10 Companies, 1 Focus (The Consumer)

According to Forrester, the majority of marketing leaders report that creating meaningful, 1:1 interactions with consumers is as important to their strategy as obtaining more budget. However, only one in ten say they are very effective at it creating digital experiences and stories that speaks directly to the consumer.

Lets take a look at 10 companies who are seriously devoted to creating consumer-focused brand experiences....

1. Virgin

Virgin spent three months researching its content strategy prior to the relaunch of a content-centric Virgin.com site in order to wed its brand stories to a valuable experience. Bob Fear, then Virgin’s head of digital, added:

“This gives Virgin.com a really clear purpose, so no longer just a boring, bland corporate portal sending you from A to B and off again. Rather, it’s a great branded experience".

2. Time Inc

In the digital age where people have a seemingly limitless number of channels to express their feelings and viewpoints, Time Inc. creates new ways to inspire editorial and write great stories.

As a publisher with multiple brands and a volume of data that would be impossible to handle for humans, Time Inc. leverages cognitive technology to help understand the frequency and channel in which different people or concepts are being mentioned, the sentiment of these conversations, and the reach of these conversations.

Watson’s News Explorer, Entity and Keyword Extraction APIs allow to aggregate and analyze the news, identify the people and relationships in it and provide a factual assessment of who is important within a given context.

Learn more about Time Inc...

3. Bloomberg

By launching the “Bloomberg for Enterprise” portal, Bloomberg not only created useful content for other players in the industry, but found their content informed and assisted their sales teams as well. Corrigan O’Hare, Head of Digital Marketing says:

“This content helps sales and marketing form a mutually beneficial bond...You can demonstrate the value of marketing with digital metrics, and sales appreciates having content to share that helps them have more meaningful conversations.”

4. Fortune Magazine

The logic behind the annual Fortune Crystal Ball feature is that Today’s adaptations, innovations, and changes of strategy all reflect educated guesses about what’s going to happen tomorrow.

Toward the end of each year, the staff of Fortune crunches numbers, grills the experts, pursues some hunches and assembles its own prognostications about the year to come. Recently, Fortune adopted a new predictive platform,leveraging Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Algorithms to make predictions about what content to publish.

Learn more about Fortune...

5. GE

GE is creating new value for customers, investors and society by helping to solve energy efficiencies and water challenges. “Imagination at Work,” brings the company’s 310,000 employees together around a shared business strategy.

All of GE’s content— from their daily posts on topics like LED lightbulbs and preventing deforestation—hits on this core purpose. Build a content-marketing strategy around a purpose bigger than your company.

6. The Economist

The Economist offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology and the connections between them. The foremost newspaper of world news, faces a challenge common to many publishers, how to convert website visitors into magazine subscribers.

The Economist leverages a dynamic webpages with individualized content blocks that are optimized in real-time, drive subscriptions for specific target audiences in an automated and smart way.

Opentopic with Watson powers the content analysis and recommendations, matches it dynamically with the respective audiences and continuously improves the results through machine learning algorithms. Cognitive technology allows The Economist to create dynamic buyer personas, have a real-time understanding of an individual’s needs/preferences/behaviors, and drive true 1:1 marketing.

Learn more about The Economist...

7. Huffington Post

Betsey Morgan, former CEO of the Huffington Post, pioneered the “rule of thirds,” an audience and cost strategy that allowed the publication to grow to a multibillion dollar business. She advises publishers to use one-third aggregated content, one third original content, and one-third voice and opinion.

Thought leadership, the first part, defines your brand voice and sets you apart from the crowd. Curated third-party content provides an affordable way to support the objectives of your thought leadership. Finally, social media efforts across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest provide a space for engagement and conversation.

8. Novartis

You’ve got to give props to this pharmaceutical giant, not just for having an Instagram account, but for using it in such a clever way.

Calling attention to a rather fascinating interactive exhibit about the role nature has played in medicine, Novartis does an excellent job of piquing its audience’s curiosity and coaxing traffic over to beautifulmedicine.com.

9. Monfrotto

Manfrotto not only seeks 1:1 level communications with consumers, they invite the buyer on a journey; encouraging "expression of passion through imagery".

As the company continues to scale, they leverage machine learning and natural language processing to create campaigns to keep up with buyer demand. Individualized webpages inform consumers; offering insight, techniques and behind-the-scenes visuals.

Learn more about Manfrotto...

10. Dove

Dove launched the #MyBeautyMySay campaign, encouraging the media and the general public to focus on the athletic ability of women in sports, not their looks.

The campaign launched in Times Square in New York City via a billboard that broadcasted real-time media comments that put the focus on the looks of female athletes during the Olympic Games rather than their performance. The campaign also ran in Los Angeles and Toronto to engage users via social media using the hashtag #MyBeautyMySay and online at www.dovehaveyoursay.com.

“I feel like our world today is pushing beauty over athleticism for young girls, I want to be an advocate to change that.”– Shawn Johnson, Former gymnast and Olympic gold medalist.

Learn more about Unilever...