A few MEC colleagues recently attended Marketing Week Live, Europe’s premier marketing event held at the Olympia Grand in London. Free to attend, the exhibition was split into eight main zones (careers, agencies, loyalty, digital and data, insight, live marketing, promotional merchandise and retail) with a vast array of exhibition stands across each area.
The event also hosted more than 200 speaker sessions with brands and suppliers covering a range of current topics across each of the main areas. The central hub of the conference programme was Centre Stage, with talks from top industry marketers (from Twitter, Diageo, Starbucks) delivering insight and case studies aimed to provide marketers with the tools to give their brand the competitive edge.
The Centre Stage programme addressed two key themes across the two days:
- More channels, more opportunities – speakers demonstrated how the proliferation of channels and platforms driven by digital technology could be used to a company’s advantage.
- Future marketing business models – sessions covering some of the broader issues facing marketers, such as strategies to be employed in different cultures to the demand from the consumer for brands to demonstrate greater transparency and responsibility.
Overall conference content across the two days was diverse, ranging from Diageo’s take on brand building in the 21st century and their continued pursuit of deeper levels of consumer engagement utilising three key areas of technology, entertainment and data to Cancer Research’s successful rebrand and how this has helped put the charity back into the hearts and minds of the British public.
The exhibition provided an invaluable insight into current hot topics affecting various aspects of the marketing industry and key areas for future development.
MEC opinion: While covering a vast array of different areas/topics, a number of key themes became apparent across the course of the exhibition:
- Brand/marketing innovation and increased engagement are absolutely vital, enabling cut-through in the modern day saturated marketplace
- Increased importance is placed on customer experience, with numerous companies putting customers at the heart of all marketing and many advocating the personalisation of marketing activity
- The increased use of ‘big data’ (dispirit/unstructured data sources) to further analyse and understand the customer, combined with an emphasis on transparency, enabling stronger/more engaging communications with consumers
In light of the increasingly fragmented marketplace, more and more companies seem to be stepping away from a one size fits all approach, adopting a more personal, one-to-one engaging relationship, ultimately tailoring this to the individual needs of their consumers.