This short article is a reflection of my key thoughts when I was invited by Professor Dr. Philip Kotler and “Kotler Impact” as one of the speakers at the e-World Marketing Summit (eWMS) under the theme of Hello Tomorrow: Building the Next New Normal during November 6-7, 2021. The purpose of this brief writing is to share with you my interpretation on how we could enhance our skill development to drive marketing innovation from Thailand’s perspective. Because of today’s rapidly changing environments and the widespread of the OMICRON variant of the Coronavirus, we all know it becomes extremely difficult to drive marketing innovation. We have to use more of human-mimicking technologies to create, communicate, deliver, and enhance value in the overall customer experience. To have technology for humanity, marketers need to start by mapping the customer journey and identifying where marketing technologies can add value and improve the performance of human marketers. [Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, 2021, 5] From my experience working with hundreds of marketing and business leaders in Thailand and Asia, I observe that there are basically 4 types of quality we need for marketing professionals to drive innovation in today “Now Normal” business environments. They are as follows:
- Consumer Empathy: The ability to use your curiosity and customer empathy to create and deliver meaningful differentiation through new ideas for superior product and services and marketing innovation.
- Data Science: The ability to understand, analyze and make best use of big data in decision making for new marketing initiatives.
- Business and its eco-system: The ability to understand competitive business environments both direct and indirect and business impact on its eco-system.
- User’s Experience Design: The ability to understand customer’s journey including cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects of customers and design meaningful experience for them.
Undeniably, understanding these 4 types of marketing skillsets is indispensable in fostering the environment to drive marketing innovation and having empathy mindset is a starting point and key to successful execution for most marketing professionals in Thailand. Five years ago, I was introduced to the concept of “Human Empathy” when I was going through the process of becoming a certified facilitator for the “Design Thinking” program at the Stanford Center of Professional Development. Since then, empathy became one of my most favorite topics that allows me the opportunities to learn to understand more about people, their cognition and their behavioral actions. The word “Empathy” is often used in so many different ways that it is difficult to determine what people mean exactly when they use it. Nevertheless, I found the concept of “the Empathy Triad” proposed by Daniel Goleman (2017) more insightful when it comes to understanding people’s cognition and their behaviors. Three distinct kinds of empathy as defined by Goleman include: …
