Alan Herrick is president and CEO of Sapient and serves on its board of directors. He sat down with Wall Street Transcript to discuss the history of Sapient, its evolution, changing customer behavior paradigms, and the role of technology as the big disruptor.
TWST: We'd like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Sapient and a picture of what the company is doing at the present time.
Mr. Herrick: The company was founded in 1990 and grew successfully since then, with no outside money. We went public in 1996, but the company, even back in those days, was interesting. Sapient rose to great success around the e-business era and, after the crash in 2001, we continued to evolve the strategy. If you fast-forward to Sapient today, we operate two different businesses. One is our Global Markets business that is focused on domain knowledge and commodities trading, energy markets, financial markets as well as our ability to distribute work offshore to help clients solve their business problems through technology. Our second business is the SapientNitro business, and that business is focused on the consumer revolution that's going on around digital technology, the multi-channel customer and how customers interact with brands today. It centers on the digital-to-traditional shift. Essentially, what Sapient is seeing is that customers are empowered by technology and interacting in any way they chose to with products, brands and retailers. And we're helping our clients successfully solve that challenge so that they actually acquire and retain customers successfully. Both our businesses use technology in different ways to create client success. In the Global Markets case, it's using technology to improve business processes and gaining competitive advantage in today's evolving financial markets. On the SapientNitro side, digital technology has driven this revolution in consumer behavior, and we're helping our clients to use marketing and technology to capture those consumers in a complex world.
TWST: In a recent release, your company announced Sapient Interactive and SapientNitro will go to market as a single brand. What customer segments are you targeting? What aspects of your products and services are most compelling to these customers?
Mr. Herrick: If you follow this over the years, there has been much talk about interactive marketing, digital spend, and a shift from television ads, print ads and newspaper ads to online marketing and online spending. Obviously, we've played very successfully in that traditional-to-digital marketing shift and helping clients to figure out how to engage with customers online. But over the last few years, that's evolved into a very different idea. First, there's a lot more than just online and traditional media; there's also now mobile, social media, iPhones, e-books and iPads. They are all creating a more immersive and proliferating device experience. So what's started to happen is that the business models need to transform because the clients originally approached this as a channel.
"I have customers that come into the store" or "I have customers that read my magazine online" has shifted to "I have customers that see an ad for my company on their cell phone, search for me online, then buy in my retail store." Now what they're realizing - and statistics support this - is that it's actually the same customer, and in-store sales are actually shrinking that aren't influenced by the Web, while online sales are growing significantly. So what's really happening is that you've got a consumer moving through these channels at will and interacting the way they want to interact, when they choose to interact. Our clients are now realizing that they can't have somebody own the direct channel and somebody else own the retail stores. Organizationally, they need to integrate their thinking and think across silos, and they need a partner like SapientNitro that can help build the strategy, the marketing, and the creative to allow their brand to successfully live in this multichannel environment and be there at the right time. The trick is to be able to know where that customer is going to be or to already be there, and to engage them and help them interact, and consume something with your brand before they're gone and on to something else. With how consumers live their lives today, how they shop, how they socialize online, everything has changed, even sociologically.
Very simply, the services that SapientNitro offers to compete in this inter-connected world are business strategy, marketing and creative, and commerce and content technology implementation services. The other idea we have in there is that companies can't just advertise and develop their brand that way alone. If you can see a brand online and then in a matter of moments have a consumption experience because you bought something or you downloaded something to read on a device, or you read something online, if that experience isn't as good as the marketing, it's going to invalidate the promise of your brand. There is a very tight loop now between a company's acquisition of a customer, the commerce transaction that a customer participates in and then servicing care around that customer. You've got to integrate both your marketing conversation, as well as your commerce and care conversation to create a cohesive brand experience for a customer. The services we have bridge that equation for customers.
[Excerpted from Wall Street Transcript, March 8, 2010 -- click on PDF for full transcript]