Yet another year, the summer kicked off with Esade Alumni Marketing Night on the terrace of the Real Club de Polo of Barcelona. After an icebreaker activity that allowed the participants to connect, make new connections, and expand their network of contacts in a fun way, a dynamic cocktail and pleasant dinner were held on the terrace, featuring the inspirational Marketing Talk and Marketing Buzzword.
Xavier Arderiu (Lic&MBA ‘01), president of the Esade Alumni Marketing Club, was in charge of the institutional presentation, in which he highlighted the Esade Alumni Marketing community’s power to keep up to date, nurture high-quality professional relationships, and develop different stages in its members’ professional career.
Carmen Torrijos, the head of Artificial Intelligence at Prodigioso Volcán, is in charge of guiding the journey towards the effective application of AI in marketing, because the technology available is smarter and enables us to browse for ideas and information more quickly. However, integrating AI into companies’ marketing strategy, finding real use cases, and understanding its limits is not so easy. Carmen Torrijos, who leads ideation projects to apply the innovation of smart systems in communication, marketing, creativity, and the media, offered the community a few tips.
“We’re always thinking outwardly; I think that we have to go back to thinking inwardly again,” Carmen Torrijos said. While thinking outwardly leads us to the customer, products, brand positions, and data, thinking inwardly enables us to reflect on how we enrich marketing teams with all the new solutions that AI offers us and how we make more creative teams with a better capacity for ideation,” she asserted.
Torrijos cited several examples of working with AI, like creating a brand guardian to convey your brand’s values, or creating avatars that embody the target audience and working with them inside the team.
She also stressed the need to take risks. In order for companies to keep growing, innovating, creating, and achieving, they have to try, fail, and learn. Creating a work environment where trial-and-error is encouraged is essential, because teams are afraid of making mistakes. It is important to have an environment where mistakes are not penalized and teams aren’t afraid to be wrong.
Mext came the anxiously-awaited 2024 Marketing Buzzword, which Mauro Ribó (Lic&MBA 94), an academic collaborator in Esade’s Marketing Department, revealed in a dynamic, captivating speech that sparked laughter and emotions and fostered the positive atmosphere. “The Marketing Buzzword of the year has to be a term that encapsulates the current time and add value when it is used to present ideas, services, and products,” Ribó said.
We are currently surrounded by confusion about what is real and what isn’t. The mass use of AI is gaining a real human appearance. More and more it is writing, speaking, moving, and even lying better. And we tend to be confused in our relationship with it. But not everything that is unreal comes from AI. Fake news has become a normal thing, and the bias in which we are living can condition you to believe it, even if it isn’t real, especially if it’s about polarized situations.
This is why the 2024 Marketing Buzzword is REAL. “Including 'real' in your communication adds impact and credibility: We do real marketing, we obtain real insights, we are real people, we achieve real results, we make real food... things that are ‘real’ are becoming more valuable,” said Mauro Ribó. “In the innovation workshop I teach at Esade along with Roser Faus, we have used the example of Durex to explain how the brand positioning defines the territory of innovation: ‘Real Sex’ is the brand’s bold positioning in view of the harmful effects of porn and the use of AI and deepfakes. Unilever was also a pioneer with ‘Real Beauty’ to promote authentic beauty free of pressure. We have to defend what is REAL, because the consequences of the unreal are very real,” he concluded.
The power of Marketing Night begins months earlier, when each participant summons the current and previous marketing teams, as well as their fellow graduates, to attend together. The same power also continues long afterward, by nurturing current and new contacts via the social media, in-person gatherings, and other Esade Alumni encounters.
See who was there!
Click on this link and join the Esade Alumni Marketing Club WhatsApp group, where you’ll find pictures from 2024 Marketing Night.
Members of the Esade Alumni Marketing Board: Alba Escribano, Carles Torrecilla, Carlos Ordàs, Cristina Ortega, Daniel Reyes, Evarist Juncosa, J. Ignacio Ruiz, Laura Alemany, Mari Saona, Montse Bonjorn, Panaita García, Patricia Sotelo, Riccardo Begelle, Roser Faus and Xavier Arderiu.
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