01732 759725 46 Workspace Solutions, seamlessly and securely manage print and scan infrastructures across both central and home offices, supporting hybrid teams and alleviating complexity for IT departments. We’re also evolving our marketing approach to support greater channel fluidity, ensuring consistency and cohesion across both direct and indirect sales channels. Q: Looking towards the future, what do you envision as the next big breakthrough or game-changer in the industry, and how is your company preparing for it? A: We’re entering a new era of channel fluidity, where B2B and B2C expectations are converging. Customers increasingly expect to research, compare, and even purchase enterprise technology online, reshaping how B2B marketing operates and blurring the lines between sales, service and digital experience. Crucially, we’re preparing for the next big shift: the rise of AI-powered search, which improves product discovery and offers personalised recommendations based on factors like user history, context, and even nuances in language. We’re adapting our go-to-market strategy with a stronger focus on intuitive self-service journeys, personalised content and seamless digital experiences. The Canon Self‑Service Portal is one example, giving customers real-time insights, proactive recommendations, and more control over their device management. Q: What advice would you give a young person starting a career in the industry? A: Be curious, be collaborative and learn to speak multiple business languages. Today’s B2B marketer needs to understand not just marketing – but also sales, finance, technology and compliance. A strong ability to translate across departments will be your greatest strength. Find ways to add value through data, storytelling and commercial thinking. And most importantly, don’t be afraid to challenge conventions – B2B marketing is ripe for reinvention. more relevant ways to connect with customers across longer, more complex decision cycles. Q: With artificial intelligence (AI) fast becoming mainstream, how do you see this impacting your go-to-market strategy, product roadmap, and indeed the wider channel? A: AI is not just something we’re planning for in the future, it’s already embedded across our technology, including in our imageFORCE range. It’s helping make our products more efficient, intuitive and responsive to user needs. On the marketing side, AI is playing an increasingly central role in how we engage B2B audiences with greater agility and precision. It’s transforming how we plan, execute and optimise. We’re taking a responsible approach to AI adoption, ensuring everything aligns with our brand values, data privacy regulations and high creative standards. As AI continues to evolve, it’ll play an even greater role in enhancing our go-to-market strategy, from account-based marketing to lead scoring, while helping our partners deliver more relevant, value‑led propositions. Q: What do you see as the key challenges or pain points businesses are facing in today’s hybrid working model and how can you help your partners/customers to address these? A: One challenge we’re helping customers solve is how to decentralise print securely, enabling employees to print where and when they need to, without compromising on quality and security. Our ‘Print in City’ service is a good example of how Canon supports this kind of flexibility and accessibility. It lets users send print jobs remotely and collect them from a network of secure, public printers. Alongside this, we offer digital solutions and services that support seamless collaboration and help businesses maintain continuity, regardless of location or setup. Canon’s MPS, including Canon Hybrid Q: What’s currently having the greatest impact on your business? A: The current economic environment is causing rising inflation and more cautious customer behaviour. These pressures are leading to longer decision-making cycles and closer scrutiny of budgets, which naturally has a knock-on effect when it comes to marketing. This has created a need to achieve more with tighter resources. While this presents challenges, it also encourages greater focus, smarter planning and more agile ways of working. We see this as an opportunity to innovate – whether that’s through more creative approaches to product launches, leveraging AI to increase efficiency, or building closer collaboration between marketing, sales and product teams to drive commercial impact. Q: How do you stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your company remains at the forefront of innovation? A: We’re focused on ensuring that our printing devices and solutions integrate seamlessly into customers’ wider workflows, helping IT teams to manage devices more efficiently across complex, decentralised environments. Our uniFLOW Online platform, for example, uses cloud technology to enable secure, centralised print management across multiple sites, while predictive diagnostics help to spot and resolve issues before they impact productivity. We also focus on user experience, developing intuitive interfaces and displays that require minimal training and adapt easily to diverse workspaces. But innovation goes beyond just products. It’s also about how we build trust and stay connected to what our customers need in a fast-evolving B2B landscape. We don’t rest on our reputation as a reliable brand; we actively invest in ways to better support the full customer journey. From adopting insight-led content strategies to experimenting with new engagement formats, we’re finding smarter, Khalid Aziz, B2B Marketing Director, Canon UK & Ireland Industry Insight Q&A Khalid Aziz
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