Customer First Thinking

Under pressure to act fast during the pandemic, businesses sped up their digital transformation plans, compressing their timetables from years into months. Now they face the next phase of evolution, what digital prophet Brian Solis calls the “novel economy”. For businesses to adapt and thrive, says Solis, they must take a more profound and humanistic approach to transformation.

Slow to awaken to market disruption and too reliant on ad spending, the global agency holding companies have seen their valuations plummet in recent years. To reverse their fortunes, they need to transform their service model. MDC is leading the way, aided by an infusion of capital from the new CEO Mark Penn, who is set to turn his collection of “partner agencies” into a “modern marketing company of choice”. 

Marketing has always been on the front lines of change. Each seismic shift has brought a new set of challenges. But now, in this new world of “infinite media”, marketing is facing its greatest challenge ever. The only response, Mathew Sweezey believes, is for marketing to pivot from harnessing media to creating experiences that help customers in the context of the moment.

The world is awash in mediocre content, mainly because most brands struggle to find something meaningful to say. Yet in times of crisis, when people are feeling anxious and concerned, there is never a better time to speak up. The key is the ability to show empathy, Ann Handley argues. She urges brands to “do less” and “obsess” about producing higher quality content that matters. 

Most loyalty programs today do little to make people feel more loyal to the brand. They are mainly promotional tools designed to drive repeat sales by giving away margin in the form of redeemable currency or discounts. Which is why it may be time to reimagine loyalty programs, according to Bryan Pearson, transforming them into dynamic platforms that are a more integral part of the customer experience.    

Marketing as a discipline is going through an identity crisis due to the radical shift in the buying behaviour of people. The answer, for some companies, is to ditch the classical marketing function in favour of a broader mandate that makes the customer experience more of a corporate priority. But just fixing what’s wrong is not enough, according to Jay Baer. Companies must also offer customers an experience so memorable and unexpected, they’ll be keen to talk about it with everyone they know.

The practice of content marketing began to evolve into a grown-up discipline about a decade ago. That was around the time social media platforms had reached the size where they could serve as a practical delivery channel. Companies no longer had to rely on paid ads to drive visitors to their own branded web properties – they could attract inbound traffic organically through social media. And then with the democratization of publishing the content floodgates burst open. Today the world is awash in blogs, streaming video, e-books, white papers, infographics, webinars, podcasts, newsletters and so much more, in a dizzying dogfight for attention. We’ve reached a saturation point, where no matter how good the content may be, the chances of it being noticed are remote. Despite this explosive growth, content marketing remains a leap of faith for most companies. They may have become better at generating content – but whether it works or not remains to be seen, especially when you consider that 70% of content reportedly goes unnoticed. Which is probably why 86% of companies say that their content marketing efforts aren’t generating business value, according to Forrester. Pretty distressing when you consider how much money is spent on content marketing – oftentimes, as much as one third of a company’s marketing budget. Despite the questionable contribution to business results, marketers are undeterred – budgets are expected to keep growing. But that means the content glut will only get worse. Even more money will have to be spent making that content visible – relying, just as before, on paid ads. The solution, according to Randy Frisch, is to say “F#CK to Content Marketing”, which just happens to be the provocative title of his recently published book. Despite the attention-grabbing title, he’s been an ardent proponent of content marketing ever since he and his partner founded their company Uberflip in 2012. Uberflip competes in the hotly contested arena of content marketing platforms. But unlike a lot of its CMP competitors, which function as publishing workflow engines, Uberflip prefers to optimize what it likes to call the “content experience”: allowing marketers to offer a more personalized and interactive way to engage with content. Every year the Toronto-based company hosts a highly regarded event for marketers called CONEX - short for “content experience” - which just last month drew a crowd of over 700 attendees from across North America. The main thesis of Randy’s book is that marketers have spent too much time worrying about content scalability and not enough about content discoverability. Even the best content can get buried in a chronological scroll. And often the content is too elementary or generic to be of much value to prospective buyers deep into self-education. Marketers should be thinking about how to map the content journey to the purchase journey, Randy argues, and design a dynamic experience that aligns with the knowledge level and decision stages of individual buyers. But before getting Randy’s take on the state of content marketing I wanted to know: what’s up with that book title?

Most traditional businesses are just now getting used to the idea of a mobile-first world where people spend six hours a day immersed in digital media. But as the digital economy starts to take over, businesses will have to be ready for even more tumultuous change. A new wave of disruptive technology is coming. It will usher in a post-digital age of continuous connectivity and transform how society functions: what’s been called the 4th Industrial Revolution. AI-powered smart speakers, streaming services, messaging platforms, apps, mobile commerce, 5G-connected devices, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain – all converging to transform how people live their lives. No wonder IDC is forecasting over $1 trillion in digital transformation spending this year, an increase of 18% over 2018, as businesses frantically try to upgrade and modernize their infrastructure and systems. But most businesses remain “digitally distraught”, as IDC puts it. New ways of connecting with customers means new ways of doing business – hard to pull off if the C-suite can’t see past the next earnings report. Digital transformation is not for the “faint of heart”, IDC warns. It takes an enterprise-wide commitment to change. It requires an inspiring vision of how to create an unforgettable customer experience. And it means rewiring the business to become more agile, collaborative, daring, innovative. In other words, it means acting more like “digital natives”. Since the number one goal of digital transformation is almost always to improve the customer experience, marketing should be leading the way. Yet, according to Forrester, that job is usually handed to the CIO, who’s more likely to be thinking digital-first, not customer-first. Which is why efforts at digital transformation generally run aground: siloed mentalities, timid goal-setting and risk aversion get in the way of being customer-obsessed. To act like a “digital native” demands an inquiring mind and a constant itch to defy convention. Those attributes perfectly describe Mitch Joel, the Montrealer who’s made a name for himself as a digital expert specializing in decoding the future, as he puts it. He built his reputation as a trailblazer in the early days of the digital revolution, dating back to the start-up of his digital agency Twist Image in 2002, which he later sold to WPP. Mitch writes a popular blog called “Six Pixels of Separation” which he started 16 years ago and produces a weekly podcast by that same name. He’s also written a couple of best-selling books, the second of which, “CTRL ALT Delete”, was about “the evolution and reboot of business”. So it was natural that digital transformation would be the main subject of our conversation. But first I wanted to know – how did he go from being a music journalist and publisher at the start of his career to becoming a renowned digital seer?

