Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  We need to understand this change—and fast. If we don’t, we run the risk of running down the same familiar road we’ve been on since the early 2000s. Digital is a disruptive medium. Therefore, we figure, it must be separate and distinct from other experiences. Businesses of all sizes have spent the last 15 years separating out the idea of digital versus physical. Brands now have vice presidents of digital marketing that sit in offices adjacent to vice presidents of what? Regular marketing? They have CRM teams and social teams, who sit beside the web teams. These people work with the ecommerce teams, but somehow don’t get along with the blog teams, who have love/hate relationships with the PR teams. And then there’s the traditional agency they’ve engaged, along with their super-hip and forward-thinking digital agency. The result? A structural mess.

  So, with that said, let’s get an inevitable scope problem out of the way first.

  A SHIFT IN FOCUS

  We most certainly are NOT the first authors to talk about the “customer experience.” Very much like the approach of content marketing, businesses have been thinking about customer experience management (CEM) for some time. Even as far back as the Marketing Company Era, the idea of “customer experience management” was a popular topic. It is defined as the “totality of the customer experience.” And, thus, every single customer experience can be considered part of that thinking. By that logic, setting a price is part of CEM; the interaction that the customer has with the owner’s manual is part of CEM; and choosing whether to make the product from wool or cotton is part of CEM.

  To suggest that the totality of CEM is marketing’s sole responsibility is not our intention.

  To be clear: In this book, we are discussing only a subset of CEM. We examine only those content-driven experiences that help evolve a customer through his/her journey from aware, to interested, to committed, to loyal, and ultimately, to evangelistic. In most cases, the value delivered from these experiences will actually be separate and distinct from the product or service itself.

  Marketing is transforming from a group that creates its value by describing the experience the customer will have with the product or service being offered. Instead, new marketing strategies must focus on creating experiences that deliver value that goes beyond the product or service.

  In order to do that, marketing must evolve and create new processes.

  THE PROBLEM OF MARKETING’S NON-RESPONSE TO CUSTOMER EVOLUTION

  As we’ve discussed, market realities have changed the ways that customers now become aware, browse, investigate, purchase, use, complain, and/or become loyal to a brand. However, the business processes that facilitate awareness, shopping, differentiation, use, and service have not changed. To date, the legacy approach has been to throw teams and technology at all the individual stratifications of the funnel, and to create ever more campaign-based efforts to optimize each stratum.

  The force of this legacy approach is strong enough to encourage service providers and agencies to do exactly the same. Many brands use different agencies for different slices of their business. Even big agencies now have a “direct group,” “digital group,” “experiential group,” and “loyalty group.” This has significantly reduced the value that agencies are providing to their clients. Tom Goodwin, CEO and founder of The Tomorrow Group, brilliantly summed up this trend in a recent article in The Guardian. He concluded:

  “We’ve created the long tail of marketing, where each campaign has ever smaller budgets, ever shorter lifespans, diminishing aims, all so wonderfully cheap in execution, so wonderfully proficient in terms of outputs, but so entirely pointless. It’s this maintaining excitement for a Twitter feed of 4,000 people, or keeping 500 subscribers on YouTube happy, that is the marketing of our time. It may be cheap, but it’s a pointless distraction and it’s not solving any of the problems that are keeping our clients up at night.”37

  And this is the key challenge. Marketing departments are currently working separately to highlight the company’s value by creating more digital experiences than ever before. What must change is the structure of the strategy that delivers a cohesive, connected, and consistent portfolio of experiences that integrates everything a brand does (physical or otherwise) to help create the total customer experience.

  We propose new, valuable content experiences, which should be created and managed by the marketing team. They will be part of and ultimately enhance the total customer experience. But, they will offer separate and distinct value from the product. They should not be created like a campaign, nor as content has always been created (as a response to a new offering), but rather like a product itself.

  THREE CORE COMPONENTS OF THE CHANGE IN PROCESS

  In our work, we’ve seen a number of high-performing brands start to think about content, marketing, and experiences in a new way. Three skill sets, or competencies, are common among these companies, and can provide a strong business case for a new process (or approach) to be put in place.

  They are:

  1. Orchestrating Events, Not Guiding Journeys

  Experiences are not paths or journeys. They are events consumed in a nonlinear fashion. Regardless of whether it’s a long, high-touch B2B journey, or a completely transactional B2C journey, customers don’t want to be guided; they simply expect to be charmed at every step, and on their own terms.

  2. Meaning-Driven, Not Data-Driven

  Data, by its very definition, has no meaning. It’s just a collection of facts and statistics aggregated for reference or analysis. To make data meaningful, businesses must develop new strategies to find that meaning. Instead of looking for proof-of-life within the data, they must instead ask insightful and honest questions—and look for the data to substantiate or disprove the hypothesis.

