by Robert Rose
Copyright @ 2015 by Robert Rose and Carla Johnson. All rights reserved. Published by the Content Marketing Institute, Cleveland, Ohio.
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About Content Marketing Institute
Content Marketing Institute is the leading global content marketing education and training organization. CMI teaches enterprise brands how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multi-channel storytelling. CMI’s Content Marketing World event, the largest content marketing-focused event, is held every September, and Content Marketing World Sydney, every March. CMI also produces the quarterly magazine Chief Content Officer, and provides strategic consulting and content marketing research for some of the best-known brands in the world. CMI is a 2012, 2013, and 2014 Inc. 500 company.
www.contentmarketinginstitute.com
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ISBN: 978-0-9859576-4-3
eISBN: 978-0-9859576-5-0
Printed in the United States of America.
Praise for EXPERIENCES: The 7th Era of Marketing
“Our ability to connect with customers is harder than ever. Carla and Robert show why marketing is no longer ‘business as usual,’ and it’s time that marketing took a broader and more strategic role in leading the charge.”
—Kathy Button Bell, Chief Marketing Officer, Emerson
“Digital, social, and mobile technologies have caused significant changes in the ways brands interact and engage with their customers. We now expect consistent and engaging experiences in every aspect of our lives. The world has changed dramatically; most marketing is highly ineffective at reaching consumers. And Carla and Robert have done a tremendous job in laying out the framework for using experiences to drive results for your marketing efforts.”
—Michael Brenner, Marketing Thought Leader, Blogger, Keynote Speaker, and Head of Strategy at NewsCred
“Robert and Carla nail the challenge of marketing to a busy, attention-impaired, fragmented audience who has stopped listening, but not living. This is a compelling treatise, call-to-arms, and self-help guide to creating the experiences that make people fall in love with brands over and over again.”
—Julie Fleischer, Director of Data, Content, and Media, Kraft Food Group
“Marketers are battling for attention in the midst of the biggest market disruption since the industrial revolution. Robert and Carla show the impact on marketing, and explain marketing’s new role at the executive table.”
—Dan Pastuszak, Head of Marketing, LinkedIn, Canada
“Articulating and telling the story is one part of the equation. Operationalizing it is another. Carla and Robert show marketers why they need to understand how to create a framework that lets them take their purpose within the organization—storytelling—and operationalize it across the enterprise.”
—Mark Wilson, Senior Vice President, Marketing, BlackBerry
“Experiences is one of those critical, must read books that transcend marketing into the entirety of business management. The most successful companies in the world will be building value outside of the products and services that they offer. We are just seeing the beginning of this now. More will come. Corporate change agents will need a book like Experiences to help them pave the way to make change real in their organization.”
—Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute, and author of Epic Content Marketing
“The essential marketing handbook to get back to the future! Experiences powered by purpose-driven content in the moments when marketers can be most influential will enable marketing to become a differentiating force in business. In Experiences, Robert Rose and Carla Johnson show you how to transform content to connect with audiences in ways that reach, influence, and delight them beyond how your products or solutions ever could.”
—Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist and author of Digital Relevance
“As our personal and professional lives are transformed by the digital revolution, so is the marketing profession. The buyer’s journey continues to shift online and marketing is the only function that can shed light on the buyer’s digital footprints, which in turn guides pervasive, value-added conversations. Carla and Robert spotlight how this dynamic puts modern marketers in a position to not only support the business but truly shape how the business engages, wins over and keeps new customers.”
—Nick Panayi, Head of Global Brand and Digital Marketing, CSC
“Too often marketers sell their souls for a deluge of mind-numbing content in exchange for likes, clicks, tweets and the almighty sales lead. For marketers looking for redemption, Carla and Robert provide a path to create inspiring, content-driven experiences that differentiate and create lasting customer value.”
—David Grant, Vice President, Industry Content and Marketing, Teradata
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
The Marketing Renaissance
By Eduardo Conrado, Senior Vice President – Chief Innovation Officer, Motorola Solutions
Introduction
Inventing the Future of Marketing
Chapter 1
Welcome to the 7th Era of Marketing
Chapter 2
Marketing With a Capital “M”
Chapter 3
The Case for Content Creation Management
Chapter 4
Orchestrating the Experience: New Buyers and Their Journeys
Chapter 5
The Four Archetypes of Content Creation Management
Chapter 6
Content Creation Management: A Framework for Change
Chapter 7
Story Mapping: Managing the Creation of Experiences
Chapter 8
Why Internal Marketing is the First and Last Thing You Should Ever Do
Chapter 9
Content Creation Management Technology: Built to Change
Chapter 10
Measuring For Meaning Instead of Mediocrity
Conclusion
Building Liquid Processes
Afterword
The Answer to “What Do You Really Do?”
