The old ways of doing business are gladly fading away. Advertising noise is ubiquitous and we are experiencing a sort of marketing fatigue - anaesthesia of the senses. To remedy this, marketers are always burning grey matter to think differently and be innovative - to stand out from the crowd and be noticed. We need to have a holistic approach to marketing involving product, marketing, content and innovation.
Omni-channel marketing became the most innovative way of engaging with customers across all their devices and across all channels. Creating a seamless narrative and experience to build lasting relationships with customers. This was, and still is, one of the most effective strategies marketers have at their disposal. But what's next for marketing as we hurtle towards the future - where customers expect a deeper bond with brands and their products. And where software and hardware production are becoming quicker, cheaper and easier to produce?
The answer in my opinion is that we need a new paradigm for marketing. A fresh perspective, one where we look through the eyes of our customers, and not through the lens of a marketer. Future-marketing is where product, marketing, content and innovation meet. A unison of action that runs so subtly parallel with customer's lives and purpose that they hardly even notice they are active advocates of your brand. I have separated the four pillars product, marketing, content and innovation of this approach below:
Future-marketing involves your brand becoming more experiential, more interactive, more tangible and more usable. Innovation must occur both, on the product level and on the marketing level. On the product level innovation will be useful and value led. It will have real utility to the user, and align with their purpose and values. Your product will have to be the strongest marketing tool you have with a value-centric approach - where business and user goals run in tandem. One of the most salient brands doing this - for me anyway - is Patagonia Outdoor Clothing. Their commitment to business transparency and responsible business practices aligns perfectly with my values and mission for environmental preservation and sustainability. They provide outdoor clothing that I can wear with pride and identify with.
How to align to the customer's purpose and values?
We are informed of who we are by the stories we are told. The stories in the media, the stories of brands, the stories of our history and the stories from our social interactions. We distil these stories into cultures, archetypes and self-identifiers.
An article on our autobiographical selves written by by Jennifer Ouellette explains this phenomenon in more depth.
We seem to strive for the purest form of these self-identifiers. Action sport enthusiasts will want to be as pure and close to the archetypical narrative as possible and by being associated with edgy, action sport brands (I am thinking of GoPro/Northface/O'neill here) will inform them and others of who they are. Similarly a person who identifies themselves as a geek, or belonging to geek culture will own geeky paraphernalia that aligns them to the geek archetype. Why is this? Well, for geeks it is deeper than a love of geeky technology, and culture. It is a self-identification as an outlier, a non-conformist. It's a kind of exclusive and chauvinistic "I am part of this tribe and we are awesome", kind of mind-set. It's a form of tribe where belonging and a sense of commonality are felt.
In my opinion, the need for self-identification is greater than the self-reinforcement from others. When we feel like we are the purest version of an archetype we feel sincere and genuine - we have purpose. External reinforcement is also important however. Look around you, very few people don't fit into a specific archetype. We are social animals and the need for belonging is fundamental.
The deeper our business and its products resonate with the customer, the stronger the bond. A product that aligns to deep character values and purpose will elicit more advocacy than a product that resonates on a more superficial level - the level of transient interests and personality traits. Products that have a deeper connection with a customer will always be more successful and have real staying power in the market.
If products mostly sell themselves, where does that leave marketing? Marketing will serve an important role as the face and the voice of the brand.
Purpose
Brands reflect their business' purpose, values and utility, they will be more of an exposition of the business - its products, its purpose and its values. These aspects need to align with your customers' own purpose and values. Your marketing strategy should position your brand with deep character values that resonate with your market. Both your product and your brand should be based on solid customer interaction and research. Customers will show you what they want from a product and also tell you who your brand is and what it stands for. This is an outside in approach, with the customer at the helm. A design thinking methodology is a very effective process that not only solves business problems, but can be very effectively applied to marketing. I will get back to this later in the article.
Marketing technology
Technology advancement is moving faster and faster and if Moore's Law continues to stand true, technological advancement will only get faster. Technology is also becoming more cheaply and easily manufactured, thus, we are getting more bang for our buck. An article from Mark J. Perry from Encyclopaedia Britannica compares the prices of the 1984 Apple Macintosh and the 2009 Apple iMac. The iMac came out 26% cheaper - the Apple Macintosh costing $5,186 and the iMac costing $3,849.
Marketing departments will be able to afford developing intelligent and crafty hardware of their own, they will go beyond just smartphone apps and social media. We are seeing a move towards ideas shaping what technology is capable of. Already we are seeing brands use new technologies in innovative ways. Beacon technology like: Estimotes Nearables, Apples iBeacon and Googles Eddystone, are all already being used in innovative ways.
SXSW used iBeacons to alert attendees who downloaded the app, with their registration code, when they were near registration booths, making their experience that much more intuitive. Hillshire Brands used iBeacons to sell sausages by tracking users in stores and sending them coupons when they approached the section of the store where their sausages were being promoted. These are two innovative ways of using technology to influence consumers in their micro-moments.
Another crafty use of technology is the Coca-Cola mini-bottle integrated digital campaign. Where customers were invited to create mini-me avatars of themselves in an online game. They then had to take care of these online mini-me avatars, and the winners of these games won the opportunity to create mini 3D printed versions of themselves. This campaign gained international recognition for innovation.
