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Marketing’s least attractive quality is acting too desperate for attention. A customer journey must begin with awareness and familiarity, but getting that attention should not be as obvious as screaming, “Pick me!”
A better way is to be useful to the customer.
The problem is structural. Most marketers of both the “brand” and “performance” ilk have a short list of metrics they must hit: awareness, recall, memorability, clickthrough, purchase, etc. But this selfishness ultimately depletes long-term value for a brand. In intruding upon the customer to secure an advantage, marketers give up the opportunity to do what is best for them—which, in most cases, would also be best for the brand in the long term.
Redemption lies in an experience-centric approach
While a prospect may move through a somewhat linear process from awareness to purchase, the maturing of a customer’s relationship is an intricate and lengthy dance of numerous brand interactions and experiences. Much of this is what we refer to as customer experience (CX), and it plays a disproportionately important role in how people perceive brands.
Analysis using the extensive BrandAsset Valuator database shows CX contributes 60% of a brand’s value. Not surprisingly, marketers are increasingly savvy to the importance of experience—53% of global b-to-c marketers surveyed by Forrester said marketing had primary responsibility for customer experience.
The emphasis on experience over attention is causing a shift from intrusion toward intuition. Most of this work is focused on digital, as nearly 3 out of 4 interactions that customers have with a company are digital.
The proliferation and evolution of digital touch points place emphasis on innovation. All kinds of marketers, like media planners, who make the brand both salient and useful at customer engagement nodes; and experience designers, who ensure easy and effective interactions, must develop and optimize the appropriate digital experiences.
Digital touch point architecture must be rooted in customer needs
Our research at Forrester addresses this challenge of aligning touch points to needs head-on: We consider the kinds of activities consumers typically engage in (such as performing routine tasks, entertaining themselves, achieving goals, etc.) and ask what digital touch points are best suited for serving these varying needs. Specifically, we test five touch points using a quantitative consumer study: chat, notifications, voice, augmented reality and immersive worlds.
