Bruno Garcia, Managing Consultant at frog: “Nothing survives a lack of good feedback”

Right at the end of this interview, Bruno Garcia, Managing Consultant at frog, said something that should resonate. To paraphrase, business-as-usual (or marketing-as-usual) may have worked for the past three years, but “incremental innovation [is not] what the next three years will be about”.

Why should you listen to Bruno? Because customer experience and digital transformation are the root of what he does for frog, part of Capgemini Invent. If you want to make your customers more loyal, give them the feeling of being part of a club, he’s the man to ask.

While we start the interview talking about AI – and Bruno believes its tendrils will spread far and wide in the marketing world – there is much more to chew on here. Data analytics, process optimisation, personalised ads and livestream shopping are just some of the topics under discussion.

Your first step to preparing for the next three years may be simply to read this interview…

Why Dust or Magic? That stems from a quote by legendary American advertising creative director, William Bernbach: “An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.” (And if you’re wondering where you’ve heard the name, Bernbach was the inspiration behind Don Draper of Mad Men fame.)

Bruno’s views are his own and not the views of his employer.

Could you please introduce yourself to our audience? What motivated you to pursue a career in marketing, and how did you embark on your journey in this field?

I’m a Managing Consultant at frog, where I collaborate with multiple brands in the consumer products and retail sector. My role involves guiding my clients through the intricacies of digital transformation, aiming to enhance brand experiences for their customers.

My journey in marketing commenced in 2009 when I began as an intern at Unilever. Armed with a marketing degree, transitioning directly into a marketing role felt like a natural progression for me. I developed a strong affinity for the job and was subsequently offered a permanent position. As the years unfolded, my passion for understanding customer behaviour and the digital realm intensified. In 2016, I made the move to a consulting firm, focusing on customer experience and analytics.

Presently, the majority of my efforts and research are dedicated to membership models and customer loyalty. I firmly believe that this aspect of marketing and sales is often underestimated and underinvested by many businesses.

What are your thoughts on the escalating integration of AI in digital marketing and its potential influence on the future of marketing, Martech and social media?

Integration of AI is expected and desirable for a more personal and relatable ERA of advertising. Mass marketing has always been an “imperfect” discipline because you can’t please all audiences with the same ad.

And let’s face it, most people outside the industry still find advertising a hassle. My kids have adopted “skip an ad” and “close ad” behaviour before even knowing what ads are – which means there are still fundamental problems with ad delivery.

We have refined targeting and delivery to make it less “massified” and more “interest-led” through complex audience models, improved networks and data-driven decision models. However, over the years the end consumer has only increased their distaste for advertising even more.

The utilisation of AI for the generation of creative ads can possibly save advertising, by making ads more personally relatable and more optimised at the point of delivery. But can also be the opposite, as it could lead to additional content explosion and unprecedented touchpoint creation – fragmenting attention spam even further and generating additional fragmentation of the customer journey.

Related reading: Christina Kyriazi, SVP of Marketing at PhotoShelter: “Staying ahead of the marketing curve is a constant sprint”

How do you ready yourself for an AI-driven landscape as a marketing leader? What new skills do you need?

Last year with the launch of ChatGPT, gen AI became front and centre to the public opinion. We finally had a form of AI which could reach the average digital user. And although that feels mundane, that also meant that all senior marketing leaders across the globe had forcibly to look into AI. Since then, there’s been an increasing shift in innovation resources and budgets toward AI.  

Data science and data governance will continue to be crucial skills as a marketing leader to be ready for an AI landscape, along with additional “know-how” and legal oversight to manage large language models, data sources and data property rights.

A second area of skills required will be process optimisation and automation. The ability to separate high-value activity from low-value activity can fundamentally change how fast an organisation is moving to reach more audiences and test and learn their campaigns, delivering better ROI. Marketers should be looking to reduce and streamline the creative workflow.

But more importantly, a third area will be the ability to generate new value add and new services through AI. I believe this can be achieved by reaching segments that have been historically underserved for scalability reasons. Be My Eyes is an excellent example of a new service unlocked by AI. The company created a free visual assistant tool empowered by generative AI to help blind users quickly resolve issues without a human agent. Before the company couldn’t serve this segment 24/7, in a cost-efficient manner. We can take this example to imagine new ways brands can flex to overcome barriers, either specific user needs, language barriers or content delivery constraints.

