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well the arena of marketing like many others has seen quite a few shifts in the last few years for a variety of
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different reasons there are the expectations of consumers as well as the impact of artificial intelligence and
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many others pleasure to be joined here in Studio by Dominic galello who is managing director and head of digital
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for Bridgepoint he is also the former Chief marketing officer at Bumble group nice to meet you Dominic thanks for a
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few moments thanks for having me I mentioned those couple of areas but realistically you also have to throw in
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the pandemic and it just feels like it is a time where for a lot of different sectors marketing included that we have
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seen just a lot of pressure and angst and even change that's kind of come about recently how do you view kind of
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the state of marketing I think we're uh on the long trajectory of a great transformation in marketing which is
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really putting the power much more in the customer seat in terms of how they look at and assess different brands so
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while brands historically were able to control the narratives around what they wanted to be known for famous for the
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Advent of the pandemic put more control in terms of users consuming content online discussing different brands
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online and that means overall you have more brands that are having to take control of their message by really
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reflecting internally not externally in terms of how they Define who they are how they deliver that value to customers
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and how they keep their values consistent in everything that they do so it is a huge period of transformation at
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the moment do you even even distinguish between Marketing in general but also digital and online only marketing as as
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how these changes are taking place you know brand expectations from customers are constantly evolving and accelerating
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so certainly how they want to transact with you how they want to discover your products or Services those are following
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the places that the customers are really hanging out which is the internet sphere
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and more importantly many of the more emergent social platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram for instance where lot of
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Brands actually still don't have mature and sophisticated strategies not just
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for how they communicate and Market but also how they transact with those customers so thinking about how
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companies can really evolve to be where customers are where they're spending
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time and more importantly where those customers are having conversations around their category or around their
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brand is a very critical need but it's been slow for Brands to really transform
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how they go to market brands are really accustomed to traditional marketing campaigns and agencies that create these
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oneway push messages versus thinking about how do you inspire a community to participate in your brand how do you
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give them the tools to create content on your behalf and the brands that are really succeeding in the social sphere
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are those that are being community-led versus being a one-way funnel of messaging that no one really cares about
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so just off of something you said a moment ago when you have companies that have kind of followed pattern a for such
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a long period of time in terms of their marketing but the expectation of the consumer conser has now become pattern B
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oh yes it I mean it it's it's it's a make or break for a lot of companies in
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terms of something like brand loyalty where if you're not doing enough to meet
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the expectation of the consumer the consumer is going to head off to another product absolutely and some companies
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are playing catch-up in this sphere if I think about the beauty space for instance Estee louder for instance
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shifted a majority of their marketing away from really traditional media driven Marketing in towards more
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influencer marketing has that been successful to sty their decline not necessarily there's a lot of ongoing
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effort of transformation in that business but I think you do have to think not only about how you're
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communicating with customers but also how are you driving value for your customers and how you create your
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product or service customers care more than ever about the values of a company how do they treat their employees how do
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they treat their suppliers how do they provide transparency around their environmental impact or many other types
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of impacts they may have on society and so it's not just about how do you communicate the bells and whistles of
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what you do it's about that endtoend customer Journey as well as the endtoend
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value creation that you do as a business that's where brand is really having to
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play a part and that's where marketers are being stretched away from just thinking about what's the latest
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campaign the latest message to how do I partner with my procurement team or my finance team or my operations team in
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terms of how do we uphold the values of the company that are the reason people choose us the reason people stay with us
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overall into the customer experience in terms of the connection with the consumer and I'll use your former life
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at at Bumble as the example here in the world or the space of dating apps yes where you're trying to make that social
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connection to begin with what are the challenges that are out there right now for for those companies so if you think
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about many dating apps they historically relied in some ways around the great visibility that digital channels
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provided in terms of the ability to Target ability to build lookalike models ability to do quite a lot of
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sophisticated types of marketing to drive high quality customers into a network but the reality of how dating
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apps grow is not outside in it is inside out it is about how many high quality good chats can you create in your
