Table A1 Representative quotes from the...

Table A1

Representative quotes from the interviews*

Code	Tools of marketing automation and artificial intelligence – Marketer's heuristics and their scope
I01	“We have a mechanism for scoring wines from our users; we then have the ability to understand what we can offer them by segmenting them perfectly for each type of wine … The automation process is underway regarding mailing with Customers. The company has internally developed software that suggests wines to users based on learning about their tastes … To operate in our field you have to be an expert, who knows the meaning of terms (for example, “acidity” of a wine). It is very important to know the topic to train users and tell them how to use the terms. Human input is always important, the machine cannot learn on its own, it is the human who has to tell the machine what to learn.”
I02	“Marketing automation systems based on artificial intelligence give tangible and important benefits. This is the essential element. That said, some weaknesses must be taken into account, for example, the loss of a certain amount of accuracy of a kind provided by human intervention … It must also be taken into account that an “on boarding period” is needed, in the sense that they are not immediately effective, they require a period of maturation for inclusion in the company. Companies need to be aware that these systems need some time to become effective in using the data. They use tools for the unification of browsing data, for example … To embed marketing automation requires the courage to make mistakes and to learn. ”
I03	“We have different marketing automation software, there has been a layering of systems … By now marketing automation is a standard, for those who do operational marketing, it is a standard activity of our process, it is not in question. Today marketing automation is done as it is, but in the future I can't imagine marketing automation without machine learning … Our company uses recommender systems, they are not yet based on machine learning systems … There are still limitations, however … A major pharmaceutical company had given an artificial intelligence system a dataset of sick people to figure out what was the best treatment, well the algorithm only proposed solutions that made the disease worse, but the problem was that the dataset was only sick people, and that was a mistake, while it was realized that the dataset should include both healthy and sick people … Today this is trivial, but when you start we don't have that confidence. A great algorithm without good data is useless. ”
I04	“The company has been adopting marketing automation tools for at least two and a half years, doing e-mail marketing, push notifications, sending sms, online advertising, social … Some of these software require skills not only in marketing but also in data engineering and in some cases in information technology. There are advantages … These are still tools that have positive effects, with really good effects on Roi (even a 400% positive effect on Roi) … The company is not yet using artificial intelligence systems … My experiences suggest that companies are still far behind in adopting artificial intelligence. Addressing it requires holding different business functions together … Not all companies have this ability for cross-functional collaboration. Artificial intelligence is such that there is always a human behind it, The criteria on which artificial intelligence works are given by humans. ”
I05	“Currently the company does not use marketing automation software, but we are thinking of implementing such solutions, for loyalty and engagement purposes. We are thinking in particular of developing the e-mail marketing part, which is not currently done …. Within the pharmaceutical environment these systems have to be very well built to avoid them going against ministerial and regulatory rules … Artificial intelligence will be able to do many things but it does not go to replace the human part, because the more empathetic part is quite difficult to be replaced by the machine. The chatbot tool for example is only used internally. Artificial intelligence has simplified but mostly made some processes faster. ”
I06	“My company has been using marketing automation software for at least four years, more specifically we use Emarsys, specifically for e-mail marketing and CRM. It is e-mail marketing software that has evolved by providing additional marketing automation elements. We use from the classic shopping cart abandonment e-mail to some more advanced e-mails that are based on the user's categories of interest, from products visited, to the proposal of personalized products for the user, then there are other automations based on the phase of the customer's life cycle … Artificial intelligence software has then been included that allows personalization of the experience for the customer based on their specific characteristics… In our opinion at the moment, the voice experience of contacting a human is irreplaceable … Machines over time will improve and surpass humans, however, we realized by adopting text-producing software that human-produced ones performed better. However, we think it is a matter of time. I am sure that an Artificial Intelligence System will be more efficient than a Human System. ”
I07	“I am head of marketing in my company, where I have been working for 12 years. We got a marketing automation system six months ago, we are still in a beta phase. We use the System mainly for e-mail marketing, where we employ them to profile the customer and facilitate customer journing. We think that the customer today expects to have a customization service even with respect to the journey in the online shopping experience … One disadvantage is that sometimes there is a kind of reluctance on the part of the customer to receive communications, so we have tried to give the customer as much transparency as possible of why they are receiving these communications, communicating the possibility to unsubscribe … Machine learning tools on advertising have evolved a lot … Those who use marketing automation by natural evolution will also have to use machine learning systems. It's not that this is good regardless of the type of business, though. ”
