[:en]By Dominick Sirianni, VP of Operations, Primavera and VP Interactive Education, Internet Marketing Association
Victor Cho is part techie, part businessman, and part visionary. Long before becoming Evite’s CEO, Cho started a database building consulting company as a high school student. He graduated magna cum laude from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business with a B.S.E. in Statistics and Marketing and then honed his business chops at Microsoft, Intuit, and Kodak before taking the helm at Evite.
In two recent interviews on our IMA Leader podcast Episode 31 and Episode 32, Cho described how the traditional models of B2B and B2C are archaic. Outdated. Limiting. Describing how businesses should and will continue to run in a growingly interconnected world as simply “business to business” or “business to consumer” sets you up to miss the boat.
Instead, he proposes a BBCC Value Flow Matrix. To fully understand the implications of this forward-thinking model, listen to Cho break it down and apply real-world case studies to leveraging it here. Seeing how Amazon and Evite apply this is clarifying and inspiring. But the important take-away is that in an ubiquitously connected world, the value flows bidirectionally in increasing numerous ways.
Global Ubiquitous Connectivity — as Victor Cho coins it — is just at its beginning stages. We are only on the cusp of seeing the real impact of being connected to everyone all the time. Look at the trend of wearables and how that is increasing exponentially. In fact, the wearable tech market is projected to hit about $80 billion by 2020 according to Juniper Research.
Wearables are a perfect example of how companies sell to consumers while also receiving information back that they can further use to refine their products and improve their customer experience. Building in social apps and other experiential features further propagates scale as more and more consumers pull in their friends and family.
The world is no longer so black and white as B2B and B2C would imply.
Technology is changing the way we live, work, and play. This is no surprise to anyone. But as marketers we need to toss out archaic frameworks and look at ways to leverage this new frontier. Marketing techniques are arguably outdated too. Victor Cho urges us to reframe our vision so we can better capitalize on the growing opportunity unfolding all around us. The best companies already are.
To learn more, check out Cho on the IMA Leader podcast and register for IMPACT15 where he will be a featured speaker at this year’s conference.
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