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ecosystem and that requires strong ecosystem balance and so how do you then ensure that you're able to deliver a
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strong ecosystem a healthy ecosystem that requires a lot of hand-to-hand combat what I call which is a lot of
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community building it's about going into neighborhoods it's about meeting with
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people understanding where they exist and then driving the right Partnerships with ambassadors with events or with
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anything else to really drive that ecosystem there's really not a lot of scale in that type of model uh when you
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first are doing that type of intervention but the net effect of you driving a healthier ecosystem means more
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good chats more dates more people talking about you know Becky or Daniel who they met on that dating app and
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actually therefore more top of funnel coming into the dating app and so the companies that are able to do the hard
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growth strategy which is brand building community building and building a strong
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ecosystem are more successful than the lazy marketers who are using digital tools as a crutch to shortcut their way
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to success so that's that's I guess the unique tonomy that you're talking about
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here because when you're talking about building all those different components
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the the chats the dates Etc you're relying on the component of the consumer themselves to factor into that that
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level of success you know the the community is in many ways the most important channel right why are you
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paying for media Impressions on a channel that no one's paying attention to when as a dating app you've got
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millions of people who are really affixed to your platform and really engaged not only on a functional basis
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but also emotionally with your brand those are the people you want to become your ambassadors and really the notion
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for any company the implication for any company is that brand and marketing is not so much about pouring the funnel
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from the outside it's about how do you nurture and educate your own customers
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to be Advocates on your behalf that's really where scale and unlock comes from
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and that was certainly a recipe for success for Bumble so now here we are in 2024 and we're getting into the time of
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artificial intelligence and we know that seemingly it feels like every sector is
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being impacted by AI in some fashion one way or the other how is it impacting marketing already and where do you see
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it going in the future you know so for the world of marketing in particularly for Brands you of course a lot of the
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costs towards doing marketing are significantly reduced the ability to generate huge amounts of content that
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are really required to communicate with customers in a very personalized way there's a lot of opportunity there but I
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think we shouldn't forget that the fundamentals of brand building which is about a clear and cogent idea that
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customers resonate with that is imbued throughout your customer experience is still required and my concern is that a
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lot of the conversation around this AI as a tool is shortcutting many of the hard things that Brands need to do to
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really effectively wind regardless of whether or not we're in the AI age of course we're capitalizing a lot of those
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opportunities particularly within the Bridgepoint portfolio in terms of how we're leveraging these Technologies but
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it doesn't undercut the need for strong strategy strong foundations to succeed
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and that's seemingly one of the questions I think a lot of people are asking because a lot of people assume
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that as AI has kind of come into the mix and will come into the mix even further
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that it's going to take over for a lot of that decision process but the human
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component and and kind of the theorizing is still in your mind it's going to
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remain as important as anything as we move forward I think it'll you know humans will play less of a producer role
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more of an editorial role in many scenarios and and the reality from a marketing standpoint in many ways is how
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do you ensure the best resonance with that customer well that Insight needs to be generated in many ways from a human
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of course you can collect that data through many other tools like artificial intelligence provides but creativ ity
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still sits at the heart of how people connect with Brands and that's not something you can necessarily fully test
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and automate your way to it does require that human empathy and understanding that is still required now that ability
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to augment that insight and put it into production huge opportunity but I wouldn't totally rule out the role and
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importance of humans in really driving that connection between a brand and its customer as being very critical and so a
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platform as successful as it may be with its online component is just as good as
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the people that are working behind it yeah absolutely and you still need an agile team that can evolve with probably
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the changing talent and organizational requirements in an AI driven age of course better cost structure the more
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efficient you can be but nonetheless what what is going to make you successful is not necessarily can you
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produce content more effectively it's going to be you know can you really deliver a brand that people proactively
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choose that they are willing to recommend to other adjacent audiences that are like the customer you want to
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pursue do companies though do they still have to be a little bit worried maybe worri is not the right word but have to
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be aware of the component of what AI can bring from a cost savings perspective in
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regards to that overall bottom line growth that the company's looking for abolutely when you're talking about you
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don't want to overdo it relying on the AI and still you want to be able to to