I08	“For us today it is unthinkable to do marketing without marketing automation tools. We develop the tools in-house (from partners' proprietary software solutions and platforms) … We apply it to both marketing and product (raccomandation systems). Campaigns using artificial intelligence perform better than others because they are more responsive. One downside, however, is that you lose a little bit of control, you don't put more hands on it and to be precise. You have to treat artificial intelligence as a black box … We don't use ROI but we reason about the cost per acquisition. Space for creative is getting tighter and tighter, it remains less important in studio and post campaign … Sectors with small numbers (smes b2b, for example) have less need for automation, an algorithm with little data is less correct. ”
I09	“We make use of marketing automation software not only for data collection and processing but also for use in workflow from a predictive and prescriptive perspective, for example in managing the “abandoned cart” in the purchasing process. Technology no longer passive tool but purposeful tool … The customer's life is simplified if we anticipate his needs. The customer can wish for the not having to think (“don't let me think”). First the data then creativity is developed. Creativity is enhanced by the data base developed by marketing automation. Machine learning is increasingly important for marketing automation. ”
I10	“It is very important for us to do cleanup on the input data, considering only the data related to the orders that are sent to us. We have our own order-gathering systems and these create a history of data, basically using databases that are already built, being processed for the supplier relationship … There is a mix of using artificial intelligence and other tools. In our forecasting, the baseline is formed for me by the artificial intelligence … The human element is at a great advantage because it gets the mix already made by the artificial intelligence … I, however, wouldn't know how I would behave if the artificial intelligence told me that in a week's time a snow cyclone is coming and so now you have to tell production to make an extra production of snow tires, I wouldn't go about it exposing myself. If the prediction is then wrong I risk my career. ”
I11	“We can acquire from online sales a lot of consumer data … It is then a matter of figuring out what to do with it, and that will take one or two years. Then there will be a phase that will be able to use them, so we will create a department that uses them. Then in the next few years, maybe after five years, we will be able to make product strategies, define offerings based on this data … To do this we need to attract new skills to the company, we need a digital agenda, the digital world needs to come more and more into the center of the company and our decisions, Data is being collected massively, but we need to figure out how to use it, and then we need empowerment, those who have the skills need to be empowered to influence the organization and make decisions. ”
I12	“Network listening is an interesting terrain in which forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning can be employed. Our company has a proprietary platform (Buzztech) for listening. It started from this consideration: regardless of the development of technology, there is always the need for substantial human intervention. As much as one can tell about the magnificent virtues of artificial intelligence, for example, sentiment continues to be an extraordinarily minefield for technology, especially when the texts are short, especially when the language is not English … Then there are problems of overinformation, one has to prioritize data and data sources … When we started in 2008, it was said that there were algorithms that would be able to handle sentiment in an automated way. It is now 2020 and there is no sign of those algorithms … Today it is hard to say what artificial intelligence will be capable in the future of doing. ”
I13	“A first aspect is to make a previously initiated buying process come to tarmine (ed. The theme of the shopping cart abandonment … Automation imposes more planning in marketing activities … These systems are increasingly user friendly … The organization for this has to equip itself less and less with technicians and more and more with marketing figures, the technical aspect is better to buy it from outside than to develop it internally … Man-machine interaction is important. The machine on the one hand might make mistakes, but the man if he only draws on his traditional tools fails to have an evolution … One risk of the automated system, for example, is that if a customer enters the online system in a marketing automation flow to search for a product, even if he then re-enters to search for a different one he might still be read for the old search, and so he is offered something that maybe he is not looking for now. ”
I14	“Digital technologies are of interest to luxury companies particularly for online retail. Behind every real-time response there is always a technological solution that has required an organizational commitment. Technologies that are integrated with those used in the online are now being incorporated into the offline store itself, and they enable the creation of databases and also support automation mechanisms (for example, for collecting purchase data and possibly profiling) … These systems integrate with the management of the other aspects, such as warehouse and management in general. There are technologies that are potentially still developable, such as even more advanced CRM management. ”
