Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ 2019 April 29 - May 1 / San Diego, CA

Technology has made surveys cheaper and easier to conduct, inundating customers with feedback requests. Companies now compete fiercely for customers’ time and attention. Join us to review techniques for winning customer attention from competing surveys and soliciting high-quality and actionable feedback. Learn how to redesign the foundation of listening — the survey — to maximize customer engagement and insight value. In this interactive workshop, we’ll discuss our findings and walk through tools created to improve how customers experience your company’s survey program.

Join us for an interactive session that will arm you with the knowledge, frameworks and direction to map a customer-driven view of the buying journey and identify the critical moments at which buyer enablement - content assets in the form of prescriptive advice and practical support - can be applied to address common purchase barriers.

Join fellow runners/joggers/walkers for an early morning 5k guaranteed to start your day off right! All levels and abilities welcome.

This welcome session will introduce the CMO Leadership Circle program and serve as a kickoff to networking between participants. You'll learn how to make the most of your time at the conference and meet executive level marketing peers over breakfast.

Welcome! Start making new connections right away at this informal networking breakfast. Get to know fellow delegates who share your areas of interest, including hobbies, favorite sports, travel, music and more. Tables will be arranged by interest area -- select your personal favorite and join the conversation!

Details coming soon!

"You" are the future of multichannel marketing — your individual identity, behavior, preferences and needs. Effective multichannel marketing requires an ability to understand customers, know where they are on their journey and associate actions with desirable customer outcomes. In this session you'll learn: - Where marketers are in their evolution toward customer insight-driven multichannel engagement - What tools you need to activate customer data - What "good" looks like for orchestrated, personalized multichannel marketing

Consumer insights drive marcomm, but they can also drive business results. Dawn Morris, former CMO, Webster Bank and current Chief Digital Banking and Marketing Officer, First Horizon National will explain. In this session, you’ll learn: • How to leverage consumer insights for agile and effective decision-making • How to identify great insights • How to integrate consumer insights into strategy.

In-house agencies are all the rage with CMOs. Creating and managing a successful in-house agency presents very real challenges as well as the potential to become a valuable, and powerful, organizational asset. This session will provide: success factors for creating and managing your in-house agency, potential pitfalls to avoid when managing your in-house agency and recommended operating models

Creativity seems like the last place we'd expect AI to challenge human capabilities, but the results of machine-directed creative projects will surprise you. Creative AI lacks the hype of predictive analytics, natural language or computer vision, but it may wind up having more impact on marketing than any of them. Learn how AI is learning to generate persuasive, engaging content that sells. Key take-aways: - What is the current state of AI's impact on creative execution? - What are its current strengths and limitations, with examples? - How can we introduce AI into the creative suite without losing our talent or our souls?

Analytics professionals are a fixture of modern marketing departments, helping to operationalize marketing and customer data. Marketers have high expectations for their teams’ maturity and adoption of big data. These aspirations are motivating marketing leaders to aggressively fill quant roles. How do you build a team today that is adaptive and equipped to solve the problems of tomorrow? • What role profiles should you fill on your marketing analytics team? • How do you identify top talent? • How do you build your team’s skills for the future?

Marketers have learned how to talk a good line. Mission statements, brand pillars and reasons-to-believe often speak effectively to customer-centricity, but actual customer experience – not so much. In this session, attendees will learn how to align CX with their brand messaging, how to use their brand promise as a filter for evaluating and prioritizing their customer experience efforts, and how to leverage brand as a motivator for effecting change across the organization.

Global B2B e-commerce is expected to top $6 trillion by 2020. Business buyers spend more time on suppliers' websites than anywhere else in the B2B buying journey. Yet, B2B companies equate digital commerce with retail, lagging in their own e-commerce efforts — sometimes out of disbelief e-commerce growth and other times out of fear it will grow to cannibalize traditional sales channels. In this session you'll learn: • How to evaluate the digital commerce opportunity for your B2B company? • How digital commerce can complement, not cannibalize, sales enablement? • How to make the case for B2B digital commerce in your company?

Small business owners have historically skirted the line between consumer buying and large enterprise buyer behaviors. This "ask the expert" session with small business expert, Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, will explore foundational behaviors of small business buyers, compare and contrast them to consumer and enterprise buying behavior, and offer perspective on how (and where) to approach the owner segment differently.