Do you anticipate any significant disruptions in marketing and sales technology this year? If so, what?

Yes, as the main disruption, we will be seeing an explosion of “conversational” customer touchpoints across the customer journey. These won’t be chatbots in the conventional sense only – often used for service – but a wider multi-purpose range of 1:1 conversational interaction engines. For example, generative AI empowered to help people solve problems and make decisions, affecting both how people become aware of products and services, but also how they consider the purchase and even eventually how they buy.

I suspect that AI shopping assistants will be value-adding for many people, and they will be willing to pay for them (the assistants will pay for themselves if they help consumers save money).

Disruption will be affecting web search, as people will gear towards simplification. These behaviours could even dial up desire for new consumer devices, such as the recently launched Rabbit R1. 

A second area will be content more broadly. With creative AI, there will be a level of “discovery and “experimentation” that wasn’t conceivable within budgets before. Now creative AI will make all of that more cost-efficient.

A third area of disruption will be on sales and service support to end customers. With gen-AI-augmented sales and service capability, companies will get the best service levels in years, as many companies are chronically understaffed in those areas. On the flip side, this also means that new and slimmer businesses can now scale their customer ops at a different speed.

Recommended reading: Glen Calvert, Co-Founder of Kaizan AI: “I think AI is under-hyped and the impact will be monumental”

How do you think AI might evolve B2B marketing and/or ABM strategies in 2024?

B2B is traditionally a very long and complex sale. AI can be used in businesses to enhance requirements comparison and that means marketing teams need to structure their marketing offers to enhance performance in recommendation engines. We are already seeing great examples of ROI simulation engines to enable more evidence-based decision-making, as Salesforce provides.

Thought leadership will increase in importance, less in volume of content, and more in originality of content – and more geared towards an actual experience – augmented or immersive. Companies will have to be more imaginative than selling strategic partnerships on whitepapers.

Another big opportunity will be predictivity. Technology has adapted to enable companies to easily use advanced analytics and algorithms to analyse historical data, understand customer behaviour, and forecast future customer needs and preferences. Companies that use data as a part of the customer experience stand apart from the competition by moving from ad-hoc to anticipatory experiences.

According to McKinsey, companies that effectively use analytics in service of marketing and sales performance are 1.5 times more likely to achieve above-average growth rates than their peers.

What core values have played a pivotal role in shaping your approach to marketing and communication?

Well, first of all this is going to sound clichéd, but customer focus and customer obsession are key. I still find many companies so detached from the reality of the customer, and not investing in solving the problems of their customers – some even create more problems than those they solve.

Secondly, empathy. With the increased use of AI in marketing and sales, empathy will be increasingly important to create a true sense of connection with the customer.

Lastly, adaptability. Nothing survives a lack of good feedback. Being a master at knowing what you don’t know and driving quick experimentation to take new insights to optimise campaigns. That will be even more important moving forward.

Recommended reading: The biggest challenges faced by Women in Tech today

How do you ensure you’re up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and technologies, and how do you integrate them into your strategies?

Staying close with startups and key vendors is key, to establishing those relationships and partnerships to gain technology insights ahead of competitors. Being open-minded about experiments, POCs and pilots is super important – always testing and learning, incubating new technologies, and exchanging know-how. Some level of certification in new technology is also important.

Learning and analysing consumer behaviour across the globe is equally key. Understanding what’s working. Markets evolve at different speeds for different things. China has been an exporter of digital commerce solutions, and more recently shifted the dials with livestream shopping, in ways we haven’t seen elsewhere. It’s crucial to learn about the underlying consumer behaviours, to understand what’s replicable, what needs tailoring, and what can we learn.

What piece of advice would you offer to fellow marketing leaders that has been particularly beneficial to you personally?

Work more cross-functionally than ever before with internal and external partners. Marketing departments can sometimes get stuck in the organisational canvas – a certain business-as-usual organisational construct – which is good for times when incremental innovation does the job, but I’m not convinced that is going to be what the next three years will be about.