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make the best the best profit that you can so we as Bridgepoint invested across a number of different sectors and across
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those sectors we've done a lot of work to understand whether or not a company
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is potentially at some disintermediation risk which means market demand Falls because AI can do the job of the company
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and some part of its value second is it changes the competitive dynamics of an industry you think about software where
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you can ship more productively than ever before the market demand may R uh remain
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but actually the way you deliver that value becomes more competitively Intense or you just have some pure operational
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leverage and so we're really focused across those three different categories
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in terms of what is the stance you should therefore take and within the disruption potential category where
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there may be a potential impact of disintermediation by AI we're actually recommending those companies become AI
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first companies in many ways they have an incumbency advantage of some specialism that they've exist that has
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existed within the business for some years they probably have some proprietary data it's up to them to
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leverage and accelerate that incumbency advantage with these very Democratic tools with these Aid driven tools to
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better service the customer and so it's really a a period of transformation for
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many businesses particularly on the more impacted end and so what we're looking
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for with our management teams is the ability to experiment a willingness to not only exploit these Technologies
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within their existing business model but also to explore new potential business models within the safety of their
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existing model so there's a lot of change certainly happening at the moment it touches all functions are there
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components then of that learning and that building out moving forward that also to a degree tie back into what we
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went through with the pandemic and I had said because I've asked a lot of CEOs
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this in the last three years about are there elements of your operation that you changed because you had to because
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of the pandemic that ended up being better for you overall longer term is it the same in in some cases with marketing
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I I I think there's going to be consistent transformation of the marketing organization you should see
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and expect a significant bias towards more creativity driven Talent versus production driven Talent uh and those
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that are historically in a production level role through the ability to manipulate content through human input
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will be able to actually better drive in many ways the consistency and quality of
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output that they that a brand requires of its content much more so I think the roles of teams are going to advance very
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very rapidly we see that within the agency businesses in particular if you think about how all the holding
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companies have communicated their organizational transformation plans you know they're investing in these
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underlying technologies that their strategist in particular are going to be able to leverage and I think we'll see
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that transformation happen but you know it is still many ways early days most companies are still crawling not even
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walking and so over the coming years I think this transformation will play out uh in in more of a gradual Pace in some
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ways than the very hard disruption that the pandemic uh imposed on a lot of businesses so is that the next level of
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innovation that we're going to see play out in marketing I think what you should
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expect is greater personalization uh of Brands certainly um but will it be sort of transformational by comparison to
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many of the fundamentals that I think are still important I don't think so I
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think you'll see an explosion of content but what ultimately wins is really high
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quality content and that requires a human sense that AI isn't necessarily able to immediately deliver certainly
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today let me finish up on this because we've also talked a lot about brand sure
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on this show and it seems like companies now are more focused on their brand than
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ever before because of the concern of loss of consumer brand loyalty loss everything kind of in this conversation
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that we've had over here the last 15 minutes is it is it the same way for you
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that you see companies more focused on it than ever before you know as as much as I'm a marketer marketer is really
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sort of dating brand is the marriage that's right and that's right it's very
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important that a brand really considers and a company really considers what is its core proposition how does that
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proposition enable them to grow as a business not only in what they do today but what they could do tomorrow so it's
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an innovation map in many ways secondly driving alignment of the customer experience and you'd be shocked how many
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businesses don't speak the same way don't behave the same way across different functions of the organization
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or different products that customers touch and so I think this radical transformation of power away from the
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brand into the customer means that the brands stand naked in the eyes of their customer and you've got to make sure you
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are buttoned up in terms of how you behave how you operate how you treat your employees how you treat your
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suppliers and ultimately how you treat your customers that's going to go that
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much farther because customers will then recommend you to other people versus you
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trying to leverage ineffective television or digital digital media channels to shout your way to success
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that's just not an effective recipe for Success anymore Dominic great to meet
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you thanks very much absolute pleasure thanks for having me thank you Dominic gello who is managing director head of
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digital at Bridgepoint