Case Studies
Four Stories to Inspire Your Transformation
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
In the 1300s, Europe experienced an awakening that lasted 300 years. This Renaissance touched everything, from science and literature to art and diplomacy. It was a time when people questioned traditional beliefs and opened their minds to human emotion, intellectual curiosity and cultural experiences. Benchmarks, as we know them, didn’t exist; so artists, scientists, and all manner of inventors felt free to explore, experiment, and create value.
Right now, our profession is
in the midst of our own awakening.
For decades, marketers have functioned in communication-oriented roles. But now we need a more strategic perspective that reflects the impact that marketing can have on our organizations as a whole. The “Renaissance Marketer” now has the opportunity to work cross-functionally and design the experiences that differentiate. And, as with the Renaissance of the 1300s, there are no benchmarks to measure against.
Right now, marketing as a function is at an inflection point between what we’re comfortable with, what we have permission to do, and what’s possible. We can’t stay married to yesterday and we can’t be afraid of tomorrow.
In our changing roles, we have to be purpose-driven, tech-savvy, and experience-centric. We also have to be well-rounded rather than highly specialized. It’s time to put structure and relying on old benchmarks aside so that we can find new paths for the work and conversations we must lead. Robert and Carla help us find those paths.
Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing brings together both the “why” and the “how” of navigating this new landscape. When you think about it, marketing is the only group that touches every department in any organization; we’re the common thread that connects everyone. By placing strategy before structure, Robert and Carla show how marketing professionals have to put their purpose—building audiences and creating differentiating experiences—at the forefront of everything they do. They also focus on using a repeatable, manageable, and scalable framework to develop a storytelling-focused organization.
Robert and Carla accurately point out how building roles that apply insights from the outside and empowering the people within can create an environment for innovation. This is how marketers will impact the organizations for which they work—by initially captivating employees through the brand’s purpose, they will be able to create rich, engaging experiences for their customers.
We have to create interest and awareness in what we sell and stay involved with prospects long after they become customers so that we keep them interested and engaged. And we have to be tech-savvy to master the quality of digital experiences that are now second nature to our customers.
That takes a Renaissance marketer. Robert and Carla can see this shift and understand that there’s no such thing as business as usual. Marketers need to relentlessly focus on creating remarkable experiences. They have to turn traditional marketing practices into something distinctive every chance they get.
To be more creative and innovative as marketers, we have to lose our fear of being wrong or failing. We have to break new ground in our roles and embrace the lack of a benchmark to measure against. Armed with a wide set of interests, an avid curiosity, and an aptitude for learning, we need the creative confidence to combine breakthrough ideas with action in a way that improves our companies, our careers, and the experiences we create for customers.
The Renaissance of the 1300s took centuries to transform Europe. The rapid pace of change today is causing us to experience our marketing Renaissance in only decades. It’s time that marketers take courage, show up in these critical moments, and create contextually relevant experiences along the way.
Here’s to breaking new ground.
Eduardo Conrado
Senior Vice President – Chief Innovation Officer
Motorola Solutions
“We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” | Joseph Campbell
What do you really do?
To be clear, we’re not asking that about the business you own or work for. We’ll get to that in due time. Rather, we mean to ask—what do you really do for a living? If you’re reading this book, chances are you serve in a marketing or communications-related function in your organization. Your job, in varying degrees, is to communicate the value of the product or service your company puts in the marketplace, so that more people might purchase it.
And we have no doubt you do it brilliantly.
You’re facing new challenges daily and meeting them. You and your team expertly create unique value propositions. You shine when asked to create marketing strategies that support the features and benefits of the company’s product. Your “reasons to believe” are, bar none, almost evangelical in their crisp and focused clarity. Your advertising tactics and conversion metrics are tight. You have wrung every single inefficient process out of the conversion funnel. Every industry best-practice statistic is at your fingertips. And yet, even at the top of your game, today’s environment seems more challenging and unwinnable than ever.
