- Duel is the only UK Marketing company to make the 2018 ‘Cool Vendors’ list.
- Fundamental challenge to the Adland status quo.
- GDPR sparks Customer Portal launch.
Duel, a Customer Advocacy Marketing platform, announced that Gartner, Inc. has selected them as one of three Cool Vendors for Retail Merchandising and Marketing. Duel is the only British company to be included in this year’s list. Paul Archer, Co-Founder and CEO of Duel, says that Duel’s recognition comes at an important time,
"Clickbait, fake news, a complete Wild West of data privacy and a totalitarian marketing duopoly of Facebook and Google have left us all, as consumers, in a state of mistrust, desperately clutching at anything that’s honest and stands for something. I believe the Cambridge Analytica scandal and GDPR heralded the beginning of this, but there’s a lot more to come - there is a change in the air and the dirtiest players in ad tech and agency-land will be the ones to suffer.”
The wider world of marketing is suffering a knock-on impact from the loss of trust triggered by the ‘post-Brextrumpian’ climate. The U.S. Trust Index this year recorded the steepest Trust decline in any territory ever (Edelman) - a trend which is reflected across advertising, with almost 70% of consumers admitting they don't trust advertising and 42% stating they distrust brands (IPSOS Connect & Trinity Mirror).
Paul goes on to talk about the need for honest marketing in this new, trust-less, era.
"Now, I’m not sure much about retail marketing and merchandising is ‘cool’, least of all us - we’re hardly talking James Dean or an ice cold pint on a summer’s day! However, what is really cool is that brands and retailers are starting to become more conscious of the need for them to return to an honest, authentic way of marketing that centres around the customer.”
Gartner define Advocacy Marketing in their IT Glossary (Gartner Glossary):
“Advocacy marketing is a discipline for activating a brand’s advocates with unprecedented scale over the social Web. When advocacy marketing is enabled with digital techniques and advocate stories, then endorsements and recommendations are amplified to potentially millions of people, given the exponential nature of social networks. Advocacy marketing has been used effectively to acquire new customers but is now actively being used in loyalty and retention initiatives.”
With this approach, a company’s standard marketing and advertising can become infinitely more effective than traditional methods. Moreover, it results in a far more trusted, honest customer experience - as the customers are advocating with honest, positive experiences of brands. It requires a fundamental rethinking of the approach at an operational level - in the plumbing of everything from CRM and ecommerce to instore engagements - to give brands much more control and make their relationship with the customer more collaborative. Paul also believes it fundamentally challenges the Adland status quo,
“If a brand or retailer can cut out the downstream middlemen and redistribute some of those bloated advertising budgets towards rewarding customers for advocacy and providing a better customer experience, they will reap the benefits in much increased loyalty, advocacy and, most importantly, sales. Surely that beats the hell out of financing awards and Rosé on a beach in Cannes?
At the end of the day, would you rather give your customer the best possible experience, or fund someone else’s massive yacht on La Croisette. I know where I would invest if I were a modern, ROI focussed CMO."
GDPR sparks Duel’s new Customer Portal launch
More than just adopting the innately honest approach of Customer Advocacy Marketing and being fully GDPR compliant already, the Duel team celebrated GDPR last Thursday by launching the Duel Customer Portal with Progressive Permissions. It’s a way for customers to control every element of their data and content when working with a brand, giving them the ability to opt in and out at will and ensuring they are appropriately rewarded every time a brand uses them. It provides full transparency on both sides, creating new standards in the fight for data privacy. Panagiotis Tsarouchis, co-founder and CTO at Duel:
“Every consumer now needs to be able to control their data, so why not give them full control over every element of their data, content and advocacy and how it is used? Duel now also gives brands the ability to progressively reward customers for different levels of engagement."
According to a summary of the report, “this research introduces retail CIOs to three vendors that are innovating merchandising and marketing with advance machine learning and automation” (Gartner) and Duel pledges to continue to deliver on this promise by constantly innovating advocacy with its Customer Advocacy Marketing platform, which automates the process at enterprise scale, delivering ROI both online and offline.
Disclaimer: Gartner, Cool Vendors in Retail Merchandising and Marketing, 30 April 2018
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.