Customer data without consumer context is like bones without flesh: Hard to see who you’re looking at. Consumer values — the key drivers of attitudes and behaviors — provide that identifying layer. In this session, you’ll learn: - Why consumer values matter - What matters most to U.S. consumers and key sub-segments, now and over time - How to leverage consumer values for smarter business decisions

Traditional B2B sales enablement strategies often don't help sellers navigate the challenges of more sophisticated buyers and team-based buying. Marketing leaders should incorporate situational awareness, balanced content investments, account-based strategies and artificial intelligence into enablement programs to improve sales effectiveness. In this session, you will learn: How to infuse situational awareness into all aspects of the organization’s sales enablement program; how to balance budget and resource allocation between inbound/outbound campaign and sales enablement needs; and 3) how to integrate Account-Based Marketing.

Customer journey maps provide customer experience leaders with a blueprint for consensus and action. While more executives are understanding the value of the customer journey mapping process, survey research shows that effective use of these maps proves to be a shared challenge across many organizations. In this session you will learn how to: - Develop compelling, fact-based personas - Gather necessary research, data and analysis to ensure an effective journey mapping - Design and execute an optimal customer experience through journey mapping

In 2018, Gartner surveyed 500 enterprise marketing leaders about the current and future state of marketing technology. We'll unpack the top findings to help you prioritize your martech initiatives supporting multichannel marketing for 2020 and beyond. Understand effective team structures, adoption levels across the stack, emerging technology priorities and more. In this session, you'll learn: - What is the state of the modern marketing technology stack to support effective multichannel marketing? - What are the traits of brands that have mastered marketing technology management? - How can marketing align with the rest of the business to make smart tech investments?

Great strategies are built on a foundation of data and benchmarks. In this session we'll dig into the wealth of Gartner's surveys and research, uncovering the data you need to power your strategy. From budget and spending trends, to marketing maturity and capability measures, to martech acquisition and usage. In this session you'll learn: - Why data and benchmarks are essential components of strategic marketing plans - What are the benchmarks and data that are fundamental to your strategic plan - How Gartner research and data supports your planning process

Marketing leaders continue to struggle to demonstrate the value of organic social media investments. As focus turns to social ads, is it worth maintaining a robust organic presence? We'll discuss the successes and challenges we've had in driving business results in social media in absence of promoted campaigns and news feed boosts, and draw inspiration from those that are doing it well.

Lera Boroditsky leads audiences on a mind-expanding tour of human cognition, asking and answering the question of how we get so smart. The crux of her talk is to encourage audiences in thinking about how this knowledge of language applies to their own lives—from work culture, to habits of creativity and innovation, to how we parse our daily interactions with friends and strangers alike. Language affects how we understand each other interpersonally and collaboratively—the bridge from one mind to another. With dry wit and fun, memorable examples, Boroditsky teaches us to see that language, like intelligence, is a living thing “that we can hone and change to suit our needs.”

The CRO role continues to grow and evolve as has the growth mandate of the CMO. Are these roles complementary or competitive? Will these roles need to ultimately blend? This roundtable discussion will cover: - The shifting role of the CRO - How CMOs can work effectively with CRO partners - Insights on the evolution of the CMO/CRO roles and relationship

False consensus bias — the tendency to assume most people think like we do — is anathema to smart marketing. But marketing leaders can push back against it by understanding themselves in relation to their target consumers. We’ll explore the degree to which our values and experiences are aligned with our consumers’, as well as ways to combat the biases that get in the way of effective marketing.

Only 28% of commercial leaders report that their account teams regularly meet their growth targets, despite a significantly expanded portfolio. Join us to learn why traditional account management practices such as delivering higher customer satisfaction and superior service are becoming obsolete. In this session, you will learn: The single biggest driver of account growth, customer improvement, Why customer satisfaction and service fall short when it comes to driving growth, How to build a customer improvement capability

Consumers are going out of their way to avoid ads — either ignoring them or blocking them altogether. This means marketers have to work harder to win attention. Providing entertainment value and emotional impact are no longer enough. Today's best campaigns are "culturally disruptive:" They tap into ongoing debates and challenge cultural norms in a way that links to the brand. In this session, you'll learn: -New approaches for developing high-impact marcomm ideas -Tools and exercises used by leading brands like Unilever, Clorox and others -How the best campaigns break through the noise

Marketers need to drive growth through improved customer experience, but research shows that most CX projects do not actually achieve their stated business goals. The problem is that many improvements fail to leave an indelible mark on customers. Progressive companies are focusing their CX investments on identifying and creating the kinds of salient, emotionally resonant experiences that shift customer's long-term behavior. In this session you will learn: - Why brands must evolve beyond simply reducing friction in the customer experience to deliver true competitive advantage - How to operationalize a CX strategy based on a deep understanding of customers' most salient experiences - How enabling customers' self-affirmation is the key to driving sustained customer loyalty.

