Why hackathons are valuable for marketers as well
as techies ?
Marketing
Hackathons let people express their creativity and bring innovative ideas
Getting
new ideas and innovative ways to improve either your product or the customer
journey is a great asset that needs to be taken very seriously by companies.
One effective fashion to do so is to organize a hackathon within your company
or an event much more larger, gathering people from various places.
Although, in the tech industry Hackathons
are usually dedicated to coders to come up with a new product/service or make an
existing product/service much more powerful, it can be associated with a
marketing approach as well.
Why
considered Marketing Hackathons as a real asset?
The
giants of the Tech Industry have organized Hackathons for more than a decade
now. Thus, those types of events are not
only dedicated to find innovative ideas even if it remains the core and the
goal of it. How can it be more than that and what can it bring to a company (or
an industry)? David Moth, the writer of this blog article and the Head of
Social Research at EConsultancy, tells us in what ways hackathons are a useful
tool.
Get your people out of their
comfort zone:
It is important not to remain locked up in
your routine and to step out in order to provide variety in your employee daily
tasks. Hackathons allow your team to be challenged in a different way from
their everyday duties.
Help your employees to see
the bigger picture:
This type of event let the participants
work on a project from scratch. Meaning, that they will not only be focus on
what their business unit provides in the customer journey rather they will have
a broader view of it. Eventually, this will be useful at a certain point in
their day job to get a different approach.
Puts back the focus on the
customer:
The user or customer experience is what
makes your product more (or less) appreciated by the customer than your
competitors. Thus, it is a key point that not enough companies focus on. Just
as the previous point, this will makes your employees to get a broader view of
the customer journey. It is critical that all the people working in the company
understand and visualize the customer process.
Work with new people:
This is basically how networking works.
This is an opportunity to get around new people, to discover new ways of
working.
All these things will lead to new and
innovative ideas that might be implemented in the customer journey.
Why does it matters to us ?
As
both of us had the opportunity to work in the tech industry, we experienced
that collective cognitive experiments often bring the brightest ideas. While
engineers are used to collaborate and share information as a piece of open
source code on GitHub for instance, open teamworking is scarcer in the
marketing field.
Design thinking, defined as “design-specific
cognitive activities that designers apply during the process of designing” is,
besides being the root of IBM culture, more and more important in operational
activities. Connecting global creativity, innovation and knowledge is,
according to us, a very relevant way to come up with solid marketing campaigns.
This statement is even more accurate in the digital industry which offers
flexibility, responsiveness and open-data. Thus, teams can easily design viral
ideas and develop them to fit with the media or audience targeted.
This blog post states that “nearly 73% of
company are working towards delivering cohesive customer experiences, rather
than standalone campaigns or interactions." This statistic is very important in
a marketing area where network effects are catalysts of growth. The more the
customer fells incorporated in an ecosystem, the more he or she will tend to be
loyal, and, the more the network will appears as attractive for prospects. A
marketing ecosystem can, of course, be designed by a single person in a single
office, but there is a lot to bet that the experiment will be way more
colorful, original and polyvalent if many people, with a different background and
ideas are working on it in an open-information state of mind.
Today, more and more firms claim to use the
Agile management method and even bigger firms as Facebook are managing projects
with a start-up spirit. Developing non-tech Hackathons is, from our viewpoint a
good way to break internal silos and enhance the development of “out of the
box” ideas. For instance, the Banque Populaire Occitane built an innovative
event to imagine new services of proximity and to stop the drop in
frequentation of the agencies. With the operation "Hacker the agency!
", customers, collaborators, as well as developers and digital experts
worked hand in hand in order to emerge the uses of tomorrow in bank branches.
The first prize was eventually awarded to a project aimed at proposing to the clients, in
the rural agencies, office space of the bank for work meetings or even
coworking.
To conclude, we choose this article in
order to highlight the fact that digital marketing isn’t cantoned to a large
amount of digital campaigns. A true digital strategy is based on an impactful
ecosystem of customer experience that is composed on relevant and linked
initiatives. Those kind of operational initiatives are the fruit of a global
reflexion and Hackathons are a great way to confront ideas and processes in
order to build a solid, accurate and cost-effective digital marketing strategy.
Mehdi Sijelmassi
Maxime Kozminski
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