IBM #News Release:

IBM Helps Brands Address the Rising Complexity of Marketing to Deliver Unique and Relevant Customer Experiences

Launches New Cloud-Based Design & Analytics Capabilities Helping Brands Simplify the Way They Engage with Customers

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SAN DIEGO, CA - 12 May 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new design and analytics capabilities as a part of the IBM Marketing Cloud to enable brands to address the rising complexity marketers face engaging with customers as individuals. These new capabilities from IBM enable marketers to collaborate, design and deliver personalized customer experiences. 

Now, brands of all sizes can gain new analytic insights by understanding how a customer engages with a brand across interactions -- from the first moment a customer interacts with a brand in a store, to researching comparable items and pricing online, or sharing feedback on their experience with the brand on a social channel.

The job of being a marketer in 2015 is more complex, thanks to the proliferation of devices, channels and emerging markets around the world, which makes delivering personalized experiences to the customer a growing challenge and an opportunity at the same time. In fact, according to the IBM/eConsultancy study, only 35 percent of consumers say the communications they receive from their favorite brands are relevant and 4 out of 5 consumers believe that brands fail to understand them as individuals.

Addressing these new market dynamics, marketers can now tap into new analytics and design capabilities from IBM as part of the IBM Marketing Cloud integrated solution or as individual offerings: 

• IBM Journey Designer – A virtual whiteboard where practitioners on multiple teams within an organization can collaborate with a single view of a customer's journey to make more informed decisions. The design point of this capability is as simple as a drag and drop where they can now effectively plan, design, create and execute multichannel campaigns based on insights learned over time to deliver more meaningful and relevant experiences to engage with the customer.
• IBM Journey Analytics – Marketers are challenged with vast amounts of data generated on each customer every single second. For example, a customer who goes into a store to look at an item, then checks comparable products and prices via mobile device, gets feedback from family and friends on a social channel --- to ultimately make a purchase via an iPad. In the growing omni channel phenomena, IBM Journey Analytics allows marketers to visualize and quantify actual customer journeys -- to help deliver more relevant experiences with greater precision to build brand loyalty.
• IBM Customer Experience Analytics – A single platform unifies IBM's Journey Analytics, Digital Analytics, and customer behavior analytics capabilities. Marketers now have a complete view of how brands engage with their customers. For example, brands can see what content they are looking at, whether they are buying, registering, and/or downloading. Brands can also understand why things are happening such as why the customer didn't complete a registration or abandoned a shopping cart, and take the corrective action to re-engage the customer to nurture brand loyalty.
• IBM Commerce Insights -- Marketers, merchandisers, product managers can now pin-point the causes of under-performing products and categories on an e-commerce site, or point to relevant data and insights to quickly respond to a competitor or changing market conditions with IBM Commerce Insights.  This offering delivers predictive analytics to understand a customer beyond simple purchase patterns by having deeper insights into their online buying patterns and providing their real-time reaction to different marketing and merchandising tactics.

“As a manufacturer of intimate apparel basics, it’s critical to differentiate ourselves in order to win brand loyalty with consumers. Customers interact with us in many ways -- across different sites and devices-- and to ensure the most relevant experience, we want to be able to connect those dots." said Tom Blaisdell, Search Marketing Manager, Hanesbrands Inc. "Understanding customer journeys is key to our marketing strategy, and the work IBM is doing in this space is going to help us further efforts to create an emotional connection between our brand and customers."

IBM is also providing brands with an expanded business partner ecosystem to help them fully leverage these design and analytic capabilities.   Just last week, IBM and Facebook announced they will collaborate to provide the world’s leading brands with tailored marketing capabilities that reach the right people at the right time with the right message.    With an easy click-to-connect integration for marketers, brands can quickly take advantage of new applications and data sources including social, ad network and the insights they provide.

"Marketers are the gatekeepers to the customer and have the opportunity to understand each individual and guide them on the path through a mix of campaigns designed to nurture brand loyalists. To succeed, however, marketers must embrace technologies that offer them the opportunity to build two way engagements with each customer and deliver a meaningful and relevant experience," said Deepak Advani, General Manager, IBM Commerce. "IBM is providing innovations such as journey analytics to allow marketers to gain insights into customers at depths they could never have imagined just a few years ago. Teams can then turn these insights into campaigns to deliver powerful experiences that engage customers in-context and ultimately build advocacy." 

About IBM Commerce

IBM Commerce helps clients understand customer behavior and use insights to help deliver highly personalized and relevant experiences at every touch point. For more information on IBM Commerce, please click here.