Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  IfOnly offers highly curated and customized experiences that range from something as simple as a VIP pass and backstage experience at this year’s Farm Aid concert to much more intricate adventures such as a two-day trip with acclaimed photographer Russell James to get an “immersive tour” of Jacmel, the artist’s enclave on the coast of Haiti.

  Each of the experiences on IfOnly.com also supports a charity. For example, if a buyer chooses the two-day trip to Haiti, part of the proceeds goes to benefit the Nomad Two World’s Foundation, which supports and promotes artists from indigenous and marginalized communities around the world.

  IFOnly.com is the world’s first emporium of experiences rather than products.

  Credit: www.ifonly.com - Screenshot accessed: 11/15/2014

  As of the writing of this book, IfOnly is one of the fastest growing companies in San Francisco. It has delivered more than 2,000 experiences in its approximately one year of existence, raised more than $1 million for partner charities, and is adding new global brands, non-profits and customers daily. This rapid growth and interest is a sign, as Traina points out, “The entire marketing industry is moving to an experience-based economy.”4

  SHARE OF EXPERIENCE: THE FUTURE OF MARKETING

  At this point you may be asking yourself, “what does Traina’s story have to do with my marketing strategy and the question of ‘what do I really do?’”

  Well, we posed that exact question to Traina. His answer: “I view IfOnly as a mass-market technology platform. We bring all of the world’s top talents in hundreds of different categories–and they can be connected to their natural audiences. I predict all smart brand marketers will begin to re-craft their message into an experiential one. The experiential part of the brand will actually become a secondary source of revenue for the brand.”

  With the success Traina has achieved through the sale of his other companies, we’d all be wise to at least pay attention to this.

  And, thus, we go back to our original question.

  What do you really do? Or rather…what should you really be doing to prepare for the future?

  Consider a few things.

  In a recent (and ongoing) study titled “Marketing2020,” Millward Brown Vermeer (previously effectiveBrands), in concert with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and others, asked senior-level marketers to predict what the marketing organization structure will look like in 2020. So far, the study has included in-depth interviews with more than “350 CEOs, CMOs, and agency heads, and more than a dozen CMO roundtables in cities worldwide.”5

  In a July 2014 Harvard Business Review article on the study, titled The Ultimate Marketing Machine, three contributors to the research—Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, and Keith Weed—conclude (among other things) that to meet this change, marketing organizations must evolve to meet what they call the “total experience.” They say:

  “Companies are increasingly enhancing the value of their products by creating customer experiences. Some deepen the customer relationship by leveraging what they know about [customers] to personalize offerings. Others focus on the breadth of the relationship by adding touchpoints. Our research shows that high- performing brands do both—providing what we call ‘total experience.’ In fact, we believe that the most important marketing metric will soon change from ‘share of wallet’ or ‘share of voice’ to ‘share of experience.’”6

  We know that content will certainly be at the heart of many, if not most, of these experiences for brands. This is the key. We believe that the new goal of marketing will not be to simply “create a customer.” No, the creation of a customer will simply be table stakes for most marketing organizations. The new objective for marketing will be to evolve a customer—utilizing differentiating content-driven experiences as the driver of that evolution across the entire lifecycle.

  David Edelman and Jason Heller of consulting firm McKinsey identified this as well in October 2014 when they wrote about the disruptions that are driving marketing transformation:

  “Continuously evolving customer expectations are a major disruptive force, but marketing is still limited in its ability to shape the entire experience…This lack of responsibility—and accountability—for the entire customer journey will continue to inhibit marketers’ efforts to develop seamless and consistent experiences across all touchpoints.”7

  In short, we also believe that marketers must take on new responsibilities and leadership roles. Marketers must not only describe the value that has already been theoretically created in the product or service for sale, but also begin to create differentiated experiential value that is separate and distinct from that product or service.

  MARKETERS CREATE VALUE THROUGH CONTENT-DRIVEN EXPERIENCES

  When Traina started Compare.Net in 1996, it was essentially an online comparison-shopping portal. Back then, the Internet was a brand new phenomenon and Traina was excited about how the web could enable brands to turn information about their products from forced advertisement into what he called a “welcome briefing,” by simply pairing brands (and their content) with people who were truly looking for a “match.”

  Ironically, 15 years later, what struck us is that Traina’s new business isn’t terribly different than the one he started nearly 20 years ago. Today, as he explained to us, his company is talking to “premium automotive brands with very, very expensive vehicles.” IfOnly is offering these brands the opportunity to create experiences to test drive high-end cars, visit the factory, and/or consume exclusive content about particular vehicles, reasoning that passionate consumers will happily pay for such experiences. “These people are, paradoxically, your highest-value prospects, because they are the ones who are most serious about ultimately purchasing,” Traina says.

  And you don’t have to look far to see other examples of this cropping up everywhere.

