Magazine: Marketing: the next generation

This year one of the speakers at the two-day BrandFestival was Thomas Gad, one of the most famous brand strategists and advisors in the world. Mr Gad, an advisor to BMW, Airbus and Deutsche Bank and the creator of the ‘4D Branding’ model, spoke about the future of brand building. He stressed that branding is one of the most crucial elements of creating a competitive advantage in the business world. Brands have become a sales and profit increasing factor just like human capital is. Edina Heal, country manager of Google Hungary told that 2015 was the year of breakthrough in mobile internet use: more than 50 percent of Google and Youtube searches come from mobile devices. The so-called Generation Y, consumers born between 1980 and 1995, has played the biggest role in this. 84 percent of these consumers only purchase a product or service after checking the opinions of others about it; they are also happy to let companies enter their private sphere. Aleksandra Banovic, chief digital services officer of Telenor Hungary revealed that according to research, by 2020 data traffic will be 14 times bigger than it is now in Central Europe. Parallel to this, many small service providers will also appear in the market. Consequently the increase in data traffic won’t automatically bring higher revenue but bigger price competition. Only those companies will be able to stay in the market that offer quality services and restructure their portfolio. Hajnalka Kovács, mobile marketing expert of Magyar Telekom spoke about the future of mobile services. She thinks that by processing the information generated by mobile phone use – which can tell a lot about their owners – new types of marketing messages can be created. Mobile phones will replace bank card payment, loyalty cards and various tickets. Personalised and location-specific advertising messages can be sent to them as well. Georgiu Achilles, senior consultant of IBM Hungary made an attempt at the impossible: giving a definition for Big Data. He used an example from the film industry and told that Big Data will be a decisive element in many fields of life in the future. New analytic tools need to be developed to manage the masses of data for marketing purposes. Dr András Orosz, country marketing manager of Tesco Hungary gave a presentation on the added value created by Big Data. By getting to know customers more, not only their needs can be satisfied better but their future expectations can be met as well. Personalised marketing is much more efficient than mass marketing or segment marketing. András Vicsek, head of research at Maven7 talked about finding the opinion leaders of online communities. If brands can find these youtubers and bloggers and involve them in brand activities, customer opinion about a brand can be influenced to a great extent. Henrietta Boncsér, business development manager of Google Hungary shed light on the interesting fact that every second 100 million business activities surround us. The majority of data produced by these is still unstructured, but those parts which companies are able to analyse can be used for ‘user journey’ management instead of product management. Nina Oswald, managing director of Interbrand in Central and Eastern Europe identified the factors behind the growth of successful brands. She told that we are living in a consumer’s age – Age of You – and global brands’ communication focuses on the shopper and on a personalised brand experience. Every year the company compiles the ‘Best Global Brands’ ranking and at the moment Apple is at the top of the 100-strong list, with a market value of USD 170 billion – 43 percent more than last year.