  3. Organizing for Agility, Not Speed

  Much has been made about the need for marketing departments to be more agile—but it’s not necessarily about moving faster. The inability to find the calm out of the chaos, and the constant pressure of “more” is due to a fear of moving too slowly. Rather, marketers can find joy in the balance of creating customer-centric experiences and reorienting to more agile strategies.

  Let’s look at each of these.

  1. ORCHESTRATING EVENTS, NOT GUIDING JOURNEYS

  The buyer’s journey will no longer be a guided tour.

  A lot of digital ink is spilled on how businesses should map their digital content platforms to the buyer’s journey. To be clear, this is still a worthwhile function. Marketers need to realize, however, that the map shouldn’t be drawn to increase the number of mile markers that guide customers through the brand’s ecosystem of marketing and content experiences. It is, rather, to establish the right balance of experiences. The goal, in fact, should be to provide the least amount of conversion friction between the customer, the desired action, and the value to the customer’s purpose.

  Yet because of the ease with which businesses can create and publish new content platforms, marketers have taken the classic lesson of “reach and frequency” to absurd levels in some cases. Every siloed group now maintains its own “content” platforms for its small slice of the buyer’s journey. Teams are rewarded for the number of interactions they can create with a customer—with a flawed notion that this drives a deeper relationship between the customer and the business more broadly. In fact, it’s usually quite the opposite.

  In one study, The Corporate Executive Board Company examined the impact of stickiness across more than 40 variables, including price, brand, and how often customers interacted with the brand. They found that the single biggest driver of stickiness in the funnel, by far, was “decision simplicity.”38

  WHEN LESS IS MORE

  The Singapore Tourism Board aimed to deliver a customized and optimized user experience on its signature site, www.yoursingapore.com. What normally would consist of multiple microsites, video-sharing channels, and informational sites all managed and measured separately, would leave the seams of internal silos and processes
showing. The Singapore team knew that it needed to integrate multiple audiences, multiple regions, and multiple platforms into a contextual, targeted, and emotionally connected portal. Seamless, frictionless content and optimal experiences became the function and the strategy.

  By creating as few interactions as possible and ensuring clear and intended impact of each, you create in your customer the desire to experience more. In short: it’s not about more marketing, more content, or more experiences. It’s about how the business creates the most valuable experience, infused by a digital strategy at only the right opportunities. Brands should resist the urge to send more and more “valuable content” down the throats of beleaguered customers, lest they find they are making the buying experience entirely more complicated and harder to manage than it needs to be.

  YourSingapore.com has reduced the number of experiences to create a simpler and higher impact experience. Credit: www.yoursingapore.com - Screenshot accessed: 12/15/2014

  Key Learning:

  High-performing brands are developing balanced portfolios of digital experiences that map across the buyer’s journey, are integrated across both physical and digital channels, and feature many different content types. These companies structure their experience portfolios to benefit the customer first and to benefit the delivery mechanism of the content second. Many have created specific cross-functional teams that are organizing both physical and digital content platforms, as well as architecting ways to integrate these experiences.

  2. MEANING-DRIVEN, NOT DATA-DRIVEN

  Facts don’t change beliefs.

  The roles of the CMO and CIO continue to evolve. The use of content and data to enhance customer experiences is one of the primary drivers of this evolution. But data alone is just a series of meaningless raw numbers that often distract from the real issues that may be at play. Consider how many times data is used to measure “proof of life” for a new marketing team or technology that has been put into service. That team has every incentive to manage its performance without regard for, and sometimes even in competition with, the other marketing teams and technologies.

  The classic example here is the separation between sales and marketing teams in B2B organizations, where the “digital experience” can be entirely different once the “hand-off” is made. But across all types of organizations, it’s not uncommon for marketing teams to build walled gardens where data and measurement are held prisoner to the goal of the team.

  Data and digital experiences become meaningful when they generate true, actionable insight. In isolation, data are theoretical answers to problems the business probably doesn’t understand. And experiences alone are simply creative projects or performance art. Meaning emerges when experiences are infused with the insight and contextual optimization afforded by data. The infusion comes from creative, insightful questions that are designed to improve the process, not prove the point.

  THE BEAUTY OF THE RATIONAL AND THE EMOTIONAL

  Wilson Raj, global customer intelligence director at SAS, framed this elegantly when he said, “Data, while powerful, is only half the story. The other half is an understanding of the emotive needs of our customer. What are their aspirations, fears, dreams, desires, etc.?”39

  High-performing businesses are balancing both the rational and the emotional to optimize the digital experiences they are creating for customers.