I15	“The machine learning part is particularly important in our company, and it feeds into the data that we can collect about customers and that is collected not only online but through digitizing the data collected in the context of store stores … Going forward, we need to work on machine learning to gain predictive capacity of machines relative to customer behaviors. For this, we would like to put appropriate systems on all digital eyewear purchasing platforms soon. This is to be able to suggest to the consumer the eyewear that we think may be of interest from the journey that the consumer has made (reccomandation systems) … There is also an important part of developing the theme of augmented reality, which through glasses can access a mass of potential users. ”
I16	“The mistake we can make is that we can superimpose a digitization hat on an old-fashioned company, this is not possible and is the reason why companies starting now have an advantage over traditional ones … These tools can give us the ability to develop appropriate promotions to our customer audience. Listening to customers is always key, the customer is ahead of the company, I don't think there will be, at least in our industry, a total dematerialization as has been believed at times. ”
I17	“The issue of decision-making through the use of artificial intelligence systems using big data is affected by the market context in which decisions will have to be made. There are sectors, particularly in business to business, in which the numbers of operations, machines and customers are very low, and as a result the data base does not assume such large proportions as to create a suitable terrain for the application of big data analysis techniques … Another element to consider is the time at which the decision is made, which can have enormous weight. The sales part is one element within the big world of marketing. The marketing man is comparable in theater to the author and the impresario, the salesman is comparable to the actor. ”
I18	“The online system we have cannot replace from our point of view the seller. Digital can never replace the human relationship with the seller … Artificial intelligence can help the customer by storing the preferred color type, so the color range is much wider and digitally manageable. Our goal is to empower our salesman, through artificial intelligence, which is a system that can help him and make him much more efficient. ”
I19	“In luxury companies where retail is fundamental an important role in the development of automation mechanisms has been played by the endowment of tools, first tablets and then mobile phones, as an endowment of salespeople, capable of replacing the old paper catalogs of products, which being very numerous in companies with important luxury brands like ours, benefited from the support of the catalog to be identified … Salespeople have been endowed with these tools, The tools, however, which if on the one hand gave support to the sales activity, on the other hand have become doors from which to acquire and upload a large amount of data on sales processes. These applications that I called the “digital lookbook” sis evolved to a model of “clientèling” applications to all the activities you can do in front of a customer, integrating with sales systems. ”
I20	“Digital is inescapable, the physical environment such as store management, for example, will increasingly be integrated as a producer of data that feeds into automated marketing processes … Starting with the historical is key to making forecasts and setting business plans, just as it is important to keep open because completely unexpected changes happen. ”
I21	“Online retail is more exposed to forms of automation, but for our company, physical stores remain fundamental and there is still a dominant role there for personal contact with the salesperson and traditional selling … That's not to say, however, that there is no adoption of technology, but it is less visible technology. There are challenges in place for analyzing preferences or making recommendations. But not technology-for-technology proposal, because technology does not always give a real benefit. You have to respect a business value of technology, as well as regulations and compliance, for example on data management … You have to strike a balance. ”
I22	“The benefits of digitization are that of greater knowledge of the customer and the implementation of a targeted offer … The major risks are that the remote use of these technologies risks losing sight of the customer and missing the contact with the customer that is lost sight of. The optimal way would be to combine these tools with qualitative analysis, which risks being lost. Touching the products is always important for the customer and therefore also for us. ”

Code	Tools of marketing automation and artificial intelligence – Marketer's heuristics and their scope
I01	“We have a mechanism for scoring wines from our users; we then have the ability to understand what we can offer them by segmenting them perfectly for each type of wine … The automation process is underway regarding mailing with Customers. The company has internally developed software that suggests wines to users based on learning about their tastes … To operate in our field you have to be an expert, who knows the meaning of terms (for example, “acidity” of a wine). It is very important to know the topic to train users and tell them how to use the terms. Human input is always important, the machine cannot learn on its own, it is the human who has to tell the machine what to learn.”