  • Marriott launched a complete original content studio that will create content-driven experiences in long-form, short form and across all media types. David Beebe, vice president of creative and content marketing, is leading the effort. His background is with Disney-ABC Television Group. He has been quoted as saying that “while content is just part of the overall travel experience we provide, we believe Marriott can become the world’s leading publisher of travel lifestyle content for the next generation.”8

  • Semiconductor and mobile giant Qualcomm has created an entire online hub for forward-leaning futurist ideas. The company created its Qualcomm Spark platform as a way to inspire and ignite conversations about technology. As Liya Sharif, publisher of the platform, said, “In today’s world, consumers are increasingly skeptical of brand messaging and advertising, and the amount of social chatter and noise is deafening. Spark is meant to cut through the noise, reach key audiences with unexpected content and provide a unique perspective from influencers on how mobile is transforming people’s lives around the world.”9

  • Jyske Bank, one of the largest banks in Denmark, has centered its entire marketing strategy on an Internet-based TV station. Jyske has transformed into a media company that also happens to sell banking services. Its physical presence now features comfy chairs, magazines, a coffee bar, and a feast of informative and entertaining videos from its 24/7 broadcast offering.10

  CONTENT IN MARKETING ISN’T NEW, BUT CONTENT MARKETING IS

  We often talk about how the use of content-driven experiences for marketing purposes isn’t a new practice. For hundreds of years, businesses have been using content in pockets to affect some kind of profitable outcome. But the reality is this: Notwithstanding a few exceptional examples such as John Deere’s The Furrow from the 1800s, Michelin’s travel guides from the early 1900s, and even Hasbro’s G.I. JOE partnership with Marvel in the 1980s, content was not—and is not—a scalable, repeatable practice within the function of marketing. In short, content marketing was historically (and still is almost exclusively) treated as a project, not a process.

  That’s the part that has changed. Whet
her it’s due to the digital disruption and ease by which we now publish and distribute content and experiences to aggregate our own audiences, or just the natural evolution of marketing itself, doesn’t matter as much as the ultimate outcome. There can be no argument, as we roll into the next five years and approach 2020, that content—and the exponentially increasing quantities that every organization produces—affects our marketing strategy and should be dealt with as a component of that strategy throughout the enterprise.

  Forrester Research predicts that unstructured enterprise content volume is growing at a rate of 200% annually.11 Enterprises are now functioning as content factories, producing massive mountains of digital files that spew forth from marketing—like a giant Dr. Seuss machine—landing squarely on the back of the content wagon being towed. How much that wagon acts as a differentiator—or as a weight that hinders forward progress—depends on how well the content is managed.

  Content will affect business—it’s just a matter of “how,” not “if”—so enterprises must make a choice:

  • Content can be managed as the strategic asset that it has (or can) become

  • Or, it can be an expensive by-product that ultimately bogs down a company as it tries to navigate the broader disruptions taking place.

  EXPERIENCES: THE 7TH ERA OF MARKETING

  We contend that we are moving into a new era of marketing. And it’s all about experiences that strengthen our customer bonds.

  Most marketing textbooks generally agree that marketing as a discipline has evolved over five distinct eras, each lasting about 20 to 30 years.

  The first five well-documented eras are the Trade Era, the Production Era, the Sales Era, the Marketing Department Era, and the Marketing Company Era. A sixth era of marketing, the Relationship Era, is generally accepted (though not in most textbooks) as the era we’ve been operating in for the last 20 years. It started with one-to-one marketing in the mid-1990s, moved into personalization in the early 2000s, and for the last seven years or so has been squarely focused on “engagement” and becoming “friends” or “liked” by customers interacting across social media channels.

  As we move into each new era, many elements of the previous persist. And, thus, some of the best elements of the previous eras will likely play important roles (perhaps forever) as we move into the seventh. It’s not some binary switch that gets “turned on.” As Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen said, in defense of the concept of digital disruption, “This is a process, not an event.”12

  That said, there is no doubt that a transformation is occurring.

  The five historical eras of marketing are generally considered to have spanned from the Trade Era in the 1800s to the Marketing Company Era ending in the 1990s.

  Consider a few data points—namely, that despite the huge, and in some cases, extraordinary efforts over the last 10 years to “know” and “relate to” our customers better through data, that:

  • More than half of U.S. customers switched service providers in the last year due to poor customer service experiences—up 5% from 2012.13

  • The rate of loyalty has barely budged among U.S. customers, rising just 1% since 2012, and customers’ willingness to recommend a company rose by just 2%.14

  • Only 23% of consumers say they have any relationship at all with any brand.15

  • 75% of adult Americans say they prefer that their data not be collected or used at all by companies.16

  A study conducted by the Corporate Executive Board in 2012 concluded that there is no linear correlation between the number of interactions with customers and the depth of relationship with that customer. Nevertheless, most marketing strategies center on this very metric: the more interactions we have, the more data we glean, then the deeper our relationship must be. It’s simply not true.

