Milind Pathak is CMO at Proximus Global.
For decades, there has been talk about how to unlock a truly safe, reliable and connected digital economy. Here are four trends for CMOs to understand about what’s next in the global digital communications landscape and what those changes mean for brands, their customers’ journeys and their bottom line.
Trusted Connections Drive Competitive Advantage
How a brand connects and communicates is becoming as fundamental to its success as its customer experience or product offerings. Competitive advantage is shifting to those organizations who can deliver on three primary communication priorities: 1. Confident connectivity; 2. Trusted digital interactions; and 3. Conversational commerce.
Trust, in particular, is front and center as never before. The statistics are compelling: 62% of consumers consider trust critical when engaging with brands, and more than 75% refuse to buy from companies they don’t trust with their data. This makes investing in trust essential, not optional.
Protection Is Customer Experience
Cyber threats are growing. Consumers, uncertain for how to protect themselves, are increasingly holding brands responsible for ensuring greater protections against fraud. In fact, 9 out of 10 people now hold brands responsible for protecting their digital lives, and 4 out of 10 will abandon brands after security breaches.
In response, 8 in 10 people now welcome added security levels to keep their digital assets safe.
No longer just a job for the CISO, ensuring protection and trust are critical components of the customer experience that marketing must also champion.
AI As A Double-Edged Sword
While AI enables personalized experiences, it also empowers sophisticated fraud. In the right hands, AI can provide deep customer insights, personalize communications, and improve overall efficiency and effectiveness. In the wrong hands, it can do great harm and erode trust in our digital ecosystem.
AI-powered attacks have become more frequent and sophisticated. In fact, globally, 28% of people have been victimized by fraud in the past three years, with 60% of victims reporting the fraud occurred within the last six months.
Already, people have found it nearly impossible to tell legitimate emails and texts from fraudulent ones. One in 3 people and 1 in 3 businesses report encountering deepfake scams or attacks in the past year.
The implications for brands and customer loyalty are significant.
The challenge is how to leverage AI’s benefits while defending against AI-powered threats.
Ensuring the digital infrastructure is built on trust is one path. AI-driven threat detection and intelligence, for instance, can help identify fraudsters in real time, helping differentiate legitimate intentions from fraudulent ones and informing decisions about other security steps before any further friction is experienced by the user.
Equally as important for CMOs is to create brand experiences so authentic, trusted and personalized that the experience itself can help users distinguish between authentic interactions and scams. To do so well, organizations are increasingly communicating security-consciousness into their communications so that when a scam does occur, it is so outside the brand promise and experience, the fraud becomes easier to spot.
This focus does more than strengthen protection. It deepens relationships, builds loyalty and drives greater engagement.
New Technologies Are Scaling Trust
The emergence of new technologies (such as 5G, IoT, API, AI) are reshaping the infrastructure enabling our digital communications globally. These new technologies are ushering in a new era in digital communications and reconfiguring how everyone, everywhere (including brands and customers) interacts in the digital world. One such transformation, known in the industry as Network API, is enabling brands to securely tap into telecommunication networks for the first time.
For brands, these open network capabilities create powerful new ways to create new offerings and bring new value to customers. For instance, currently, there are tremendous innovations in fraud protection, including real-time fraud prevention using location and enhanced digital identity verification and authentication that are allowing brands to, more confidently, deliver trusted customer experiences.
The modern customer journey is built on a foundation of trust.
CMOs should embed security and trust into every customer touchpoint, treating them as brand differentiators rather than compliance requirements. This approach can build durable customer relationships and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly digital economy.
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