#BrandifyIt2017 Day 1 Recap: Location, Data and Enhancing Brand Reputation

Day 1 of the 2017 Brandify Summit has given our attendees and viewers a world full of insight! Today, discussions revolved heavily around how the specific capabilities of location data can in turn translate into greater brand reputation pushes and strategic efforts to generate customer satisfaction

The Power of Data
Brandify CEO Manish Patel kicked off the 2017 Brandify Summit with a anecdotal explanation of the conference’s theme.

“People x data…and the x is for experience.”

In terms of experience for local customers, customers of today have different expectations of the brands they visit each and every time they step into a physical location. Knowing this, a “seven star” experience must rest heavily on tapping into the value of location and using it to go the extra mile for a users end to end experience. Summit panelists David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal note that platforms like Facebook and Google realize this and building products to support local in anyway to obtain this sort of data.

The Value of Location
As Greg sterling mentioned time and time again, “location is truly becoming a broad utility that is central to all of marketing. Experience enhancement is certainly a part of the core focus for marketers today, and many have just begun to see that this can be done best through the utilization of location data
But Factual CEO Gil Elbaz noted that while location is becoming central to a lot of how apps and smart devices are interacting with customers, even more is coming down the pipeline on the consumer side and the brand side. On a more hopeful note in addressing relevance and context within the consumer journey.

“Location can be used as a humanizing tool,” Elbaz said.

Panelists on personalization and the customer experience from Sense360 and Placed agree with Elbaz' notion, highlighting that ad targeting is just a part of a stack, and there are different data points and lenses that work together to build and enhance the customer experience.

Enhancing Reputation by Going the Extra Mile
With so much saturation in nearly every vertical and category, Brandify partners at Yelp note that it's time for brands to start going the extra mile by harnessing the power of review channels. One misconception, among customers and brand marketers alike, is that only upset people want to write reviews.

• "78% of reviews are above 3 stars, and the majority are 4 and 5 stars," said Yelp's Nate Evans. For this reason, accumulating and interacting with quality reviews shows the authenticity that other online searchers are looking for and shows that brands are moving beyond merely having a listing online.
  
  
  
  
• Going the extra mile moves past review response. Google and Factual noted in their sessions that more granular options and services such as bots, messaging, and input of photos and detailed attributes give brands more control and therefore a better self-representation at the local level.
  
  To go beyond your customers, marketers need to begin thinking beyond by learning about the latest capabilities in artificial intelligence, cognition and voice. Learn more about each of these capabilities with Brandify Labs.
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