This session will use Gartner L2 data to look at how 2018’s Genius brands are organized, where they’ve invested, and how they’ve leveraged business model innovation to become best-in-class. How does the overall business performance of Gartner L2 Genius brands correlate with digital performance? What are the areas that are consistently stronger across Gartner L2 Genius brands, and where are they weaker? In short, what do these brands have in common and what can other brands learn from Gartner L2 Genius brands?

Test-and-learn is more than a process; it’s a practice deeply ingrained within the cultures of the most successful organizations. This session will help attendees understand how to build or grow a test-and-learn culture that enables their organization to replace opinions, guessing and “gut feelings” with processes and methodologies that save money, increase efficiencies and deliver results.

As a marketing leader you are likely surrounded by numbers on your customers and programs. Numbers flow from your team, finance and your agency. Some numbers conflict, while others seem to challenge reality. But since the decisions ultimately rest on your shoulders, you need to make sense of the numbers. To help you be a better consumer of numbers, this talk will cover: • How to sniff out inflated numbers that are misleading you with results that are too good to be true. • How to question your “number makers” when their numbers seem too low to be possible. • How to create simple rules to make assessing numbers easy, so you can get back to focusing on the actions those numbers suggest.

Millennials may no longer be the new kids on the block, but 78 million strong and coming into their biggest earning and spending years, they’re still the cornerstone consumer for most marketers. In this session, you’ll learn: - What drives the purchasing decisions of today’s Millennials - What Millennials expect and want from brands - How the smartest brands connect with Millennials for real results

Gartner recently found that the #1 strategic priority for CEOs is to drive growth. And to whom do CEOs turn to lead the development and implementation of growth? Marketers. This two-part workshop is designed to engage marketing leaders in a mini case-based discussion regarding: 1) the levers they can pull to create growth, and 2) the ways in which they can lead better implementation.

Are you trying to motivate employee behavior and consumer buying decisions, or drive political or public opinion? Dr. Jonah Berger’s most recent speech looks at the subtle and secret influences that drive the decisions we make—from what we buy to where to eat to what we wear and the careers we choose. A must-see presentation for HR, sales, and leadership teams—and anyone tasked with persuading others to take action—Dr. Berger argues that other people’s behavior influences us at every moment of our lives, and that learning to better understand the influences driving you, your co-workers, employees, family members, potential partners, business associates, and clients can lead to more productive relationships and lives. Drawing on research he conducted for his book, Invisible Influence, Dr. Berger integrates studies of business, psychology, and social science to lift the cloak of invisibility from the driving forces behind our daily choices, transforming the way audiences see themselves and others. With this speech, Dr. Berger shows audiences how to, as Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh put it, “influence others, make smarter decisions, or just better understand the mystery that is human behavior.” A speech brimming with ideas that will provoke deep reflection, Dr. Berger gives audiences the tools they need to capitalize on invisible influences.

Start your day in an uplifting and energizing way, with early-morning yoga. Join an experienced instructor and fellow delegates for this early-morning offering suitable for all ability levels. Towels will be provided and light refreshments will be served.

Get ready to make new industry connections with your fellow attendees! Tables will be organized by industry sector so you can join informal discussions, compare notes and benchmark your progress. Select a table and join the conversation.

B2B customers see less and less value in outreach from suppliers or interactions with sales reps, putting downward pressure on access and influence. The good news: The most progressive commercial teams have found a different model for engaging customers in a way that customers not only value, but reward with higher deal quality. This session will explore what is wrong with the status quo, share insights into B2B customer buying behaviors, and introduce a powerful way to engage today's reluctant customers.

74% of CMOs express dissatisfaction with their role. And 80% of CEOs indicate dissatisfaction with CMO performance. Is it because CMOs are uniformly incompetent? Or is it because roles are misaligned? Based on nine years of research, most CMO roles set CMOs up to fail. This session is designed to have an open discussion about: 1) the ways in which roles are misaligned, 2) drivers of misalignment, and 3) what CMOs can do to resolve it.