I02	“Marketing automation systems based on artificial intelligence give tangible and important benefits. This is the essential element. That said, some weaknesses must be taken into account, for example, the loss of a certain amount of accuracy of a kind provided by human intervention … It must also be taken into account that an “on boarding period” is needed, in the sense that they are not immediately effective, they require a period of maturation for inclusion in the company. Companies need to be aware that these systems need some time to become effective in using the data. They use tools for the unification of browsing data, for example … To embed marketing automation requires the courage to make mistakes and to learn. ”
I03	“We have different marketing automation software, there has been a layering of systems … By now marketing automation is a standard, for those who do operational marketing, it is a standard activity of our process, it is not in question. Today marketing automation is done as it is, but in the future I can't imagine marketing automation without machine learning … Our company uses recommender systems, they are not yet based on machine learning systems … There are still limitations, however … A major pharmaceutical company had given an artificial intelligence system a dataset of sick people to figure out what was the best treatment, well the algorithm only proposed solutions that made the disease worse, but the problem was that the dataset was only sick people, and that was a mistake, while it was realized that the dataset should include both healthy and sick people … Today this is trivial, but when you start we don't have that confidence. A great algorithm without good data is useless. ”
I04	“The company has been adopting marketing automation tools for at least two and a half years, doing e-mail marketing, push notifications, sending sms, online advertising, social … Some of these software require skills not only in marketing but also in data engineering and in some cases in information technology. There are advantages … These are still tools that have positive effects, with really good effects on Roi (even a 400% positive effect on Roi) … The company is not yet using artificial intelligence systems … My experiences suggest that companies are still far behind in adopting artificial intelligence. Addressing it requires holding different business functions together … Not all companies have this ability for cross-functional collaboration. Artificial intelligence is such that there is always a human behind it, The criteria on which artificial intelligence works are given by humans. ”
I05	“Currently the company does not use marketing automation software, but we are thinking of implementing such solutions, for loyalty and engagement purposes. We are thinking in particular of developing the e-mail marketing part, which is not currently done …. Within the pharmaceutical environment these systems have to be very well built to avoid them going against ministerial and regulatory rules … Artificial intelligence will be able to do many things but it does not go to replace the human part, because the more empathetic part is quite difficult to be replaced by the machine. The chatbot tool for example is only used internally. Artificial intelligence has simplified but mostly made some processes faster. ”
I06	“My company has been using marketing automation software for at least four years, more specifically we use Emarsys, specifically for e-mail marketing and CRM. It is e-mail marketing software that has evolved by providing additional marketing automation elements. We use from the classic shopping cart abandonment e-mail to some more advanced e-mails that are based on the user's categories of interest, from products visited, to the proposal of personalized products for the user, then there are other automations based on the phase of the customer's life cycle … Artificial intelligence software has then been included that allows personalization of the experience for the customer based on their specific characteristics… In our opinion at the moment, the voice experience of contacting a human is irreplaceable … Machines over time will improve and surpass humans, however, we realized by adopting text-producing software that human-produced ones performed better. However, we think it is a matter of time. I am sure that an Artificial Intelligence System will be more efficient than a Human System. ”
I07	“I am head of marketing in my company, where I have been working for 12 years. We got a marketing automation system six months ago, we are still in a beta phase. We use the System mainly for e-mail marketing, where we employ them to profile the customer and facilitate customer journing. We think that the customer today expects to have a customization service even with respect to the journey in the online shopping experience … One disadvantage is that sometimes there is a kind of reluctance on the part of the customer to receive communications, so we have tried to give the customer as much transparency as possible of why they are receiving these communications, communicating the possibility to unsubscribe … Machine learning tools on advertising have evolved a lot … Those who use marketing automation by natural evolution will also have to use machine learning systems. It's not that this is good regardless of the type of business, though. ”
