Mikael Jungner is a well known public character in Finland for both his professional and private life. Whilst he's a very confident presenter, the content of his speech left much to desire for. Mainly due to incoherency and jumping from point to point with no apparent logic. The basic gist was that the business environment has changed drastically and what's required of companies now is agility, involvement (both organization members and customers) and new strategic thinking in that what works is being tested on the market first, as opposed to putting something out there and concluding whether it worked or not afterwards.
I can't really agree with the above generalization, because I don't see that nearly all companies have gone or will go the way Junger envisioned. It simply works for some type of products (mainly consumer) and for others not so (industrial), but that's not to say that all companies shouldn't think about finding a way to apply the values (agility, involvement, new strategy) put forward here.
Next up was Niklas de Besche, the Executive Director of Meltwater in Sweden giving an overview of marketing communication from Meltwater point of view. Meltwater was not know to me in advance (I'm ashamed to admit), but now I'm all the more wiser. Meltwater offers real-time analytics as to what's happening to brands on the internet, how customers behave and what's trending to enable companies to take real-time action to these factors. The main point being that media intelligence has become strategic and this is where marketing communications can move from being a mere support function to a truly value-adding business partner.
The third speaker of the day, Elina Ämmälä from Aalto University, was by far the favourite of mine. She delivered with coherence and interesting themes for the future of communications. To summarize, the communication profession is moving from content production to enabling communication through offering tools and channels for it. This means that communications cannot be controlled, traditional power structures are eroding and organizations no longer stand somewhere up the hill as authorities, but are on the same level with all the communicators out there. It's important to realize that an organization exists in communications and the whole existence of corporate life effectively happens through interaction. She also shed light onto some new and exciting product innovations coming through research conducted at Aalto University. Apparently the next big thing might be haptic devices in corporating different senses into product experiences!
No comments:
Post a Comment