Maybe you’re finding it increasingly hard to differentiate your product. Perhaps, despite the importance of your work to describe that value, your management team doesn’t consider the marketing function a strategic part of the business. Or, even more challenging, maybe the number of new digital channels and platforms that you have to optimize with a limited budget just feels overwhelming. The new expectations of customers feel unfair at times.
Why is marketing being blamed for not “engaging” at every stage of the customer journey—when we don’t have the power, budget, or resources to change so many parts of that journey?
Yes, we’ve been there.
So, what’s the challenge? Is it the digital thing? You know that the methods customers are using to research, review, purchase, and become loyal to products and services are fundamentally transformed. You can’t go to a conference without hearing all about how “digital” is changing the way customers purchase. Yeah, that’s not it. You’re all over that.
You have a digital strategy. You’ve deployed a social team, and an e-business team, and a web team, and a mobile initiative. You’ve got an app!! But it’s still not getting any better. We’re still not strategic. It’s only getting more overwhelming. What’s really the challenge?
Well, here it is: It’s not just HOW consumers are changing—researching, reviewing, and buying. It’s also WHAT THEY VALUE MOST. This is also changing. And guess what? It’s not your product any longer. They value experiences. If you don’t offer compelling, differentiated experiences, your current customers will research, look, purchase, and become loyal elsewhere.
DO YOU HAVE A FOMO?
Recent research has shown that young consumers (those under 35) now account for more than $1 trillion of annual consumer spending. As we move into 2015, they are now at the helm of what’s being called “the experience economy.”1
When asked directly, more than 75% of these Millennials said that “when it comes to money, ‘experiences’ trump ‘things’.” As Eric Meyerson, head of Consumer Insights at Eventbrite, the company that sponsored the research, said, “We know that engaging in experience helps Millennials form a sense of identity, differently from how other generations defined identity at their same age.”
And it’s a fear of missing out (FOMO) that is driving this sense of identity.
In 2013, the Oxford English dictionary added 65 new words, including “selfie” and “twerk” (yes, really) to our approved lexicon. It also added FOMO. Research found that 70% of Millennials have this irrational fear—and it’s a primary driver for their desire for new experiences.
But it’s not only Millennials that are driving this thirst for compelling experiences over products. In another 2013 study of more than 1,000 adults in the U.S. and the U.K., researchers found that in today’s “constantly connected” world, people crave sensory experiences over products. In fact, this study found that 81% of Millennials, 79% of Gen Xers, and 78% of Baby Boomers value experiences more than they do material items. Additionally, 64% would rather spend their money on an experience than a product.2
Can you imagine then—in the future—perhaps a store where the primary items for sale aren’t products or services, but rather “experiences?”
The thing is, it’s already here.
THE WORLD’S FIRST EXPERIENCE EMPORIUM
Quick story: March 5th, 1999, was rainy, overcast, one of
those cold, spring mornings that gives San Francisco its reputation. But, for Trevor Traina, the weather that day was beautiful. It was an experience he’d never forget.
He was standing on a stage next to the richest man in the world—Bill Gates—who had just bought his company, Compare.Net, for $100 million and was now announcing it to the world. Microsoft was launching a transformative initiative around ecommerce, and Compare. Net was a key piece of it. Gates said: “The Internet has forever changed the way that business is conducted. With these tools, our hope is that the ecommerce opportunity is opened up for everyone.”3 There’s no doubt that it opened up opportunity for Traina.
Compare.Net was the first of what would eventually become five successful companies that Traina would start over the next 15 years. Three others also were sold, including SchemaLogic (sold to Smart Logic), StepUp Commerce (sold to Intuit), and DriverSide.com (sold to Advance Auto Parts). But it may just be the fifth, and latest, that captures the true essence of Traina’s passion.
Following the great recession of 2008–2010, Traina recognized that there was a true evolution underway in how consumers looked at the collection of physical goods. As he said to us, “I observed that the portfolio of physical things available was no longer differentiated or enticing–and that people were really looking to refocus their dollars on more meaningful expenditures.”
Traina’s new company is called IfOnly.com. According to Traina, it’s the “world’s first emporium for experiences rather than things.” He calls it “IfOnly” because, as he says, “everyone has his own ‘if-only.’ Your ‘if-only’ will almost certainly be different than mine—but whatever it is, it can and should be fulfilled.”