Editor’s note: A visit to the Millennial 20/20 Summit in New York by two Technology Business Research analysts leads them to the conclusion than even the dierati are struggling to reach millennials. Making the trip were Bozhidar Hristov and Stuart Williams.
HAMPTON, N.H. – Amid the ongoing digital reinvention of advertising and marketing, enterprises face yet another challenge: reaching a new population demographic born after 1980 — the millennials.
At the Millennial 20/20 event held in Manhattan on March 1 and 2, agencies, tech startups and industry giants such as Accenture, one of the event sponsors, demonstrated how they are integrating mobile, social and virtual platforms as well as data analytics, new business models and lots of elbow grease to build relationships with the new generation of economic buyers.
While the event at times exhibited a lack of focus, firms such as Accenture did not miss the opportunity to demonstrate how they plan to support the largest firms in retail, travel and automotive to reach these new buyers.
Attendees ranged from young designers and entrepreneurs to experienced leaders of Fortune 100 companies. Every attendee was eager to understand members of the new generation, how they differ from preceding cohorts and how to build commercial relationships with them. Keynotes ranged from social science research into the coming generation to builders of mobile applications to talks on specific industry complexities.
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TBR met with several managing directors of Accenture’s Operating Groups practices: Retail, Automotive and Air Travel. Each group staged an impressive demonstration of how their groups enable firms to connect with and grow business with millennials.
The Retail group demonstrated how consumer interactions build a personalized profile that enables marketing moments.
The Air Travel group demonstrated a combination of predictive social messaging and blockchain luggage tracking that is designed to improve flier satisfaction across a complex set of players that enable the travel process from portal to portal.
Finally, the Automotive group demonstrated a series of reinventions of the car buyer-seller relationship, including a virtual car tour using augmented reality to place a new car right in a buyer’s garage. Accenture’s unrivaled industry expertise — paired with investments such as the Accenture’s Open Innovation program and tools such as myWizard delivered through internal, organically built, trusted relationships — was clearly messaged throughout the event and demonstrated a single face of Accenture, combining services and assets across the firm in service of the industry solutions.
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While few of Accenture’s rivals, be they professional services firms or agencies, took part in the event, the company aimed to establish itself as a market-maker in high-growth areas such as connected services and demonstrate its ability to innovate as well as bridge technology and talent. Relationships with startups, such as that with by Reveal, provide access to new, trendy technologies that, when paired with established frameworks blending creative IP from acquisitions as well as Accenture’s consulting-led model, add dimension to Accenture’s innovative thinking capabilities and solidify the company’s vendor agnosticism.
Additionally, Accenture demonstrated innovation at the event, which could help attract talent from the target generation as well as millennials’ unbound mindset around attributes such as social activism, self-awareness, innovation, trust, purpose and accessibility. The millennial approach could provide Accenture leverage as the company prioritizes caliber over scale for future recruits.
Accenture is one of many firms wrestling with the challenge of marketing to and engaging with digitally enabled consumers. Firms such as Accenture that can span technical, creative, design and business vectors of change are best positioned for success, while traditional marketers or single-play providers are unlikely to lead the market. As one of the dominant players on the interactive services battlefield, Accenture’s investments in creative and design talent have helped it to move from proof-of-concept discussions to execution at scale through local integration.
However, millennials have yet to permeate the C-Suite in the buyer role to a degree that enables Accenture to achieve scalable results. As a result, maintaining relationships with legacy technology partners to service enterprise-level clients will remain the predominant revenue channel opportunity. In the long run, though, embracing user-centric, rather than tech-led, discussions delivered through the lens of the millennial generation will help Accenture maintain its position across G2000 clients as they are tasked with finding ways to better appeal to the millennial buyer.
(C) TBR