Personalization represents one of the biggest opportunities facing marketers, but it's not without pitfalls. From creepiness to irrelevance, marketers struggle to decide how close is too close. We're challenged to understand what type of personalization will drive results with our customers. And from CDPs to DMPs to personalization engines, we’re unsure of where to place our tech bets. In this session you'll learn: • How to use customer insight to build a personalization strategy • How to translate a personalization strategy into tactical execution • What tool you'll need for the job and how to evaluate personalization engines

Mass market brands with revenue of $1 to $20 billion struggle for digital survival. They have neither the agility of upstart brands nor the reach of the big guys. So how are they to reach their consumer base? In this session, you’ll learn: - How to dial up search efforts - Where to place investment with retail partners - How best to compete on social media platforms and display advertising

Hyped technologies such as customer data platforms can't deliver ROI without smart strategies and talented people. In this session, you'll learn: - How to establish the value of unified customer data and recognize its limitations - Evaluate the technologies that can deliver growth and their place in the martech stack - How to increase your team's customer data proficiency

Gartner predicts that profitability will replace customer experience as the CMO's top strategic priority, reducing investment in marketing-funded CX programs. CMOs who execute CX properly position their function as a strategic partner shaping how customer relationships are formed and strengthened. In this session you’ll learn: - Fact and fiction of CX - The ROI of CX - How marketing gets CX right

Marketing leaders struggle to determine which functions they should centralize, decentralize, or approach in a hybrid manner to align their team structure to their marketing mission. This session will provide an overview of Gartner’s organizational decision framework to inform decision making about organizational design and help answer this timeless and complex issue.

To deliver seamless, multichannel customer experiences, marketers must integrate data, content and business logic across touchpoints and systems. But successful martech integration isn’t simply a technical task. Clearly-defined business objectives, customer insights, adequate resourcing and cross-organization alignment are all critical to delivering the relevant experiences your customer expect. In this session, you'll learn: - What are the relevant tools, interfaces and code that help tie together disparate systems and databases? - How do I develop a roadmap to prioritize my marketing technology integration initiatives? - How can I obtain buy-in and cooperation across my company to achieve integration that delivers personalized experiences at scale?

Have you ever wanted to chat directly with your target customer and get information straight from the source? This moderated panel discussion is a chance for commercial leaders targeting the small business segment to hear directly from their target customers. We will begin with some general questions around how small business owners use supplier information and content, then will open up the panel to questions from the audience.

Imperfect data is perfectly normal. Too much imperfect data is also normal and costly. Most marketing analytic leaders tell Gartner their most common activities relate to mundane data tasks. How can you, as a marketing leader, free your analytics talent from dull, low-value data work to high value insight generation and machine learning? To help cement your marketing data plans, this talk will: • Introduce Gartner’s ABCD framework so you can audit and improve your data quality • Highlight low effort improvements to help get you started • Create a data-driven (of course!) business case for sustained data investment

For many CMOs the board of directors is one of your most important, and challenging, audiences. This session features critical questions a CMO should be prepared for from your board. We’ll help you justify additional investment and identify potential future plans. Attendees will learn: • How to think about your media mix. • How to avoid disruption in an era of Amazon. • What’s next in marketing.

Some brands work hand-in-hand with their digital marketing agencies to produce differentiating, effective work. Others struggle to get their agency to deliver the basics of proposal promises. This roundtable will give attendees the opportunity to discuss with their peers what works, what doesn’t, and when to know it’s time to call it quits with their current agency.

Despite more and more customer data available to business partners, key leaders continue to report that at least half of their customer-facing decisions are unsuccessful. This is the product of the “data rich – insight poor” reality that companies face today. While Marketing leaders continue to invest in their CX, Insights, and Customer Analytics capabilities, they still struggle to impact critical business decisions. In this session you will learn how to ground insights in holistic business context, provide pragmatic recommendations on which business partners can easily act, and guide business partners in navigating an increasingly complex information landscape.

Search is the glue that holds your customer journeys together. Search advertising and SEO account for more than one-tenth of the total marketing expense budget. But a "set-it-and-forget-it" mindset often prevails when it comes to search planning and activation. Reset your search strategy to meet the needs of your customers today, and tomorrow. In this session you'll learn: - How search has evolved, and how changing search behaviors and contexts continue to transform customer journeys - How you can use Gartner data to understand how leading brands perform on search - What steps you need to take to reset your search strategy

In an effort to establish more effective end-to-end commercial processes, HP undertook a review of organizational effectiveness in three arenas across the sales and marketing functions: Organizational Structure, Spend Efficiency, and People Efficiency. As Head of Business Transformation, Rob Wait led this initiative across HP's four business units. In this session, Rob will share with attendees how he organized the effort, what resources and guidance he leaned on, and where the businesses found opportunities for efficiencies in this $50 Billion dollar enterprise.

