The Future of Connected CRM: Bridging Data, AI, and Personalized Experiences

Navigating the AI-driven future: How integrated data ecosystems are reshaping brand-consumer relationships and unlocking personalized experiences

In today's digital landscape, data reigns supreme. Those who possess the most valuable data often emerge victorious, and with the advent of AI, we can now distill information into actionable insights within seconds. This shift has elevated the importance of data quality, making it the most valuable asset, with data collection points becoming integral to success.

The AI Revolution and Data Ownership

With AI platforms like OpenAI and Claude becoming easily accessible and relatively affordable at scale, companies across industries are incorporating them as a layer within their products. This widespread adoption is leading to a monopoly effect in ownership, potentially rendering simple 'AI wrappers' nearly obsolete as organizations build their own AI-powered solutions.

Given this trend, our focus should shift towards data collection and ownership. The products that can collect the cleanest, most connected data across physical and digital environments will ultimately prove more valuable than the AI interpreting it. By collecting data at an individual level, we can create new identity layers that act as memory agents, both predicting and reacting to the world around us. These profiles will understand our tastes and guide us through curated experiences of stories, products, and discoveries, avoiding the repetitive loops often created by current recommendation systems.

The Brand Perspective: Content Overload and Platform Challenges

On the flip side, brands today are distributing content, products, and experiences across multiple platforms in an attempt to maximize engagement and attention, often at the expense of brand alignment. TikTok exemplifies this trend, where brands follow random trends to gain views, altering their tone of voice and target audience in hopes of going viral. However, when these newly acquired consumers visit the brand's domain or physical experience, they often find little correlation to the content that initially attracted them.

Brands are also grappling with platform algorithms, forced to pay for visibility among their own followers and pressured to create content types favored by the platform to maintain engagement. This has contributed to the noise of social media, fostering a mentality that nothing meaningful happens in these spaces – it's just a wash of generalized content without real human connection or intent.

The disconnect between creative effort and fleeting engagement is leading some brands, particularly in the luxury sector, to abandon social media altogether. Daniel Lee, while at Bottega Veneta, aptly summarized this sentiment: "Everyone sees the same stream of content. A huge amount of thought goes into what I do, and social media oversimplifies it." This resonates deeply with creatives who invest significant time in building narratives and worlds, only to see them lost in the endless scroll of content.

The Tipping Point: Personalization vs. Current Landscape

We find ourselves at a crucial juncture where consumers crave personalization, and brands want to deliver it, but the current digital landscape falls short. Some brands attempted to bridge this gap by developing their own apps, aiming to world-build and bypass social media. However, this approach places an undue burden on consumers, requiring them to download and engage with yet another single-brand app. The cost and effort to maintain these new channels often outweigh the data collected, leaving both sides frustrated.

The Future: Experience-Based Engagement

The future of brand-consumer interaction lies in experience-based engagement, both physical and digital. Artists, brands, and creators need to build immersive worlds around their offerings, from product launches to world tours to fashion weeks. This shift requires a new ecosystem and infrastructure based on tiered access, allowing for the creation of nuanced identity layers.

This tiered access model enables anyone to participate at their level of excitement, engagement, and financial means, moving beyond the traditional general audience and VIP dichotomy. It allows brands to capture granular data for product, content, and brand refinement, ultimately enabling personalization and increasing retention. For consumers, it offers a "choose your own adventure" experience model that helps form individualized taste profiles.

The Connected CRM Solution

The solution to these challenges is a connected Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. By integrating content and products as part of the experience story, brands can gain clear insights into what works and what doesn't, eliminating guesswork in ROI calculations and budget allocations.

This new model builds comprehensive CRM profiles that track all digital and physical interactions and transactions, connecting them to actionable outcomes. Unlike traditional siloed services, this approach offers a holistic view of the consumer journey.

This future is not just a concept – it's already here in the form of ITM.

We are currently running our pilot program, if you're interested in learning more or seeing a demo, please reach out via email at cam@itm.studio