantage by using wisdom to get
in front of such awareness. One approach solves a
problem after it has occurred; the other prevents the
problem from happening in the first place.
The Even Bigger Role of Sensors
Quantifying attitudes and sentiments for analysis
extends to the individual datafication of human
behavior as well. For example, the people an
individual chooses to follow (as well as the people
who follow him or her); the type of language he
or she uses; his or her geolocation and the way it
changes—all of this information informs clairvoyant
marketing. Dr. Marcel Salathé, assistant professor
of biology at Penn State University, can accurately
predict a person’s likelihood of getting a flu shot
simply by analyzing his or her tweets.
By now, you’ve likely noticed that context is the
clairvoyant marketer’s key to offering magical
experiences. Sensors are often the enablers of this
magic. Using sensors, your car knows if someone
other than you is sitting in the driver’s seat and
can be programmed to use this data for everything
from automatically resetting the seat position to
refusing to start. In this same vein, the smart fridge
automatically reorders depleted stocks of orange
juice and milk. A glowing cap on a prescription
drug can alert its user to call in a refill order. Scores
of sensor-enabled clairvoyant marketing examples
are already filling the business journals. By enabling
early detection and treatment of cardiac problems,
sensors will soon prevent heart attacks to such an
extent that tomorrow’s youth might even have to
ask, “What’s a heart attack?”
Source: fitbit.com
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Clairvoyant
Marketers
Will Teach the
Machine
IBM has said that the computers of the future
will not be programmed; they will be taught.
Machine learning is one of the keys to bringing
clairvoyant marketing to life. Without it, humans
can only envision so many combinations of data,
context and need states. Business rules and if-then
statements will only take things so far. Practitioners
of clairvoyant marketing will take full advantage
of machine learning—starting with automated A/B
tests and dynamic optimization. From there, it will
progress to teaching systems how to interpret and
predict a person’s needs based on triangulating
context derived from a wide variety of inputs. It
may start with location but will move to incorporate
the information sources described above, including
wearables, external sensors, past behavior and more.
Intelligent machines will run thousands of A/B tests
to accurately interpret various signals and then
determine the best message/experience and the
most effective delivery mechanism.
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Recommendations
Rethink Sense and Respond
Paradigms with the potential to supplant those that
have been in place for decades, even centuries, are
challenging to grasp, let alone embrace. But new
technologies and techniques that make data digitally
visible for the first time are creating game-changing
opportunities. Predictive analytics informed by
insight from location services, machine learning
and IoT will give enlightened brands huge business
advantages. Ignoring these trends for long will leave
you irreparably behind.
Get Clairvoyant Technologies
on Your Radar
Make sure your CIO and CMT (chief marketing
technologist) are in tune with the trends and
technologies that are disrupting the traditional
sense-and-respond marketing model and that are
likely to make rapid response, at least as we know
it today, obsolete. Brands that get in front of the
buyer’s unconscious decision-making process will
outperform those that respond to conscious needs
(even when they do it at lightning speeds). Though
concepts like machine learning, wearables and the
datafication of just about everything seem futuristic,
this future is happening fast, and the implications for
marketers are enormous.
Be Painstakingly Clear About Your
Marketing Strategy
The datafication of everything will paralyze
marketers who try to translate the capabilities of
technology into multiple strategies individually
driven by data, social media, mobile platforms,
wearables, the cloud, etc. Create one strategy, and
then assess how technology can tactically help you
implement it. Remember, your CEO cares far more
about your customer acquisition and retention
strategy than about the number of mind-numbing
strategies modeled after the technology-du-jour.
Do Whatever it Takes to Achieve and
Maintain a Single Organizational
View of the Customer
Breaking down organization silos will be essential
to any brand’s ability to develop and succeed
with this new style of marketing. You must know
everything you can about a customer or prospect
to orchestrate good anticipatory marketing.
Organizational units that insist on owning a specific
customer scenario will work inadvertently to
compromise clairvoyant marketing. Only you can
identify just where these organizational challenges
lie. And in most cases, your evaluation of your
people will require adjustments.
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Contact Us
Meet the Author
Motivated and inspired by what’s next, Razorfish
helps its clients navigate the unknown, drive
change and transform business. This content series
is designed to help brands achieve customerobsessed business transformation, with a special
focus on the core pillars of Experience Innovation,
Participation Marketing, Ubiquitous Commerce and
Intelligent Platforms. For more content,
visit razorfish.com.
Jeremy Lockhorn
VP, Emerging Media
+ Mobile
jeremy.lockhorn@razorfish.com
Jeremy analyzes emerging
trends in all mobile business lines, including media,
strategy, web/app development, analytics and more
in the form of consultation, education, ideation,
partnership exploration and pilot opportunities.
During his 19-year tenure at Razorfish he has
advised clients such as Expedia, Nike, Best Buy, Citi,
MillerCoors and Microsoft.
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