Gen Z — digital and social media natives — have defined their own rules for digital communication. Brands who wish to engage this important cohort fail to follow those rules at their own peril. In this session, you’ll learn: - How culture combines with generational DNA to shape Gen Z’s digital world - Which platforms and content types appeal to Gen Z - How to create content Gen Z finds share-worthy

CMOs report that marketing analytics is the top capability supporting the delivery of marketing strategy in their organizations. At the same time, recruiting, hiring and retaining highly-skilled employees in a competitive market remains a top challenge for organizations. In this session, we'll discuss: - How to identify and recruit resources for marketing analytics - How to interview for competencies and skills - How to retain valuable employees by developing career paths

Brands with purpose outperform their peers - from employee satisfaction to profitability. More than ever, customers demand that the companies they do business with have purpose, and reward those brands with increased trust, revenue, and advocacy. For 120 years, National Geographic has had purpose at its core, and we'll hear from CMO Jill Cress on how that purpose continues to drive brand value. In this session, you'll learn: - Why purpose matters and how it adds value to your brand - How to identify your brand's purpose - Common pitfalls to avoid

This session is all about managing one of the biggest challenges facing B2B buyers today - the challenge of ‘consensus’. As the number and diversity of customer stakeholders increase, so does the inherent conflict within the group. Faced with these increased consensus requirements, companies are struggling with price-driven conversations, extended sales cycle time and more stalled leads. In this session, you will learn: • How to identify the most critical buying group stakeholders • How to understand and overcome the barriers to consensus facing diverse stakeholders • How to engage key buyer advocates to connect buying stakeholders together

Consumers don’t need to decode your algorithms to have privacy concerns. Smart marketers can get out ahead of consumer sentiment and address privacy concerns before they become public relations nightmares. Building effective communications, acting transparently and giving consumers the tools they need can help brands stay in the good books. In this session, you’ll learn: - How consumers distinguish between privacy and safety - How to balance data collection with consumer-focused outcomes - Where the ‘creepy’ line is, and how to avoid crossing it - How best in class organizations are managing this balance

Social media is the multitool in the marketer’s digital toolkit, and Facebook and Instagram are top destinations for both consumers and brands. In this Ask the Analyst session, engage with Gartner analyst Mike Froggatt on how social media fits into broader strategic marketing goals, hear answers to commonly asked questions about the best (and worst) uses of Facebook and Instagram for marketing, pose your own and learn from your peers.

Projected to overtake the US as the world’s largest consumer market, China is the land of opportunity for brands — making it crucial to understand. In this session, you’ll learn: - How search, social and e-commerce are different in China - How to leverage platforms like Tmall, WeChat, and Weibo, and those beyond the BAT (Baidu-Alibaba-Tencent) ecosystem - How to craft a strong digital marketing plan

Marketing leaders are heavily invested in scaling personalization. Rather than focusing on building one-to-one capabilities, consumer perceptions of personalization point to a more extensible approach. Marketers who build “tailored help” — personalized messages that provide valuable assistance or support while using a limited number of consumer data dimensions — achieve higher-impact results. In this session, you'll learn: - The commercial potential of “tailored help,” alongside real-world examples - A framework for building this type of personalized message - How to select the highest-potential data dimensions to amplify your personalization results

The digital age has given rise to two-way mediums (versus traditional one-way mediums like television), giving consumers easier access to information and creating new paradigms for how brands reach potential customers. As consumers become more sophisticated in their own personal needs, this behavior is reflected through changes in their online search and buying behaviors. In this session, we will assess how these changing behaviors are manifesting in a digital environment across consumer goods categories, what this means for brands and retailers, and how organizations can capitalize on new opportunities to reach and acquire customers through content and digital investments.

Marketing is ironically not always effective telling our own story within the business. CMOs must become more effective communicating how and where marketing may impact others and most importantly the value marketing provides. This roundtable discussion will provide an opportunity for CMOs to share best practices and learn from one another about pragmatic, real-world internal communication strategies.

