The Rosenstein Group

New episode of Martalks! A double feature, with Sana Remekie of Conscia. talking #dataorchestration alongside integration partner and returning Martalks guest Jason Cottrell of Orium. In this clip, everyone (including Jason's kids, apparently) agrees on the importance of the accellerators, which the most advanced #systemintegrators now use to execute the highly detailed integration and data mapping that takes place between connected platforms. Sana here lists EPAM Systems, Valtech and Royal Cyber Inc. alongside Orium, as a select few, #composable-native integrators which 'share the same vision of the architecture' needed to help brands truly take command of the data across their martech stacks. Jason helpfully defines accelerators as pre-written integrations, requiring major investment and extensive user-testing to be client read. "Any integrator worth their salt in the composable space," says Jason, "should be coming to the table with that. A big thank-you to our guests for sharing their wisdom and experience. You can hear the full conversation via the link in the comments.

“You don’t buy a smart fridge to only use the ice maker. Yet for a while, many brands were leaning into enterprise #martech and doing exactly that, paying exorbitant licensing costs to only scratch the surface of what the technology could do." - Mikaela Crimmins of advertising company Orchard. The dip in martech budgets is no secret, but Nadia Cameron and Andrew Birmingham's writeup on Gartner's annual CMO survey contains some invaluable insights into what's driving the trends. The whole thing is worth a read but there are a bunch of useful quotes from Ewan Mcintyre, who points out that some of this perceived change may actually a redefining of what constitutes 'marketing' budget, with IT teams now owning a lot of buying decisions. And, of course, there is the seemingly unstopppable rise of media budget. As martech and #ecommerce tools get smarter and more affordable, one would rationally expect costs to come down, and help brands achieve more with less. If that drives greater optimization of the stack, in the long run, that can only be a good thing for consumers - which should ultimately pay off for brands and technology companies.

"So long as the receiving platform is capable of being able to personalize at that level, we can serve that up for them." - Martin Balaam, describing the superior marketing agility unlocked by Pimberly's composable PIM. Described modestly by Martin as "the little bit in the middle" between platform and ERP, in fact, #composablePIM unlocks a whole range of possibilites in #ecommerce. That includes improved personalization (to quote the great Deane Barker, "ecommerce is a content play"), but as this conversation reveals, merchandising, search, analytics, order management, campaigning and more all stand to be enhanced through enhancements in product data. This clip is just a teaser of the full podcast, which you can access via the comments link. Thanks very much to Martin for sharing his insights on Martalks. Great stuff.

"The great companies have embraced new technologies, certainly like #composable, that allow them to play to win all the time" - Fred Argir speaking on our recent webinar on #ecommerce replatforming and digital transformation. Fred's The Argir Group works with a lot of retailers undergoing digital transformation as part of corporate restructuring. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of his work, Fred speaks despairingly of scenarios where legacy technology – and the inability to “react to headwinds” – is holding back the business. Headwinds are an inevitability of business and, indeed, of marketing. Navigating them means staying fleet of foot, which heavily depends on having modernized your martech stack. A big thank-you to Fred for sharing his widsom with our guests. Full recording of this webinar > comments link.

In the last few years, better #productinformation management has gone from being a benefit of #composable transformation, to one of the leading triggers. Today, some companies are puzzling over how to expose product data in multichannel settings - but the challenges for many retailers are more fundamental. In this clip from our recent webinar, Serena & Lily's CTO Stuart McKeachie explains how they replatformed in order to master the presentation of complex product variations in their primary webstore - and to then harness the wider benefits of the composable stack. To learn more about #PIM, stay tuned to Martalks in the coming weeks for a recent episode I recorded with Pimberly's Martin Balaam. Full webinar recording with Stuart, Diane Randolph and Fred Argir > comments link.

Missed our recent webinar? Pleased to say it's been released as a podcast. In this special epside of Martalks, we hosted Diane Randolph, Fred Argir and Stuart McKeachie, 3 pioneering leaders on brand-side technology innovation, to get the retailer's perspective on #composable transformation. The rise of the brand tech leader has been meteoric in recent years, so it's little surprise to see the likes of Diane sitting on the board of companies such as Orium to help guide technology firms through the evolving #ecommerce landscape. In this clip, Diane explains how a the internal team worked alongside their #systemintegrator to develop the transformation roadmap - which eventually led to the selection of commercetools as the platform of choice. Hear the full podcast on the composabale transformation roadmap via the comments link. And a big thank-you to Fred, Diane and Stuart for taking part. The Argir Group

Several months ago, I wrote an article about factors that make scaleups more resilient. Here's an excerpt: "Speaking from my own experience – both as an #executivesearch professional, and as an investor – the most effective scale-up leaders need to be adaptable, collaborative, and willing to bend to feedback from their wider leadership team." Little surprise, then, to hear Zohar Hod proudly talking about the culture of empowerment he's fostered at One Creation Corporation. Very early on in the life of a startup, CEOs and founders discover that being able to trust one's team is a foundational leadership trait. Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer Yang Cheung gets a well-deserved shoutout here for the vision and leadership that brought One Creation to where it is today. Full podcast > comments link. #scalups #leadership

#Trust is one of the big buzzwords of modern marketing, with customer cosnent at the forefront of modern marketing initiatives. The brilliance of One Creation Corporation is that it's successfully productized a mechanism for quantifying and earning this trust by building steps into the #ecommerce customer journey. Zohar explains all in the podcast (see comments link) but the there are essentially 4 components to this solution: 1) asking customers about their marketing preferences 2) an incentives engine which rewards customers for their trust 3) integration to any downstream CDP 4) a low-code interface which allows marketing managers to make use of One Creation's solution to any customer experience. Listening to this back was one of those "why didn't I think of that" moments. Great stuff Zohar and team. #zeropartydata

New Martalks episode! For 2.3 we were joined by One Creation Corporation's Zohar Hod, founder of the premier customer consent solution for ecommerce. This incredibly useful piece of SaaS allows marketers to build preference-collection steps into customer journey's with no IT dependency; there's also an incentives feature which allows brands to influence the customer's decision to share data. This is great example of the right solution at the right time, with brands everywhere puzzling over how to keep customers engaged in a way that enhances the customer experience, rather than coming across as creepy. In this clip, Zohar explains how the tech integrates with Klaviyo, Segment and any other downstream #CDP, ensuring that the customer profile updates in realtime for wider marketing purposes. Hear the full podcast > comments link. And Zohar, thank you so much for sharing your insights. It was a fascinating discussion. #Zeropartydata #firstpartydata

“Most of the brands we work with come to us with this nagging suspicion that the reports they’re used to seeing in Google Analytics, or Facebook ads, or wherever, are not actually quite right.” As Edward Upton of Littledata explains, this lack of trust leads marketing teams losing trust in their data, negatively impacting their campaigns’ effectiveness. To hear more about how Edward and his team are giving ecommerce brands more faith in their #revenuetracking data, follow the link in the comments. #marketingoptimization #lifetimevalueanalysis