People love to be wowed; they enjoy innovative new ways to interact with brands. This in combination with a campaign that really touches your customer on a deep emotional level is a recipe for success.
Content is the substance, the tangible focus on which marketing supports. Content is the "marketing product" that customers consume. It is the focus of all your marketing efforts. Without it your campaign is just a quasi-abstract combination of research, strategy, channel and media. Content is the value your marketing campaign provides to your customer - and there always has to be a value add to the customer. It could be an educational blog article, a delicious, cup of coffee, or a fun, little 3D printed version of you. Always make sure that your customer receives something in exchange for their attention and time.
To add value to your customer you need to know what sort of content would best suit them. Advancements in audience insights and tracking mean that you will be able to target your content to the right customer, at the right time. Content will also have to be customised, giving your customer a sense of inclusion and familiarity with your brand and its content.
Curate, syndicate and aggregate
We have no shortage of information to consume these days, but cutting through the information that we are not interested in is a challenge. Content curation, aggregation and syndication are how we distribute, organise and compile our information. Tools and websites like [https://www.reddit.com/ Reddit]], Flipboard, Feedly and Digg are becoming the default ways in which we access our information. Leveraging these tools in an intelligent way to syndicate your brands content is a smart way to distribute your message and learn more about your customer. The data from these tools will tell you what your customers willingly choose to consume. In a sense customers will do some of the work for you, they will provide insight into what their drivers and interests are. The value exchange for personal data will have to be desirable to the user.
Business transparency
In a hyper-connected world people are becoming more informed and educated. Unlike any time before us we are exposed to world events as they happen. I recently watched a live streamed Periscope of the Saint-Denis terrorist police raid in Paris - as it happened, before the news teams were even there. It was filmed by Benson Hoi a resident of the area, and I found it in a thread on Reddit. This is how news works these days. It is therefore important your brand is transparent and socially responsible. People expect you to do responsible business that is good for the environment, communities and customers. If your brand is involved in a scandal - yes, I am talking to you Nestle and Volkswagen - you need to be honest and quick to the mark with response and crisis management.
If you like crowdsourced news check out Storyful which is a social news network that verifies the news articles for you.
Ah yes, the buzz word of the decade - innovation. Most people and marketers think of innovation as sparkly new smartphone apps, location beacons or nifty drone deliveries. Well, they are sort of right - but that is not the whole story. Technology is a huge part of innovation and plays a key role in innovation strategies, but organisations and marketers need innovative ways of thinking and innovative systems and operating models.
Design thinking
The design thinking methodology is a problem solving methodology used most commonly by technology or UX project teams. It can also very effectively be used in the marketing space too. It basically involves understanding the problem - in our case a marketing problem (you would be amazed at how many organisations are solving the wrong ones). This means taking marketing or business' objectives and strategy and talking to real customers and asking them what they think of the objective/strategy, does it align to what they want from your brand and how to go about implementing that objective/strategy. You would identify motifs and patterns with the data you gather from your in-person, ethnographic research of your customers and lay out a set of marketing tactics to incorporate into your strategy. Get real creative and concepts out quickly and test with sample audiences and iterate. The finished campaign will also be agile and be based on empirical data from your design thinking process and marketing insights.
Most large corporations suffer from a slowness. They are encumbered by the weight of bureaucracy and protocol. In order to incorporate new ways of thinking and systems, businesses need new ways of operating. Whether it is agile workflows; scrum, kanban or scrumban methodologies, or something else. Whatever allows your business to evolve and become more customer-centric and therefore more successful.
Sustainability and innovation
Your business also needs to ask whether or not its business practices are sustainable. The world is changing fast and to keep going you not only need sustainable products, but sustainable systems, operations and workplaces. Innovation in all these spheres is increasingly important, but getting CEO sign-off on sustainable innovations isn't easy. At the moment it is still a decision between social and environmental responsibility and the bottom line. Research shows that going "green" can actually yield top and bottom of the line returns. Consumers are becoming savvy to the ways of business, and are starting to make the ethical choices.
Whether it is on a product, marketing, systems or any other level, innovation means a paradigm shift. A new way of thinking and doing business. Product, marketing, content and innovation are becoming so intermingled with each other it is hard to have clear cut distinctions between them. The age of marketing's pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers is done.
Marketing and innovation
An omni-channel approach should be maintained for your campaigns but this will have to evolve and anticipate changes in the market and in technology. The Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Everything (IoE) movement mean that it's not just mobile phones that are going to be smart and connected - handbags, washing machines, medicine cabinets and bicycles will all be connected to each other and to the web. We should start thinking about how we can leverage these new channels and platforms, before the competition does.
These movements bring with it a wealth of modalities that could augment your marketing campaigns and enable even further integrated channels. In light of these new advancements, marketers will have to be more cognisant and sensitive to privacy and data issue. Offering a value exchange to customers, where sharing their data reaps great benefits to them. These issues are becoming salient among consumers and the media, and will probably become even more so in the future.
What does the IoT and IoE movement mean for marketers? I don't think there is one single answer, but this is an exciting time for us marketers and if we wear our innovation hats, we can really change the landscape of what's possible.