Companies often have few customer experience experts that have limited success in influencing customer-impacting decisions made by non-CX expert business partners. See how FedEx responded to this scale issue by developing self-guided CX tools, based on Design Thinking principles, to enable business partners to develop their projects through a customer-centric lens without specialized training. The CX toolkit allowed the CX function at FedEx to replicate CX's influence, enabling a more customer-centric decision-making process and ultimately allowed CX to do right by the customer and the business. In this session you will learn: Identify business partners' common barriers to customer-centric thinking, How to build and select the right suite of CX enablement tools.

Mobile remains a source of dynamic innovative marketing tactics. In this session we'll examine the pros and cons of several emerging mobile capabilities. Marketing leaders who have embraced one such tactic to improve mobile engagement with customers will recount their experience. These leaders will then outline the role that new mobile tactics will play in their evolving marketing roadmap. In this session you will learn: ° What are the benefits of new messaging solutions? ° Should you upgrade your mobile web experience using Progressive Web Apps? ° How do NFC and other scannable marketing technologies fit into your mobile strategy?

Using data to target ads isn't new, but the marketplace remains challenging. Hurdles include changing consumer behaviors, the data glut, and barriers to audience portability. In this session, you’ll learn: * The pros and cons of various targeting data sources * How to get the most from anonymous and PII-based use cases * Best practices for standardizing audiences and measuring outcomes

No sooner did CMOs start really understanding Millennials when a whole new generation of young people – Gen Z – aged into key youth lifestages. In this interactive session we'll explore who Gen Z is and how they are different from Millennials. We'll talk about Gen Z’s key attitudes and their expectations for brands. And we'll consider how to engage Gen Z for concrete results.

Consumers increasingly expect brands to have a stance on issues of the day. How can your brand respond to these expectations or actually be proactive about your position on important issues? In this session, you will learn: - What opportunities are present for taking a brand position - Risks and benefits of staking out a brand position - How other brands have successfully managed brand activism

Interest in customer experience (CX) remains high, but the commitment of business leaders to improve and invest in CX flounders when they don't know how CX impacts the top and bottom lines. CX leaders and marketers who want to maintain budgets, support, and momentum must demonstrate how CX is integral to the financial and business outcomes leaders desire. In this session, you will learn: - The ways customer satisfaction and CX have been proven to deliver strong business results - How to use your own customer data to validate CX's worth to your organization

In this session will expose marketing leaders to the practical knowledge and critical skills to confidently make design work effectively with their creative teams.This session is intended for executives who do not have formal graphic design or visual arts training but recognize the powerful impact of visual narrative in their work. The focus of the session will be the use of design and a visual vocabulary as a storytelling medium.

Gartner research shows that despite significant investments in corporate branding, less than 30% of audiences see brands as truly differentiated from their competitors. However, those companies that focus their brand on personal benefits to their stakeholders enjoy 3x greater brand connection. In this session, you will learn: The nine categories of personal benefits How to align your corporate brand to personal benefits How to win brand connection and preference among external and internal stakeholders.

More than 90% of customer experience executives are tasked with creating a customer-centric culture as a part of their CX mandate. Yet, organizations often say they want to be customer-centric but aren't willing, or quite ready, to make the shift. In this session we'll discuss common obstacles CX leaders, or anyone faced with building a customer-centric culture, face and how to prepare for, minimize and remove these hindrances.

Executing a customer experience-based strategy requires the development of a robust CX capability. Join this session to discuss the key roles and competencies of a high performing CX team as well as the design of clear-cut CX governance for complex, cross-functional work.

Consumers love Amazon. But there are signs of trouble in paradise, as people question the retail behemoth’s cultural power and influence. In this session, you’ll learn: - Which loyal Amazon customers might be up for grabs - Whether and how to leverage consumer values to drive a wedge between Amazon and your target - How brands who need Amazon can reinforce consumers’ relationship with the platform

We think of joy as elusive and intangible, but what if we could create products and experiences that reliably give people a feeling of joy? In this talk, Lee reveals the specific physical attributes that trigger our hardwired impulses toward joy, showing why some products feel delightful while others don’t, and how tangible elements can be used to create powerful moments of surprise, magic, and wonder. Grounding these insights with real-world examples, Lee shows how the aesthetics of joy can be used to create unique, innovative products and experiences that can captivate audiences, increase the adoption of new technologies, and build well-loved brands with timeless appeal.