Download for offline listening. In one survey after another marketing leaders cite driving growth as their biggest challenge. Judgement of a CMO’s performance invariably boils down to one measure: the year-over-year increase in brand sales. And as much as marketers have glommed on to the idea of customer experience as a differentiator, they are still mainly accountable for selling more stuff to more people. That’s why marketing strategy and planning, according to Forrester Research, “remains stubbornly old school”. Marketers see their job as spear carriers for the brand, leading the hunt for new customers. The only thing that’s changed from past practices are the KPIs: Engagement now tops ad impressions – social shares trump share of voice. But the goals are still the same: create top-of-mind awareness; lead people down the path to purchase; get them to convert. No wonder the idea of putting customers first seems so abstract. Marketers are still caught up in the game of brand messaging. That game was relatively easy to play when the choices were confined to broadcast media. But today marketers are forced to spread their dollars across a broad mix of channels, hoping to catch customers at exactly the right moment. The problem: Messages go unnoticed in an ever-expanding universe of content. Audience attention is fleeting, measured in seconds, not minutes. So how do marketers get off this merry-go-round? What should their true role be? How do they lead their organizations out of the digital wilderness? And how, in fact, do they become more customer-centric when they are still organized around brands and products? In his book “Tilt”, Niraj Dawar, the esteemed Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business school, observes that “marketing, as a discipline, has been in a funk since the demise of mass marketing clipped its ability to move large numbers of customers to buy”. He sees today’s marketers as aspiring technicians “who understand data but not strategy”. He argues that product innovation is not enough – it only results in incessant leapfrogging. His idea: Marketing must go from asking, “How much more of this stuff can we sell?”, to “What else do our customers need?”. Marketing’s new role, he suggests, should be to “take charge of the entire customer relationship”. Marketers today need to give up their channel-based strategic planning processes in favour of delivering value at every stage of the relationship. Instead of “playing a game of R&D roulette”, as Professor Dawar puts it, marketers need to figure out which customer problems the brand is best positioned to solve.

Download for offline listening. Over the past decade design thinking has grown in popularity as a catalyst for innovation. Historically, the design function has always operated on the business perimeter, answering to product management, engineering or marketing. But with today’s intense pressure on businesses to ward off digital disruption, design thinking has taken on a central role in freeing the corporate imagination. Until very recently design thinking was not even taught in business schools. The curriculum has been overwhelmingly devoted to scientific management principles which stresses measurement and process (like Six Sigma, TQM, etc). Design thinking, by contrast, looks at problems from an outside-in perspective: how people experience the world. Applying abductive reasoning, it tries to reframe the problem by factoring in the often emotional and irrational choices made by customers. To think like a designer demands curiosity – insight - free thinking – empathy - and a collaborative spirit: attributes more often found amongst polymaths than technocrats. Design thinking leads to Big Ideas about innovative products, services and business models. But to improve the usability of a product or service, a different design methodology - human-centered design – is applied. Both have their role in meeting the needs of customers. But what’s missing is a more holistic view of the customer relationship – one that takes a broader view of the end-to-end experience. Which is why experience thinking, a new evolving field, fills a critical gap in the innovation process. Experience Thinking looks at what’s important to customers – searches for unmet needs – pinpoints the desired outcomes – and homes in on the ideas that can turn a humdrum experience into one that customers will rave about. It can be thought of as the “corpus callosum” connecting creativity and innovation in order to crack the code on difficult-to-solve problems or come up with truly unique experiences. “When you take a holistic look at how people react and would interact within a set of events at specific points in time, you are implementing Experience Thinking”, writes Tedde van Gelderen in his book Experience Thinking. As the founder and President of the Toronto-based design consultancy Akendi, van Gelderen has worked with a broad range of companies over the past decade, helping them create what he calls “intentional experiences”. His framework divides the design process into four interconnected quadrants: Brand, Content, Product and Service, each with its own goals, techniques and outcomes. Together they form the tapestry of a connected end-to-end experience. Prior to founding Akendi, the Dutch-born van Gelderen worked mostly in the area of user experience design where he applied his post-graduate degree in cognitive psychology, either as a design manager or consultant. Today the company he founded has offices in both Canada and the U.K. and is considered a pioneer in the realm of experience design.