I08	“For us today it is unthinkable to do marketing without marketing automation tools. We develop the tools in-house (from partners' proprietary software solutions and platforms) … We apply it to both marketing and product (raccomandation systems). Campaigns using artificial intelligence perform better than others because they are more responsive. One downside, however, is that you lose a little bit of control, you don't put more hands on it and to be precise. You have to treat artificial intelligence as a black box … We don't use ROI but we reason about the cost per acquisition. Space for creative is getting tighter and tighter, it remains less important in studio and post campaign … Sectors with small numbers (smes b2b, for example) have less need for automation, an algorithm with little data is less correct. ”
I09	“We make use of marketing automation software not only for data collection and processing but also for use in workflow from a predictive and prescriptive perspective, for example in managing the “abandoned cart” in the purchasing process. Technology no longer passive tool but purposeful tool … The customer's life is simplified if we anticipate his needs. The customer can wish for the not having to think (“don't let me think”). First the data then creativity is developed. Creativity is enhanced by the data base developed by marketing automation. Machine learning is increasingly important for marketing automation. ”
I10	“It is very important for us to do cleanup on the input data, considering only the data related to the orders that are sent to us. We have our own order-gathering systems and these create a history of data, basically using databases that are already built, being processed for the supplier relationship … There is a mix of using artificial intelligence and other tools. In our forecasting, the baseline is formed for me by the artificial intelligence … The human element is at a great advantage because it gets the mix already made by the artificial intelligence … I, however, wouldn't know how I would behave if the artificial intelligence told me that in a week's time a snow cyclone is coming and so now you have to tell production to make an extra production of snow tires, I wouldn't go about it exposing myself. If the prediction is then wrong I risk my career. ”
I11	“We can acquire from online sales a lot of consumer data … It is then a matter of figuring out what to do with it, and that will take one or two years. Then there will be a phase that will be able to use them, so we will create a department that uses them. Then in the next few years, maybe after five years, we will be able to make product strategies, define offerings based on this data … To do this we need to attract new skills to the company, we need a digital agenda, the digital world needs to come more and more into the center of the company and our decisions, Data is being collected massively, but we need to figure out how to use it, and then we need empowerment, those who have the skills need to be empowered to influence the organization and make decisions. ”
I12	“Network listening is an interesting terrain in which forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning can be employed. Our company has a proprietary platform (Buzztech) for listening. It started from this consideration: regardless of the development of technology, there is always the need for substantial human intervention. As much as one can tell about the magnificent virtues of artificial intelligence, for example, sentiment continues to be an extraordinarily minefield for technology, especially when the texts are short, especially when the language is not English … Then there are problems of overinformation, one has to prioritize data and data sources … When we started in 2008, it was said that there were algorithms that would be able to handle sentiment in an automated way. It is now 2020 and there is no sign of those algorithms … Today it is hard to say what artificial intelligence will be capable in the future of doing. ”
I13	“A first aspect is to make a previously initiated buying process come to tarmine (ed. The theme of the shopping cart abandonment … Automation imposes more planning in marketing activities … These systems are increasingly user friendly … The organization for this has to equip itself less and less with technicians and more and more with marketing figures, the technical aspect is better to buy it from outside than to develop it internally … Man-machine interaction is important. The machine on the one hand might make mistakes, but the man if he only draws on his traditional tools fails to have an evolution … One risk of the automated system, for example, is that if a customer enters the online system in a marketing automation flow to search for a product, even if he then re-enters to search for a different one he might still be read for the old search, and so he is offered something that maybe he is not looking for now. ”
