Moments of serendipity at an uncomfortable breakfast

The Marketing Society Middle East sat down for its third 'Uncomfortable Breakfast' to discuss the hot topic of data. You may ask why we call it such an off-putting name, 'Uncomfortable Breakfast'.

It is, of course, a delicious breakfast held at an enviable establishment here in Dubai – such as the fabulous space we’ve been using for the past couple of events, the Armani Hotel.

The 'uncomfortable' element is to find a topic that the marketing community knows is important but may not, en masse, discuss in an open forum regularly enough. For this reason there were no journalists present!

This forum brought together forty senior marketers with regional and local remits, and all came to hear more about the story behind data.




Today that’s the problem; we’re talking about data itself and not about the stories it can provide. Taking the latter approach, storytelling, Marilies Rumpold-Preining of IBM Commerce gave us some interesting insights:

• It used to be about customer records, customer data, having the address right, recording their email and the basic profiling; all the data was kept in silos and to bring it all together, to have a holistic view of the customer was not an obvious thing for companies to do.
• But here we are today, Dubai has evolved and so has the world of data. Today it’s not only about customer profile, it’s much more about the context and the behaviour of the client. It’s where they transact, what they do, where they access information.
• Almost all CMOs understand that to grow their business they need to better engage with them and create unique experiences for them; the only way to do that is by using data in a meaningful way – using both the basic profiling data and also the contextual data i.e. where their clients surfed last night, which mall did they visit, which store they went into...

The way Marilies and her colleagues at IBM describe this is using data to help marketers to create more 'Moments of Serendipity'.

With today’s omnichannel marketing we can generate an uncomfortable amount of data. It’s a question of turning it into useful, actionable insights.
We talked about how Watson quickly structures all that unstructured data – have you seen the series of videos about Watson – if not, do have a look here:

We also talked more about specific areas of interest to those in the audience brave enough to ask their uncomfortable questions. Pertinent questions across the morning included:

• Are marketers in Dubai adopting the same trends that we are seeing in Europe in terms of using big data?
• Dubai is catching up with the pace of global technology but is there a talent gap in terms of using the technology?
• Is there a direction where big data will be used in DUbai? The UAE culture is very discount-based due to many consumers being in transient mode, so do you think that using big data to better understand customers, build relationships and loyalty, to charge premium pricing makes sense?
• How are we dealing with 'dark social', the social media we cannot reach data from, like Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc where we cannot capture interactions happening?
• Many are worried about personally identifiable information and privacy; as an industry what can we do about this?
• If a retailer has no online presence and no online customer database to start with, how can you start using data?
• When will we really embrace data-driven business performance? So many people in this region are personally tech-savvy as consumers, return to their offices, put on their procurement hats and opt for more traditional modes of communication?
• There is more data and increasingly there are better ways to visualize this data; it can trick you into thinking there are correlations when there are no correlations. The tricky part is the human factor of asking the right questions to get the right answers. How do we get to the right questions to get meaningful answers?

There was much food for thought and many more questions raised. Now it’s up to us, the founding members of The Marketing Society Middle East, to keep the conversations going.

The Marketing Society Middle East
If you are based in the Middle East and are interesting in taking part in the society or the next Uncomfortable Breakfast get in contact with Alasdair Hall-Jones, head of membership & global via [email protected].

If you’re interested why you should join, why not hear from other people who were at this event:



If you’re interested in hearing more of the content of this event have a listen to this video:



James Welch is a board director of The Marketing Society Middle East and managing director of Blue Logic Consulting.