  As the Corporate Executive Board study noted:

  “In reality, that linear relationship flattens much more quickly than most marketers think; soon, helpful interactions become an overwhelming torrent. Without realizing it, many marketers are only adding to the information bombardment consumers feel as they shop a category, reducing stickiness rather than enhancing it.”17

  Now, we’re not saying that relationships are dead. Certainly, companies that have focused on customer relationships (Nordstrom and USAA are two well-cited examples) have been able to create differentiating strategies with a focus on relationship marketing. And there are many examples of best-in-class marketing organizations using social channels, content, data, and the mix of very smart, creative processes to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with their customers. Some have reached that “evangelistic” stage of marketing.

  But there is a shift happening. The data show that these relationships are “tenuous” at best. And brands are beginning to realize that it’s NOT the product or service that the customer values, or that keeps them loyal—it is the experience that they have at every stage of their journey with that brand.

  Content marketing, and creating content-driven experiences, has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful new way for marketers to create this experiential value for business. The idea of providing education, delight, and general usefulness (as a brand’s approach to engage its customers) provides a new way to enrich interactions with customers at every stage of the buying journey.

  The challenge before us is how to transform marketing from a subservient department that creates content only to describe the value of a product or service, into one that knows how to create, manage, and lead the development of valuable experiences over the next decade.

  This is truly the way forward—and a step toward the answer to the question, “What do you really do?”

  MARKETERS CAN CREATE DIFFERENTIATING VALUE

  It’s time to reclaim marketing’s ability to create value. But that will happen only if marketing’s goal is to create value that evolves customers from aware, to interested, to engaged, to sold—and then onward to loyal and evangelistic. The ability to deliver content-driven experiences consistently will be the single most important key to marketing’s evolution along this trajectory.

  Fifteen years ago, just as Trevor Traina was selling Compare.Net and the dot-com boom was in full swing, world-renowned marketing professor Philip Kotler published Kotler on Marketing. In it, he discussed the late 1990s—the period that fueled most of the thinking for his book—as a time of tumultuous change. But Kotler knew that this was merely the beginning.

  Kotler concluded the book with a section called “Transformational Marketing,” in which he discussed how the field would change with the “new age of electronic marketing.” In the coming decade, Kotler wrote, “Marketing will be re-engineered from A to Z. Marketing will need to rethink fundamentally the processes by which they identify, communicate and deliver customer value.”18

  There’s only one problem: 15 years have passed, and this vital transformation hasn’t happened yet. It’s time to get to it.

  And this book is a step in that direction.

  HOW THIS BOOK HELPS TRANSFORM MARKETING IN THE ERA OF EXPERIENCES

  This book has been one year in the writing and five years in the making. Over the last five years, Robert and Carla have each worked directly with large enterprises in both the B2C and B2B space. After more than 100 workshops, advisory engagements, and in-depth meetings with businesses of all shapes and sizes, we’ve personally seen what is working and what isn’t.

  We’ve also watched as others have shown some terrifically productive thinking to help businesses scale the idea of content and marketing as well as the creation of customer-centric experiences. Their contributions are noted here and imbued into the suggested methodologies.

  Let’s be really clear: We are in the midst of a seismic shift in how products and services are marketed to customers. We wrote this book to help map out the future of the marketing department. In that regard, we believe:

  • Good enough is no longer good enough. The classic goa
l of “creation of a customer” will simply be table stakes for marketing. The marketer’s new objective will be to create differentiating and uniquely valuable experiences for customers that go well beyond the product or service.

  • Content-driven marketing IS the differentiating function of business. Marketers must lean in, step up, and lead the business into the future. They must move beyond being a subservient on-demand production group built to service sales. Instead, they must lead the business as a strategic function that will enable the business to adapt to new disruptions.

  • We are entering a new, seventh, era of marketing. Customers’ experiences through all aspects of their journey with a brand will guide marketing strategy. Customers will be looking to be continuously delighted, surprised, informed, entertained, and assisted. They will seek out brands that align with their purpose and values. Relationships will continue to be tenuous, but will be deepened less on the quality of the product or service (or the quantity of interactions), and more by the differentiated experience created within each interaction.

  In this book, we’ll explore both the “why” and the “how” of navigating this new landscape. We’ll put strategy before structure, function before form, and insight and creativity before action and activity.

  We provide a suggested framework—a set of “better practices” (if you will), instead of “best practices”—for creating an active, functioning, and scalable way for marketing to use content-driven experiences to differentiate and create value. We call this new process Content Creation Management (CCM) because, as is true with any initiative (and in honor of William Deming), if we “can’t describe what we’re doing as a process, then we have no idea what we’re doing.”