I14	“Digital technologies are of interest to luxury companies particularly for online retail. Behind every real-time response there is always a technological solution that has required an organizational commitment. Technologies that are integrated with those used in the online are now being incorporated into the offline store itself, and they enable the creation of databases and also support automation mechanisms (for example, for collecting purchase data and possibly profiling) … These systems integrate with the management of the other aspects, such as warehouse and management in general. There are technologies that are potentially still developable, such as even more advanced CRM management. ”
I15	“The machine learning part is particularly important in our company, and it feeds into the data that we can collect about customers and that is collected not only online but through digitizing the data collected in the context of store stores … Going forward, we need to work on machine learning to gain predictive capacity of machines relative to customer behaviors. For this, we would like to put appropriate systems on all digital eyewear purchasing platforms soon. This is to be able to suggest to the consumer the eyewear that we think may be of interest from the journey that the consumer has made (reccomandation systems) … There is also an important part of developing the theme of augmented reality, which through glasses can access a mass of potential users. ”
I16	“The mistake we can make is that we can superimpose a digitization hat on an old-fashioned company, this is not possible and is the reason why companies starting now have an advantage over traditional ones … These tools can give us the ability to develop appropriate promotions to our customer audience. Listening to customers is always key, the customer is ahead of the company, I don't think there will be, at least in our industry, a total dematerialization as has been believed at times. ”
I17	“The issue of decision-making through the use of artificial intelligence systems using big data is affected by the market context in which decisions will have to be made. There are sectors, particularly in business to business, in which the numbers of operations, machines and customers are very low, and as a result the data base does not assume such large proportions as to create a suitable terrain for the application of big data analysis techniques … Another element to consider is the time at which the decision is made, which can have enormous weight. The sales part is one element within the big world of marketing. The marketing man is comparable in theater to the author and the impresario, the salesman is comparable to the actor. ”
I18	“The online system we have cannot replace from our point of view the seller. Digital can never replace the human relationship with the seller … Artificial intelligence can help the customer by storing the preferred color type, so the color range is much wider and digitally manageable. Our goal is to empower our salesman, through artificial intelligence, which is a system that can help him and make him much more efficient. ”
I19	“In luxury companies where retail is fundamental an important role in the development of automation mechanisms has been played by the endowment of tools, first tablets and then mobile phones, as an endowment of salespeople, capable of replacing the old paper catalogs of products, which being very numerous in companies with important luxury brands like ours, benefited from the support of the catalog to be identified … Salespeople have been endowed with these tools, The tools, however, which if on the one hand gave support to the sales activity, on the other hand have become doors from which to acquire and upload a large amount of data on sales processes. These applications that I called the “digital lookbook” sis evolved to a model of “clientèling” applications to all the activities you can do in front of a customer, integrating with sales systems. ”
I20	“Digital is inescapable, the physical environment such as store management, for example, will increasingly be integrated as a producer of data that feeds into automated marketing processes … Starting with the historical is key to making forecasts and setting business plans, just as it is important to keep open because completely unexpected changes happen. ”
I21	“Online retail is more exposed to forms of automation, but for our company, physical stores remain fundamental and there is still a dominant role there for personal contact with the salesperson and traditional selling … That's not to say, however, that there is no adoption of technology, but it is less visible technology. There are challenges in place for analyzing preferences or making recommendations. But not technology-for-technology proposal, because technology does not always give a real benefit. You have to respect a business value of technology, as well as regulations and compliance, for example on data management … You have to strike a balance. ”
I22	“The benefits of digitization are that of greater knowledge of the customer and the implementation of a targeted offer … The major risks are that the remote use of these technologies risks losing sight of the customer and missing the contact with the customer that is lost sight of. The optimal way would be to combine these tools with qualitative analysis, which risks being lost. Touching the products is always important for the customer and therefore also for us. ”

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