On a recent holiday to Naxos I read Account-Based Marketing for Dummies by Sangram Vajre. Vajre is best known for his work as Head of Marketing at Pardot, which was acquired by ExactTarget and then Salesforce.com and more recently as Co-Founder and CMO of Terminus Software, a leading account-based marketing (ABM) software.

Bots are on the cusp of moving away from something that only existed in the realms of science fiction to becoming a reality. While we remain some time away from robots being in every home, bots or chatbots as they are also known are increasingly commonplace online. The rapid rise of marketing bots has given us much to think about.

Last week I attended Advocamp - the excellent customer advocacy conference which takes place in San Francisco each year. The event is organised by Influitive, a software company that is helping create the advocate marketing category.

What is a brand? Is it what organisations say or is it made up of what people think, feel and experience? I believe it’s the latter. On the face of it, this may not seem revolutionary, but I disagree — adopting a customer experience-led mindset promises to change how we structure marketing teams and organise the businesses of the future.

With CMOs predicted to spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017, is big data marketing the next big opportunity? I believe so. While the definition of big data within this context is still being defined, it’s more useful (for now) to focus on its potential utility.