92016MayAs we address the requirements for humans to act, we realize technology can be a significant enabler to help us reach a better stateas a separate strategy and developed distinct digital capabilities, processes, tools and partnerships. It felt like the technology became the strategy rather than an enabler. Today, many of us focus on the larger opportunity to build brands first. Instead of driving "digital marketing," we are building brands in a "digital world." This helps brands to connect with the right consumer, delivering the right message at the right time and place and with the right brand building tool--all in a much more precise and personal way.Reach a Better State When dissatisfaction is clear and a vision of a better state is determined, there should be a belief that we can reach that better state. At Georgia-Pacific, one example of this is a brand building plan that enables us to reach our objectives and is driven by our capabilities.How an organization uses technology as part of these plans can be a significant challenge especially given the wide variety of technology-enabled capabilities and the rapid pace of tool proliferation. So while we can never predict with certainty which investments, plans and technologies will be valuable, we should develop disciplined experiments to help identify solutions that could drive the greatest business value.To align our organization on a path to reach a better state, we started with the development of a technology roadmap that outlined a broad spectrum of tools needed to deliver on our business objectives. From there, we conducted large and small experiments in the digital space to identify ways to engage differently with our consumer segments. We sought to advance brand analytics through machine learning, launched media experiments to improve our buying efficiency and effectiveness, and technology-driven crowd sourcing to complement our content, just to name a few of our tests. We believe that marketers should behave more like entrepreneurs and include experiments as an essential part of their brand building plans. Because this includes testing and often assessing different technologies, it requires significant collaboration, not only between IT and brand building capabilities, but also the CIO and CMO. The challenge going forward is how best to approach this effort, which leads back to the question "where do we start?"So, Where do We Start?As we address the requirements for humans to act, we realize technology can be a significant enabler to help us reach a better state. However, we must first start by challenging the status-quo, identifying new or improved business opportunities and laying out a path to pursue these opportunities. Then, the task is discovering the technology, from the many options available, most likely to enable brands and businesses to be successful.In our experience, embracing an entrepreneurial mindset and learning from well-founded experiments has been at the root of our success. We think it is a good place to start! MT
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