Igniting Customer Connections. Frawley Andrew

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      • Consumers have high expectations. Particularly among younger consumers, the expectations for content and communication are high, boosted by Amazon.com, YouTube, and much more. Consumers expect relevant recommendations at the right time. They expect consistency across all channels. And video and other rich media aren't an exception anymore. They're the standard, and that standard continues to grow. To be effective, marketing needs to be in the media vernacular of the moment, or (ideally) ahead of that moment. After all, 65 percent of your audience learns visually, according to WebDAM Marketing Trends for 2014. And visual data is processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than text is.

      • Information about a consumer's experience and emotion are widely available. In the past, we had to rely on focus groups and anecdotes to understand the emotional feelings of consumers. Today, through social media, most consumers are volunteering lots of information about how they feel. This information, along with low-cost surveys, allows brands to actively use emotional data as an aspect of their audience selection and segmentation.

      • Consumers will be willing to trust you if you get it right. If brands deliver on their promises, personalize communications, create relevant offers, and respect privacy, consumers can still express old-fashioned loyalty. It just may not last as long as it used to.

      • They control the message. The balance of power has shifted from brands to consumers. And the impact of consumer empowerment cannot be underestimated. Yes, there are more and more channels and consumer touch points. But the consumer has the power to turn off, delete, and block messaging. So respecting consumers' time and intelligence is even more important than ever. Otherwise the all-important customer connection can be diminished or even lost.

      What Does an Empowered Consumer Mean?

      The empowerment of consumers with new, faster ways to communicate globally can be a blessing or a curse to brands. On the plus side, the world is your audience – more prospects, customers, and potential revenue. We, as marketers, are delivering programs into the marketplace that are driving tremendous results on a scale that couldn't have been achieved in the past. But consumer empowerment also means that brands have to consider the potential social impact – at all levels, from manufacturing to marketing. No apparel company wants to be the brand behind a collapsed sweatshop in Southeast Asia. No organization wants to do anything that it wouldn't want to see in its customers' Facebook Timeline or Twitter feed. No technology brand wants to send out a marketing message that manages to offend a faraway nation. All the impact comes back home now, faster than ever.

      One fact is clear – the consumer is increasingly in the driver's seat. Ordinary people are seizing an extraordinary ability to change the way they communicate, buy, and live. This disrupted, consumer-driven marketplace opens up new opportunities for marketers to deliver relevant information and offers that meld seamlessly with the consumer's lifestyle. But it all starts with making stronger, deeper customer connections.

      An empowered consumer creates very different marketing experiences, more complicated buying patterns, and a higher degree of uncertainty about what consumers will do. As we move into the future, “we must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty,” says Nate Silver, renowned statistician and predictor of everything from baseball to presidential elections. This insight points toward a much more fluid, ever-changing world. In that context, successful marketing needs to recognize that there's not one predefined path for every consumer. Every action triggers a reaction and multiple paths forward. Marketers need to anticipate and predict consumer needs as accurately as possible by using data, insights, and the wide array of tools now available. Only then can we ensure that marketing is relevant and effective.

      Marketing Isn't a Mystery Anymore

      Consumers are smarter about marketing now. Back in the day, they just passively accepted whatever came through their TVs. They didn't have a choice. It was just there. Now, thanks to a broader awareness of what marketing is, people know when they're being marketed to – and they have the power to block, ignore, undermine, or opt out of the deluge of messaging and media coming through all of their many screens. After all, we live in a multiscreen world – which is great for reaching more prospects via the channels they choose. But more marketing can also mean messaging overload, customer fatigue, and diminishing returns. And the consumer holds the device – whether it's a mobile phone, a tablet, or a laptop. So consumers are in control. They will choose the channels that deliver the most relevant experience and seamless buying process, and will ignore the rest.

      Meet the Me Economy

      The marketing landscape used to be simple and limited. If you wanted to buy a television set, you went to an electronics store, compared models, and bought one. Now, you would probably do some online research, compare your options (Amazon vs. brick-and-mortar stores), and buy via the channel that offered the best value and experience. The purchase path may be very nonlinear and highly idiosyncratic to the individual buyer, brand, category, and product. In short, the herd mentality is over, as are the days of thinking about buying in terms of research, purchase, and loyalty. Now we're dealing with economies of one, the so-called me economy– where content is personalized for everyone, where micro-transactions happen every moment, where consumers filter messages, and where social and virtual currencies may be as important as hard cash.

      What Do These Shifts and Trends Mean to You?

      To be successful, marketers need to be relevant, in the moment, enabled at the transaction level, creating an emotional connection, and super-agile, so you can adapt to rise above the noise. As we'll see in the next chapters of Igniting Customer Connections, brands like yours need to take full advantage of the current marketing landscape, with all its megatrends and consumer behaviors, to build better business outcomes (e.g., brand and business equity) that will propel it ahead. How? By focusing on a powerful combination of customer experience and engagement. And it all starts by creating strong connections, which we explore in detail in the next chapter.

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