Fresh From Spark.Me: Technology’s Cool, But People Are More Important

Spark.Me, one of the biggest, baddest and the most sparkling marketing conferences in the CEE is taking its place as we speak (or type). The spirits are high, imaginations are sparked and some of the speakers blew our minds.

As I don’t want you to miss out on the experience, I’m bringing you some highlights from my favorite talks and speakers that took the stage on the first day of the conference.

Love, Trust and Sales

The keynote speaker is the guy well known to everyone who ever craved a Dominos pizza in Chicago, but his reputation has long crossed the borders of the Windy City – he’s Ramon DeLeon.

His career in marketing started when he was 7, even if he didn’t know it yet. it was when his mother, an Avon sales lady, told him something that will shape his relation to customers:

People have to know me, love me and trust me to buy from me.

He started his career at Dominos as a delivery boy in 1989 – you have to be a real hustler in this line of work, he says, if you want more pizza orders and bigger tips. He started online orders way back in 1997, and took it upon himself not to ensure a good customer experience – but over the top one. He even got his own hashtag due to that – RamonWOW.

So here’s what he has to say about customer relations:

• Know who you are and what you represent
• Train, educate, inspire.
• Focus on being different.
• Prepare for the worst
• Think about the relationship you are building with your users
• Friendship first, users second.

Ch, ch,ch…Changes

The next awesome speaker talked about changes – and there is going to be a lot of them, notes Paul Papadimitriou.

In the next 10 years, 2,5 billion people will move to the middle class. One billion women – who, btw, make 80 percent of all purchase decisions, will enter the workforce. 17 trillion dollars will change hands and be inherited by new generations. Oh, and there’s a little thing called technology that is evolving rapidly and changing our lives by minute,

How will you cope with that, Paul asked us from the stage,

There are four driving forces of the change:

• Deflation – The price of technology keeps falling, making it more affordable than ever.
• Platforms – every new technology is built upon an old one – upon another platform, if you will, it is layered. We’re never starting from scratch, he notes, we’re just building up!
• Social networks – we’re all connected, nodes in vast networks of peoples and interactions.
• People – and this, my friends, is the most important driver of change. Technologies don’t make us do things – we make them because we want to do those things.

There isn’t a single aspect of industry – or of our lives – that will not be turned upside downThe only way to win is to know and understand the drivers of the change – and to disrupt and innovate your self.

I hope you got the gist – even though Spark.Me is a conference dealing with the topics concerning marketing, business, technology and the digital age, the one thing everything boils down to is people. The lesson learned: People are always at the heart of everything you do.