What is High-Velocity Marketing?
Some things are truly inevitable. They stand out from the churn and unpredictability of daily life. And one of those things is a trend I’d like to call “High-Velocity Marketing”.
So, what is High Velocity Marketing?
High-Velocity Marketing describes a brand’s ability to act and react orders of magnitude faster than before. Think of the kind of instant brand communication that takes place in the fast-paced world of Instagram and Twitter.
Why should brand executives and marketers care?
Because – in the very near future – speed will be the most important capability for brands that want to stay relevant. Instead of planning campaigns weeks in advance and rolling out your brand messages globally over a period of many months, it will be done in days – or even hours. Brands that can’t get their messages out immediately and respond instantly to world events or shifts in online sentiment will be unable to take part in fast-paced global conversations.
Here’s an example:
When President Donald Trump invited the National Champions, Clemson Tigers, into the White House and served hamburgers and pizza, he shared this tweet about “hamberders”:
Within a few hours, Burger King joined the conversation and tweeted this:
Nicely done. But what if Burger King had been able to respond even faster? What if minutes after Donald Trump’s initial tweet, Burger King had devised and launched a campaign to offer “hamberders” in every Burger King restaurant around the world. Same ingredients as a regular hamburger for just $1 more, just because. Who wouldn’t want to order one of these?
To become and stay relevant in the age of Generation Z, brands need to act many, many times faster than conventional marketing processes currently allow. Social media has created endless, fast-paced global conversations about virtually everything there is to talk about. To be part of that, brands also need to move at the same pace. Being a day, or even an hour, too late will soon becomes unacceptable.
Why is High-Velocity Marketing so important for handling future crises?
Being able to move at lightning speed opens up new opportunities, but it could also become mission-critical in the face of a potential crisis. Imagine that one of your marketing campaigns is perceived as offensive and blows up on Twitter. Your product or statement is being massively criticized on social media for having an upsetting or inappropriate message. How quickly would you want to be able to remove every and all references to this product from every store, online shop, campaign website, ad, social media profile and app? Instantly, I assume.
You don’t have to search long to find numerous examples of global and local brands that ran into the kind of problem described above. The longer your offensive messages stay out there, the more brutal the punishment becomes. Waiting a day? Not a chance.
Situations like this present a huge risk for brands. Iconic global brands like Apple, Nike, D&G, Ferrari and Boeing can afford to take a hit from time to time. But for most brands, this kind of misstep can be an existential threat.
These days, even the big guys need to be afraid. When Boeing delayed the grounding of its global 737 MAX 8 fleet by two days, it invited massive criticism, potentially damaging Boeing’s valuable brand for years to come.
What are the benefits of High-Velocity Marketing for customers?
The impact of High-Velocity Marketing on customers will be almost entirely positive. Every brand interaction will be more up-to-date and, therefore, more relevant to customers. Errors will be fixed faster too. And the instant nature of High-Velocity Marketing opens the door for even more interesting and entertaining interactions. Here are two examples:
Imagine a luxury fashion brand or retailer. It’s Oscar Night and the fashion world is watching. Photos of stars and celebrities from the red carpet are flooding social media. What if you could create and share an instant landing page for each photo within seconds to enable your customers around the world to “shop the look” while watching the show? What if you could build on this experience by promoting similar dresses and other matching accessories from hot designers?
Or, imagine that you’re the sponsor of a beloved local soccer team. What if you could push real-time updates of the championship game to all out-of-home screens in the city? Seconds after a goal for the team, a video of the goal and a fun brand message could appear everywhere. Wouldn’t that be a high value experience to every fan walking on the streets at that moment?
How does CoreMedia Content Cloud support High-Velocity Marketing?
CoreMedia’s very first customer was the DPA, Germany’s leading press agency. Right from the beginning we understood that speed, consistency and the ability to fully remove anything wrong within seconds was a mission-critical requirement for publishers. Today, every brand is a publisher with the same need for speed and global reach as an industry-leading press agency.
In fact, CoreMedia Content Cloud was designed for exactly this kind of high-velocity publishing. But that’s just the beginning. A typical global brand implementation is even more complicated than that of a press agency. We’re handling integrations into multiple commerce platforms for different markets, managing translations into 10-80 different languages and, sometimes, delivering that content to more than a hundred different countries. And all of that’s in addition to providing support for an increasing number of other touchpoints like apps, in-store displays, digital signage, service portals, out of home advertising, internet platforms, social media channels and voice portals. And that’s where our high velocity brand orchestration capabilities truly shine.
For a number of fashion customers, we’ve reduced the time-to-web for new drops in multiple markets from weeks to less than 30 minutes. That is an acceleration of more than two orders of magnitude. With CoreMedia Content Cloud, they can accomplish the same tasks in less than 1% of the time.
The future will be more complex, more exciting and more dynamic that anything we’ve seen. Brands should get ready for High-Velocity Marketing. Their future competitors will.
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