  Consider Kraft Foods Group and what Julie Fleischer, director of data, content, and media (an important title to note), is accomplishing with the merging of these concepts. As one component of a completely integrated experience (including a print magazine, packaging, website, social, email, and video), Fleischer and her team track more than 20,000 attributes of some 100 million annual visitors across the experience. That is 2 trillion pieces of data being assimilated over the course of a year. The company has merged both its data management and content platform; it uses the data to provide insight into how to address the purchased advertising that Kraft does through its media buying. This has enabled the company to get quadruple the ROI from its creation of an integrated digital experience than from ad buying alone.40

  It’s important to distinguish between an analytics problem and a data problem. To quote Wilson Raj again:

  “CMOs must ask, ‘Do I have the data?’ If the answer is ‘yes,’ but I can’t get at it, I don’t have a Big Data problem. I have an analytics problem. But, if the answer is ‘no’, then the CMO must start to examine where they can get it and add in the missing linkages.”

  This is a critical factor for both the CMO and CIO. To properly ask, “Do I have the data?” the business must first know the answer to “what data is needed?”

  In order for data to have more value for a business than does existing information, marketers need to get beyond using analytics as a method to “prove” success or ROI. Instead, marketers must use data and measurement to derive more meaningful insight to develop fewer, but more beautiful and powerful, experiences for customers.

  Key Learning:

  High-performing businesses are developing new leadership roles on the marketing team. (Fleischer’s title is one that may become more common.) These managers are creating strategies that peel back the layers of big data to make it manageable and meaningful. They aren’t necessarily scientists or mathematicians, but they know how to ask the right questions about the data, customers, and influencers to glean insights that move the business forward.

  3. ORGANIZING FOR AGILITY, NOT SPEED

  Quick is a measure of time; fast is a measure of speed.

  Agile is a term that all the marketing kids are dancing to these days. But what often gets lost in translation is the difference between being fast and being agile.

  Undoubtedly, the digital disruption has left many marketers struggling to rediscover the joy in their profession. Recent studies have found that 66% of CMOs feel pressure from their CEO or board to prove that marketing has value. Another 60% say their leaders are “turning up the heat.”41

  Moreover, marketers are feeling pressured to become developers of digital experiences. In a study that surveyed the Global 1000 businesses on how they were reorienting their operations to manage the “modern, always-on, and mobile shopper,” 96% said that integrating digital media components has fundamentally affected their business. Sadly, a third of the marketers in these business said these shifts have “left them feeling ‘under pressure and vulnerable.’”42

  These are keen observations. The fear of moving too slowly is causing marketers to do foolish things and to develop more experiences and digital content rather than optimize a set of well-defined digital experiences.

  High-performing organizations are finding that “more and faster” is the wrong metric and that they must step out of it. As they evolve beyond the old, stale hierarchies and processes of the last 100 years, these companies are changing the way they infuse experiences intelligently into every part of the customer journey. Put simply: They are reorienting to agile strategies, not fast strategies.

  As the number of potential digital experience opportunities explodes, businesses must resist the urge to be everywhere all the time, and instead focus on being in the right place at the right time.

  Key Learning:

  The “social conversations” and “real-time” experiences being created today should not be an unrelenting “have you heard us yet,” and then three seconds later, “we SAID, have you heard us yet?” Rather, the goal for high-performing organizations should be a permanent state of agility…of “we’ll be there when YOU need/want us to be.” In other words, it’s not how fast the push notification arrives every time the customer is out for a jog. It’s more about having the ability to quickly send that perfect piece of media WHEN the customer asks for it, either by direct request or through an automated preference.

  Understanding the difference between being agile and moving fast brings the joy back to the process of marketing.

  REDESIGN MARKETING FOR CREATING CONTENT EXPERIE
NCES

  It’s simple: Marketers must get beyond the cycle of chasing campaign-oriented capabilities around every emerging channel. To succeed, marketing departments must evolve.

  They certainly must be able to describe the value of the product or service through various campaign-focused offline and online content islands such as television, print, social, and mobile. But, they must also create differentiated experiential value that is separate and distinct from that product or service, and then integrate the physical and digital world seamlessly.

  This new focus beyond the campaign means that content can no longer be everyone’s job and no one’s job—a collaborative effort is required. The creation, management, publishing, and promotion of content-driven experiences must become a strategic function in the business. This new focus beyond the campaign requires that content be made real. Content can no longer be simultaneously everyone’s job and no one’s job.

  To accomplish this, new processes must be created, along with new roles to facilitate those processes. This is an approach or methodology that focuses on the creation of content-driven experiences as a separate asset; it has as much potential value as any given product and could potentially have revenue possibilities. We call it Content Creation Management.