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 Donna Zuiderweg posted Oct 29, 2017 1:28 PMSubscribe
For this week’s post, I chose to read Envisioning 2025: Five technology changes that will reshape customer behavior and what they mean for customer intelligence by Ray Poynter. In the article, Poynter describes five changes that will affect customers and companies in the next ten years. All of the trends mentioned in the article are already very visible in the marketplace today. However, the author asserts that they will continue to grow in magnitude and influence. For instance, the smartphone revolution will continue to grow until, “more than 90 percent of the population in developed countries will own a smartphone” (Poynter, 2017, p. 2) and an amazingly high percentage of adults will be connected to the internet 24/7. Further, cloud computing will continue to expand, becoming ubiquitous and wearables, the Internet of Things and personalized predictive analytics will become better and better.  
All of this means that we will become ever more reliant on our smart devices and companies who can capture the data and use it for purposes of direct marketing will have ever more ways to optimize and serve their messages to us. For individuals working in the areas of marketing and customer research it will mean the need for a significant shift in how business is done. Poynter describes for key areas were professionals will need to shift their focus in order to stay relevant in their industry. The four areas are: interpreting the data; doing it in a way that provides a more holistic and complete picture; advocating for the customer; and, identifying patterns (Poynter, 2017).
I was particularly interested in this article for two reasons. First, my organization does rely on a significant amount of advertising and customer outreach to drive our business. We have shifted somewhat in our marketing and advertising strategies but I still feel we are too heavily engaged in traditional, old-school ways of customer identification and outreach and are not shifting fast enough. I fear this is partly due to team members who are nearing retirement and are not staying up on trends and the newest research and targeting practices. Second, working in the nonprofit field, we tend to move more slowly and lag behind the curve – sometimes due to capacity but most often due to resource availability.
This article makes it very apparent that we need to be thinking much more proactively about the shift in customer intelligence and how it can impact our current marketing and advertising practices.
Poynter, R. (2015, April 15). Envisioning 2025: Five technology changes that will reshape customer behavior and what they mean for customer intelligence. Retrieved October 24, 2017, from https://www.visioncritical.com/envisioning-2025/