Michael Solomon

Fundamental categories that form the bedrock of marketing strategy and customer insights simply no longer exist. You need to understand the new landscape of consumer behavior so you don’t get left in the dust.

In this fast-moving 45-minute program you will learn:

- How you can reach today’s consumers, who plug into a “hive mind” that tells them what to buy.
- Why the debate about “offline versus online” marketing strategies is useless.
- How to market with rather than market to your customers.
- Why your customers rely upon your brands to tell them who they are
- How to develop new killer products and services by demolishing your industry’s walls

We’ll dive into key ways that Millennials think about products and stores, and we’ll identify emerging tech solutions that sync with young consumers’ lifestyles.

In this keynote you will learn:

- How Millennials think
- Why brands matter to them — and don’t
- What you can learn from “World of Warcraft” and other online video games
- Why “haul videos” and other consumer-generated content will transform the way you think about customer insights
- How cutting-edge technologies like virtual reality will revolutionize the shopping experience

vEveryone is buzzing about Artificial Intelligence these days, as well as they should. Machines that “think” for us already are transforming how we work, play – and shop. McKinsey tells us that some 29 million U.S. homes used some form of smart technology last year, and that number grows by over 30 percent a year.

Many organizations now deploy robots, avatars and chatbots to perform tasks we used to ask flesh-and-blood people to do. This suddenly makes the age-old question of what makes us human much less theoretical. Self-driving cars threaten to replace truck drivers. IBM’s Watson beats chess masters and veteran Jeopardy game show contestants. Movies and TV shows like Blade Runner, Westworld, and Humans that focus on the civil rights of synths, replicants and androids are center stage in popular culture. Alexa and Siri are our new guardian angels.

Where does the person stop and the machine start?

Marketers need to grapple with this question, and soon. As customers increasingly interact with machines instead of people, there are huge ramifications for the way we think about sales interactions, communications strategies, product design and marketing channels.

Will consumers more readily accept a product recommendation from an AI agent if an attractive avatar delivers the message? Will customers become loyal to an intelligent agent, much as some do with their favorite salespeople now? Will shoppers prefer to see computer-generated models in advertising rather than real people?

Very soon, the rise of the machines will become the race of the machines. Don’t be left at the starting line. In this thought-provoking presentation we will ask:

- How does the physical appearance of a robot or avatar sales advisor affect the likelihood that customers will trust and follow its’ recommendations about what to buy?
- How will chatbots and affective computing (where software detects a consumer’s emotional state) impact sales interactions?
- As advertisers use machine learning to generate artificial images for their messages, how will AI influence ideals of beauty and the fashion industry?
- What will be the impact of dating apps, sexbots and other smart devices on interpersonal relationships?
- How will facial recognition and wearable computer technologies meld with AI to create “markets of one?”