Marketing, as we know it, is failing. Increasingly, CMOs and CEOs are asking for business driving ideas, not advertising ideas. What we think of as marketing has evolved, and we must look beyond the advertising idea to new ways to connect and engage customers. Marketing becomes less about promoting a product than creating a function, purpose and desire for a brand through experiences that comprise a combination of functional and emotional products, services and messages.
These experiences are at the heart of a growing convergence of marketing and sales, designed to drive tangible behaviors and measurable actions. This requires an evolution in the thinking around experience design. This means looking at the entire experience across all touchpoints and understanding the connection or value of each touchpoint to both the customer and the brand.
It’s the cumulative effect of every touch that defines the overall customer experience and positions the brand. From this perspective, we explore the role of the brand within the experience space, and in doing so, we adopt a purpose-driven approach to brand behaviors and positioning.
At a macro level, we define the roles of bought, owned and earned media and map out the brand’s ecosystem to identify the opportunities for connection and engagement understanding that the customer makes no distinction and moves seamlessly across channels. This allows us to look at the total “connected” experience understanding every place and space that a brand and customer connect; from real world to digital world and seamlessly back again. In fact, we think about these multi-channel interactions as an experience “system.”
Integrating or connecting the experiences is less about creating “matching sets of luggage” than it is about serving up relevant, timely and purposeful brand engagement that is fueled by data (implicit and explicit) and increasingly enabled by technology.
As the lines blur between marketing, distribution, sales, service and product, a combination of new and traditional skills are required to work collaboratively to design end-to-end experiences that drive business and brand value. We need to master the art of content, context and connection and understand the role of data and technology in supporting, enabling and fulfilling these experiences.
By understanding the complex interplay of actions and behaviors and knowing how best to support and orchestrate these experiences, we are better able to drive desirable behaviors and enduring relationships that create value for both the customer and the brand.
For more on this topic, listen to Laura’s interview with Richard Fouts, Research Director at Gartner, on Gartner Voice.
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The Customer User Experience
Designing an online experience with customers and buyers is changing. How does the timing and delivery of content impact the digital experience? What is the impact of social networking? All user experience design has to look through this different lens. |
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