Attendees are invited to enjoy informal discussions with peers who are interested in the same subject area. Compare notes, share ‘A Ha’ moments and solidify connections on your final morning at the Conference. Select the table of most interest to you, and join the conversation.

As smart devices evolve to smart environments, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning help harness consumer digital mobility. But you’ll need a new playbook. In this session you’ll learn: ●How voice interfaces, visual search and gesture recognition will reset consumer expectations ● How these technologies enable more fluid, personalized engagements ●Strategies to exploit these technologies

91% of organisations are experiencing significant internal and external changes that affect their strategy, but only 1/3 of organizations are adapting quickly enough to achieve their goals. One of the underlying barriers preventing CMOs from keeping up with the fast-paced changes affecting their organizations is the typically ‘linear’ approach to strategic planning. Leading CMOs adopt an ‘adaptive’ or ‘agile’ approach to their strategic marketing plans that document and broadcast the assumptions that underpin their strategy to serve as ‘triggers’ for strategy review. Case study examples of successful approaches to adaptive strategic planning from Southwest Airlines and Eli Lilly will be presented. In this session, attendees will learn: • How to make your marketing strategy more adaptive to internal and external changes. • How to define your assumptions as triggers for strategy review and potential course correction. • How to enable your team to act as sensing mechanisms for when the strategy may need to be reviewed.

Amazon is the world's most valuable retail company. Surpassing a $1 trillion market cap and continuing to grow double-digit e-commerce revenues, Amazon is creating new opportunities for brands that can successfully tame the retailer's complex marketplace. In this session, you'll learn: - Performance of thousands of brands on Amazon - Examples of best-in-class Amazon marketing - Distribution strategies for brands

GartnerL2 has been benchmarking the digital competencies of B2C brands for almost a decade. This session will reveal our first ever benchmarking of B2B companies, sharing best and worst practices among leaders and laggards across the key dimensions of B2B digital competency, including website performance, path to purchase support, and digital content creation. Attendees will learn: What separates good from great; How to strengthen a B2B company’s digital presence; What industry-leading digital capability means for B2B companies.

While there is no shortage of behavioral and attitudinal customer data available to our decision-makers, there is an absence of data synthesis to identify the most impactful insights. Almost half of decision-makers report “cherry-picking” data rather than synthesizing easily-accessed rich and diverse quantitative and qualitative customer data resulting in delays and suboptimal decisions and business outcomes. In this session, participants will learn how to enable synthesis across the organization by: - Visualizing the data/data owner network - Codifying synthesis “hacks” - Prescribing a data reconciliation process

Gartner data shows that 74% of marketing leaders cited market and customer insight as one of the top capabilities critical for success. However, organizations fail to use methodologies beyond VoC platforms and analytics that they can, and need to, utilize to obtain that insight and/or deliver products that resonate with their prospects and clients. This session will explain why top leadership, product owners, CX/UX leaders and insights professionals must champion these practices or risk their organization falling behind. It will also provide overviews of some popular methodologies and the insights and optimization power they deliver and offer guidance on how to help your company capitalize on the many benefits user research provides.

Gartner research shows that challenges related to talent, skills and employee issues are the biggest internal inhibitors of growth. In this session you'll learn: - How marketing talent challenges impact strategic success - What are the highly sought-after marketing capabilities and where do you find them? - How a talent roadmap addresses marketing talent challenges

In a world where personalization is expected by digital consumers, marketers are constantly pitched on the latest and greatest data solutions that will solve all of their content and marketing needs. In actual practice, many add new pain-points to an already crowded technology stack. A framework for selecting data vendors can help marketers of all data literacy levels, from starting out to adding the final piece of the puzzle, improve data management practices and achieve marketing goals. In this session, you'll learn: * What marketing objectives and channels can the right data and partners impact in a meaningful way? * How do marketers evaluate and select the data vendors based on quality, structure & delivery? * What makes a marketing data master and how can marketers measure the ROI of data?

Marketers face tremendous pressure and uncertainty in innovating their digital consumer experiences today due to rapidly proliferating digital technologies, channels and competitive moves. These pressures in turn prompt of questions such as, “Should we develop a mobile app?” or “What is the best way to capitalize on artificial intelligence?” Understandably, marketers are wary of falling prey to the “shiny object” syndrome, but they simultaneously realize that they cannot miss out on market-transforming digital trends. In this session, we'll help Marketing and CX Leaders direct ideation efforts toward commercially successful experience innovations.

