IBM To Invest $100M To Grow Its Marketing Consulting Business

Published: March 31, 2014

IBM announced its plans to invest $100 million to globally expand its marketing consulting services. As part of the investment, the company plans to 10 new IBM Interactive Experience labs, which are designed to provide clients with the opportunity to work with experts in mobile and digital marketing.

In a separate effort to bolster its marketing offerings, the vendor is said to be in talks to acquire marketing automation vendor Silverpop.

Some of the cities where these new labs will be located include Beijing, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, New York and Tokyo. The company plans to add 1,000 employees to staff the labs.

Along with the new facilities, IBM also unveiled new data-driven innovations from IBM Interactive Experience designed to help business leaders gain deeper insights into individuals and transform the way customers experience their products, services and brands. IBM researchers within IBM Interactive Experience invented unique algorithms that conduct the analysis for these new capabilities:

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  • Customer Identity Resolution, a rules-based matching toolkit that helps enterprises build a broader understanding of who their customers are by connecting information across different data sources such as customer relationship management (CRM) records, social media accounts and other profile information;
  • Intelligent Customer Profiles, an analytics-driven solution that enables consumers to directly manage the personal information companies use to provide them services; and
  • Influence Analysis, an analytical approach to identifying individuals who influence other consumers related to a specific topic.

“There’s no longer any real distinction between business strategy and the design of the user experience. The last best experience that anyone has anywhere, becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere, and the quality of that experience is entirely dependent on the use of individualized information,” said Bridget van Kralingen, SVP of IBM Global Business Services. “As our clients recalibrate what it means to engage with their customers or employees, we’re bringing them the full spectrum of world-class design and IBM Research, book-ended by strategy consulting and our strength in Big Data.”

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