I'm back from the Future

I was there in 2017 and so I can tell you what to expect - machines will run the world. I provided band strategy consulting for Blue Yonder, Europe’s leading provider of artificial intelligence solutions for the retail trade.

Their solutions take a myriad of data sources (from the weather, the time of year, promotional activity etc) and predict with an extraordinary degree of accuracy what the demand will be for every single product in a supermarket - typically that’s around 50,000 products!

The challenge for me was to help Blue Yonder better engage with retailers, who tend to only want to deal with other retailers and are suspicious of anybody from outside their industry - let alone a bunch of data scientists! Together with their senior management and marketing team we did three things differently.

First, we stopped focusing on the science and starting focusing on the problems the science could solve. Don’t say how it’s done, say what it will do!

Second, we re-developed the brand to reflect the retail world - for it to feel like it’s part of the fabric of retail through its choice of language, imagery and identity.

Third, we gave up re-inventing the wheel by creating standardised messaging templates that ensured teams could get on with selling and not having to keep inventing ways of talking about the brand.

The heavy lifting was done in a 25 day brand strategy process that delivered a concise definition of what the brand stood for, its messages, its values, and the assets it had to meet its opportunities.

The rest of the year was spent delivering that strategy, the fruits and It worked by the way. The first integrated demand generation campaign over-delivered by 400%!

So, machines running the world, yes, but we still get to tell them where to go! If your brand needs some help in being relevant and differentiated why get in touch here