Following on from the two day Silicon Beach event I was booked to go to the Adido Digital Marketing Summit. This was held at the Hilton Hotel in Bournemouth and featured a full day of speakers with lunch thrown in. All kindly put on for free and gratefully accepted.

Even with massive budgets the likes of O2 still find it difficult to get the Customer Experience nailed and core to the business. It was interesting that Pete Dixon made the point that on the Board of Directors, who sits there to really represent the customers and their experience, as it's not a Sales or Marketing issue.

Juliet Hodges spoke on the psychology of behaviour, which was very interesting to everyone in the room it seemed. Sometimes marketing and user interface design is driven by gut feel and the end results that we want, but what do we want the user to actually do. Two great examples of where things did not go according to plan was that of giving a group of girls that had a high risk of teenage pregnancies baby dolls that would cry at the right times, in the hope of showing them how hard parenting was and that should put them off. In cases it did the opposite in that it gave a greater sense of purpose beyond their socio-economic environment. They were more likely to end up pregnant.

The other example was for a energy company sending out bills that showed how a customer compared to their neighbours in terms of usage. Above average customers would try to reduce their usage, but those below average then felt they were able to use more, which wasn't the intended consequence. By adding a smiling face icon it reinforced the message that it was a good thing to be low and stay low.

Michelle Jacques gave us a way of looking at our data to give a real view rather than gut feel perspective using the model of breaking your sales data into 5 chunks sorted by when someone last made a purchase, break each chunk into another 5 based on the frequency of purchase, and then again into another 5 sorted by the value. This banding of the 555 group down to the 111 group breaks your customer based down so that you can take a different approach and message to each one.

Andy Headington showed the stranglehold of the duopoly of Google and Facebook.

GDPR - arghh.

I have even taken to switching the default search engine to Bing for a month to see how that goes.

And there was a lot more on the day. Brain food, you feel stuff by the end of the day, and then feel hungry soon after. A bit like having a Chinese, and I should know.

Speakers at the event were:

Pete Dixon, O2
Juliet Hodges, BUPA
Tom Crewe, Adido
David Smith, GFF
Andy Headington, Adido
Luke English, Laceys Solicitors
Jon Payne, Noisy Little Moneky
Vikas Arora, Bing
Michelle Jacques, Octopus Farm
Cate Murden, Push
David Berendt, Adido