The Year Of The Consumer

It’s no accident that we’re publishing the second installment of Digital Transformation Playbook in partnership with Accenture Interactive in the wake of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

- James Cooper

In this report, we are focused on the consumer and customer experience, and the two retail inflection points are good indicators of how brands are shifting to go with the flow of the customer journey rather than interrupt it. They also represent big macro themes informing marketing, including the rise of Amazon and the converse, and largely nascent, direct-to-consumer commerce play, data driven and utility-enabled creativity, and AI- and AR-driven activations. All this in service of the empowered and experience-focused consumer.

With these themes in mind, staff writer Marty Swant, on page 17, interviews David Godsman, who joined Coca-Cola almost a year ago as the beverage behemoth’s first-ever chief digital officer. In his role, Godsman is leading the brand’s consumer-first transformation through new experiments and activations around data and connected devices in order “to help customers make decisions in a more effective manner.”