Some platforms are better localized than others. However, balancing global efforts with local nuance is easier said than done and choosing which platforms, tools and content to localize is complicated. Member problem: Local businesses (e.g., Samsung or Lego in the US; or Colgate and P&G in Europe) are given platforms, tools and content by the corporate headquarters that are not enough for their local market — knowing where, when and how to localize them is an ongoing challenge for them. In this session, you will learn: What platforms should be localized, how to scale global content on a local level and when it becomes necessary to produce locally-owned content.

Consumers are deserting brands that neglect their needs, while brands struggle to retain customers using commodity points, miles, and coupons. Want to avoid the race to the bottom while improving differentiation? In this session you'll learn: - Why loyalty initiatives must address customer needs - Where to use data and technology for competitive advantage - How leading brands simplify and personalize for growth

Affluent consumers ($250k HHI+) are crucial for brands. Problem is: Most brands target affluent consumers with imagery and messaging that not only fails to resonate with but actually alienates higher-income consumers. In this session, you’ll learn: - What truly matters to the Affluent - Why it’s so important to get Affluents right - How to align brand values and messages with Affluent priorities

Many marketers think of account-based marketing (ABM) as an approach designed primarily to leverage existing relationships. But, ABM's focus on marketing-sales collaboration and data-driven personalized engagement makes it equally effective for maximizing traditional demand generation programs as well. In this session, you'll learn : How an account-based approach can maximize your efforts with prospects and customers alike How to personalize B2B messages for maximum impact How to most productively engage Sales to boost your ABM performance

During this session, you will have the opportunity to ask a Gartner advisor about emerging B2B buyer trends and how to use existing data sources to develop/boost your B2B buyer understanding. Discussion will include: principles of B2B buyer intelligence/data collection; analysis of latent data streams (e.g., web data); and tools/best practices to maximize the value derived from existing B2B buyer data/information. Participants will come away from the session with a framework for evaluating current capabilities (e.g., data sources, analytical tools and staff; and technology infrastructure) and peer-based recommendations on steps to fill the gaps.

You've attended the keynotes, breakouts and even some analyst one-on-ones about marketing technology. You have a lot of new ideas, but you also have some additional questions. Join other marketing technology leaders and Gartner analysts in this interactive roundtable discussion and peer meetup. You'll have the opportunity to share your own experiences, hear about approaches other leaders in your role take and discuss key themes and takeaways from the event.

In a world where companies share brand ownership with consumers, marketing leaders must balance point-in-time, “big idea” paid media campaigns with ongoing, longer-lasting multichannel marketing initiatives. These initiatives should engage audiences in social and other key channels, tapping into consumers’ natural conversations and using shared, earned and owned media to source and amplify key messages from consumers. In this session, you will learn how to: 1) generate higher impact audience engagement in social channels; 2) think in terms of ‘chapters’ of consumer engagement versus big campaigns, and 3) connect innovative social media execution tactics to your brand's broader commercial and awareness objectives.

Organizational transformations create immense change among marketing teams. In fact, two out of every three major corporate changes produce sub-par results because of reduced employee performance in all areas. However, based on new research, we’ve discovered proven strategies to help you lead your marketing team to success in an environment of change and transformation. In this session you’ll learn: - Exactly how change harms the performance of your employees - How you can stay ahead of potential negative outcomes - How you can build a more resilient team, capable of handling constant change

The global trust crisis is in full force. Fake reviews, ads, videos, social accounts and counterfeit products are creating a toxic marketplace for brands. Google and Facebook promise to improve, but there's a better solution. Find out how blockchain innovators are taking on the challenge of trust and authenticity and how brands can get involved. Key take-aways: - What aspects of marketing are conducive to decentralization, and what key projects are underway? - How can marketers use ledgers to deal with privacy, identity and consent? - How can blockchain help restore trust in media and brands, and what actions can we take today?

Marketing analytics technology selection used to be straightforward – select a web analytics provider among the few big players and sign a long-term contract. That era is over. Today, marketers use multiple measurement solutions to gauge the effectiveness of their programs, content and targeting strategies across channels. Evaluate the current marketing analytics landscape and develop an informed roadmap to level-up your marketing analytics and measurement practice. In this session, you'll learn: - What is the current state of the marketing analytics technology landscape? - How do I build a strategic roadmap for marketing analytics technology to help solve key business problems? - How can I use my roadmap to guide my evaluation of new marketing analytics solutions?