Month: June 2020

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein

I recently attended the Ramp UP virtual Marketing Summit. These tumultuous times are upending a lot of consumer behavior and accelerating change.

Here are some of the key takeaways.

Empathy based Marketing

1. Lens of authenticity. Diversity and inclusion will play major role in marketing.
2. Not product-based marketing but people-based marketing
3. Companies will need to act local.
4. Some companies are trying to help local B2B partners and championing their stories as part of marketing campaigns.

Social Listening is more important than ever

1. Social-Listening through AI-ML based tools will gain more traction
2. Brand Survey and Third-party vendor based brand study will continue to be relevant

Consumer Behavior Upended

1. eCommerce is on the rise. (Shopify -the e-commerce giant reported total revenue for Q1 2020 of $470 million, a 47% percent increase year-over-year.)
2. Video consumption has increased many-fold.

Linear TV(Traditional tv) to CTV(Connected TV)

1. AD supported connected TV platforms will play a crucial role in Marketing
2. Platforms like Roku and Amazon who have content, Audience and DSP will be the major players.
3. Outcome based TV marketing in the future.

_{DSP stands for demand-side platform it allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface.}

Traditional Gender based Audience Segments losing relevance

1. Millennia’s are looking at gender as a spectrum rather than a binary

Cookie Less world will increase reliance on first-party data

1. Trusted eco-system with trusted value exchange
2. How to use persistent data across platforms is a challenge
3. Safari is blocking 3rd party cookies now, Google chrome to do it in a couple of years.
4. CDP will gain traction as companies will be forced to better use the first-party data
5. Companies will need to put well-defined governance process on data rules. How data will leave the enterprise, does it need to be anonymized, scrubbed etc.
6. Logged-In data will become valuable
7. Focus on Data Compliance will increase

_{CDP stands for Customer Data Platform. It aggregates data from different touch points organizes and creates a single view of the customer}. _{First-party data is the data companies collect from the consumers.}

Walled Gardens become more powerful

Walled Gardens mean closed platforms. In the World of AD tech, it will be Facebook and Google. In a cookie-less world with access to user-data of billions of users these enterprises will become more powerful than ever.

Location based targeting will gain importance IN A COVID-WORLD

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a text file that is stored in your computer through the browser when you surf the internet. The term was coined by web-programmer Lou Montulli and is in use since 1995.

What is a first-party cookie?

Stored by the website you are visiting. They are here to stay.

What is a third-party cookie?

Created by a separate domain. Ex: When we click on a ad-link in a site or a social-icon, third-party server saves a cookie in our machines. These are mostly used by ad-retargeting services.

I recently passed an interesting certification – Commerce Cloud Digital Developer. Commerce cloud is branded as Salesforce but under the hood it’s a distinctly separate product. Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016 for $2.8B and rebranded it as B2C commerce cloud.

I wanted to share lessons-learned and my experience in general.

SFRA NOT SITE GENESIS

Coming fresh to the platform I had no legacy baggage. The certification focuses on SFRA not SiteGenesis. Routes not Pipelets.

CONTROLLER-MODEL-ROUTE

Understanding controller, models and middleware functions is crucial. You need to understand and remember the syntax of the controller functions. The test is going to check your knowledge on how controllers retrieve form data, uses the response to render the ISML template. The following is a list of items I think are crucial for the test.

1. Forms.getForm
2. res.render using JSON
3. Middleware chaining for CSRF and cache
4. Cartridge placement
5. Append, Replace when to use
6. Transactions

LOGGING

Logging is an important topic. I saw several questions in the test covering the following topics.

1. File naming Convention
2. Category based logging -when logs will be written
3. Log message syntax
4. When logging will be suspended, what’s the limit

OCAPI

OCAPI is a section which is vast and I was worried. There were very few questions on the actual resource URL’s maybe one question on OCAPI hooks. Having said that you must know the difference between GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and if there are restrictions on using them.

PAGE DESIGNER – CONTENT SLOT

Page Designer and Content-Slot questions were basic. Campaigns can be tied with content slots but not for page designers, when one becomes applicable versus the other. What kind of files are being used by Page Designer?

FORM – TEMPLATE

Understanding the folder structure is important as the questions will test your knowledge on how the folders will be structured. It pays well to understand each of the ISML tags. How localization fallbacks work for same region different language.

Webservice

1. How to create service
2. How to connect with SOAP
3. Best practice

MERCHANT TOOLS – ADMINISTRATION

This is a section I had struggled as was not sure which one’s to focus. This is my post-test understanding.

1. Ordering Section – Taxation
2. Content Import
3. Site Import
4. Custom Object Grouping
5. Setting up search parameters
6. Search refinement
7. Category based search
8. How objects can be replicated

FEW OTHER ITEMS

1. NPM Command
2. Debug values of a script
3. Tools to understand code performance
4. Storefront toolkit

Hopefully this help!