Last week, Unilever announced it had acquired Dollar Shave Club.  Tech Crunch carried an interesting article on the $1 billion acquisition and the challenges reputed & established FMCG brands face with the onslaught of innovative and emerging brands. 

FMCG companies have been living in ...

These three - Deep Learning, Personalization and Privacy are indeed oxymorons.  The fact that when they come together for contextualization, relevance and differentiated customer experience - privacy takes a back seat!  When Privacy takes centre stage, then Deep Learning & personalizat...

Last week Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer - Stephen Deadman, wrote about the need to refocus the debate around personal data. It was a thought provoking article where Stephen talks about the need for a kind of a new coalition between tech companies on the use of personal data.

I had also written the...

Last week, we saw Microsoft announcing the acquisition of Linked-In for US $ 26.2 billion. With the acquisition of Linked-In, Microsoft now has access to over 400 million accurate profiles of professionals from Linked-In across the world. Over the last year or two, I have been seeing this trend wher...

I was reading an interesting update on Forrester Marketing 2016, where companies & marketers were asked to take cognizance of micromoments. I don't disagree fundamentally with this theory but I was thinking how do marketers prepare & adapt to this new paradigm.

One of the top questions that c...

I often hear a lot of businesses and managers talking about a metric Cost-to-Serve(CTS) - reducing cost-to-serve a customer. They continuously talk about moving customers to lower cost channels and hence reducing the cost-to-serve & improving profitability. I find this ridiculous as an independe...

We live in a complex world today where customers reach or talk or share their views about companies or the products they like, own or use or their experiences thro' a multitude of ways. The touch points, the IT systems and channels are quite fragmented. Each day there is a new one that comes-up and ...

I was at the Loyalty Summit in Mumbai where I shared my thoughts on how "How IoT is the third age of marketing technology". Here's the presentation.

IoT is truly giving a voice to products! Also, it is changing the way data is getting generated from many products based on usage and giving c...

I have been reading a lot of interesting developments about IoT(Internet of Things) and some recent trends on the kind of devices that will pop-up soon to influence a customer's life which were showcased in CES 2016. I often wonder how ready are enterprises to transform themselves in a way to anonym...

There is a very lovely article by Vala Afshar in Huffington Post on the current state, business impact, currency and value of customer experience.

What I liked about this article is that there are really some lovely perspectives on how companies should look at & evaluate customer experience.

Here ...