The pandemic has brought a flood of uncertainty to everyday business and to the future, no one knows when this virus and its variants will stop and that life before Covid will resume. The world of business is totally upset. Yves del Frate* from CSA tries to bring some solutions.

He wishes good luck to companies that build their 2021/22 business plan on the basis of past years and the benchmark of their competitors. At best they will reproduce past performances, with no real hope for a better future in a country where more than 80% of brands are threatened to disappear in the indifference of the French (Havas study “Meaningful Brands” 2019).

The crisis is accelerating these trends, as the CSA Brands & You barometer demonstrated during the two confinements of 2020. How to keep the pace, without losing the course? How to predict the ROI of ideas, means and innovations in an uncertain world?

How to anticipate the desires, needs and future behaviors of consumers? We are at the beginning of a new economy to build. Companies, already challenged by the health crisis, are faced with French people in 3D: consumers, citizens and employees all at once. Mobilized after having been immobilized, conscious after having been unconscious of the power of their purchasing act.

The French are now demanding both good value for money and a positive, tangible contribution to social issues. On the menu: environment, consumer health, well-being at work, and if possible, localized production in France.

These 3D consumers will be the drivers of the transformation they are calling for 56% of French people think that their consumption choices are the most likely to change society…and they don’t name any brand that they think contributes to improving society (CSA / W study “Baromètre du Contributing 2020 – 1ère édition”).

New balls! A new world, a new economy.  In this “new economy”, you don’t build your business plan with the tools of the old. Google, Amazon or Netflix, precursors of the old new economy and big winners of 2020 have opened the way with the behavioural analysis of Internet users.

Today, there is no longer any reason to limit ourselves to digital, no longer any reason to depend on made-in-the-USA solutions that do not take into account the globality of the purchasing act, nor the complexity of the consumer. Predictive marketing at the service of ideas.  CSA has specific methodologies and algorithms to predict, anticipate, and measure behavior in relation to marketers’ strategic or tactical innovations.

The objective of these predictive marketing solutions is to allow companies to evaluate the business potential of their new ideas, to make the best possible proposal, at the best time, through the relational device adapted to the new media uses of the French.

This is the new way to build loyalty, win new customers, and grow sustainably. This artificial marketing intelligence, conceived and orchestrated by human intelligence, is built around the new requirements of the French towards brands at the functional, individual and collective levels.

The knowledge and involvement of consumers are essential… They are the drivers of change.
Challenge habits A new form of marketing tools, more data-driven and more human, which allows for building a more robust business plan: Prototype the offer that will make the difference tomorrow, Forecast the sales of an offer that does not yet exist, Project the impact of investments on key performance elements such as awareness, image or traffic. Last example at CSA, OPERPAY A unique device that measures over time the knowledge and use of payment solutions. 18 payment methods are studied, from mobile payment to crypto-currencies.

The data can be downloaded to the CSA Barometer platform for dynamic and intelligent analysis, with the possibility of adding a predictive dimension. The French have changed and tomorrow will be even more uncertain. It is urgent to challenge habits; you can’t win a race by looking in your rearview mirror.

To make a difference, to invest at “safe costs” in a more operational and controlled innovation, to predict the return on investment of new ideas and leave the uncertainties to others, it is urgent to invest in artificial intelligence made in France, artificial intelligence with a human face, CSA predictive marketing solutions.