Digi Society
Digital Transformation in Marketing
Marketing, as many other business areas, experienced boom of digital transformation in the last decade. Digital transformation refers to evolution of business areas that results from the leverage of technology. In marketing, digital transformation represents the shift of utilizing digital channels to generate deeper insights to be able to carry out more data-informed actions and optimize the customer journey.
As a consultant, I get to engage with marketing professionals and their customers in numerous markets and industries. The general idea marketers work with today – the more data is at hand, the more sophisticated, personalized and effective actions they have opportunity to design and execute. However, it’s not so straight forward, luckily. Some industries, e.g. healthcare, life science, or financial services; are “out of box” very regulated. On top of that, we have government legislations like CAN-SPAM in North America, GDPR in the EU (and its adaptations all across the EEA), other country-specific data processing regulations that prevent businesses to collect, store and leverage our data however they see fit.
Even with these limitations, digital is powerful!
The world economic situation, with the coronavirus pandemic striking hard in the whole world and start of war in Ukraine in early 2022, the consumer is more vary of how they spend money and focus on creating a “financial pillow” as it happens in times of crisis. In marketing, we also notice its impact in form of change in how businesses invest in digital marketing – shifting resources from bought to owned channels. And so they are in-housing digital means of engagement by developing mobile/desktop applications, investing in marketing automation to evolve and optimize their customer interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
In the digital agency I work for, we predict that this trend will continue to strengthen, driving many businesses to re-imagine the way their engage with consumers – invest in new technologies and find creative ways to leverage consumer insights. At the same time, digital marketing (as well as technologies designed to support/enable it) is subject to more regulations and data protection trends. For example, the introduction of Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), killing third-party cookies, etc.
Risks of Digitalization of Society
The conversation about risks of digitalization is endless. And for the right reasons. Myself, I see major risks in using basic platforms and services, and making them part of my everyday life. I chose to take a closer look into the risks related to the two hot topics of digitalization – IoT and cloud technology.
IoT is a network intertwining devices, software, and other ‘things’ together, enabling a connected world throughout physical space. IoT is perceived as cool, videos about smart home and human-computer interactions went viral. But IoT also bring some considerable risks our way, such as;
- Lack of security of data storage and transfer,
- Weak password selection, human-originated risk which makes it vulnerable to attackers,
- AI-triggered attacks, which are becoming more common with the advancement of AI technology.
Cloud technology, also somewhat related to IoT, as more and more people are taking cloud-based communications and data storage into use the cross-communication between our devices increases. While in practice it makes our lives easier, it also us more vulnerable in potential breaches. For example, as a iPhone user, I’m majorly skeptical about using iCloud for backing up my phone storage and messages!
When I was first buying a house in Finland, the building company pitched the Smart Home concept where the entire house can be controlled from a mobile device. Everything from the temperature in the fridge, heating, induction switch on/off, dishwasher and washing machine and even sauna remote start. Kind of cool, isn’t it? Yet I couldn’t help the thought that I’m on holiday and my house is flooded or burns down because of a security breach. 😅
Self-evaluation
I really enjoyed studying this topic, and it was also a bit funny to watch the videos dated <2015 talking about the future which we live now!
Although my professional life is build around data and everything digital, in my personal time I enjoy disconnecting and focusing on enjoying the moment. I’m not super active user of social media, and probably because of working with vast amounts of personal data and seeing how it’s used for business advantage, I do mind what, where and how I sign up for services. Not that it’s of great protection, it’s better than no action.
I’m favouring all kinds of data protection policies although it makes my professional life more difficult. Businesses have random outbursts of panic when it comes to limitations. Before May 2018, when GDPR became active, I had my first burnout from the amount of work and pressure it brought upon my department. 🥴
References
SecurityScorecard. (n.d.). 7 Internet of Things Threats and Risks to Be Aware of. [online] Available at: https://securityscorecard.com/blog/internet-of-things-threats-and-risks.
www.bostondigital.com. (n.d.). What is a Digital Transformation in Marketing? [online] Available at: https://www.bostondigital.com/insights/what-digital-transformation-marketing.
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