Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005.  This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.

For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.

Start with this post: Why Launch the Next Digital Consultancy…Now?

 

5 Learnings for Small Business Marketing in the Next Normal

New normal, next normal, not-so-normal – however you see the changes to our lives and businesses, the affects will be lasting, even transformative. For small businesses, reopening is its own challenge only to be followed by an urgent need to reinvent that business to grow and thrive in new circumstances.

Small business can use a simple framework to guide an anything-but-simple adjustment. By this time, many have wrestled with what it may take to reopen their business aligned with public health needs. How should that business change to do better? Different ordering and delivery – digital, wherever possible; streamlined and automated operations, even different products and services that are suddenly more relevant. At Travelers, we developed the Reopen, Reinvent and Grow Business Guide to help small business owners with key steps along the way.

But what are the lessons for marketing in the next normal to help that reinvented business grow, not just endure? What is realistic for a resource-strapped small business to effectively market?

McKinsey sees a greater challenge for small business:

“Around the world, economies are cautiously reopening. Businesses are keeping one eye firmly on the here and now but also tentatively looking ahead to what’s shaping up as a great reset…

…Small businesses will confront some of these problems. But much as Ginger Rogers danced the same steps as Fred Astaire—only backward and wearing high heels—small businesses must make the necessary changes at a greater relative cost and with less working capital.”

While it’s tough to generalize between the great variety of B2C, B2B and B2whatever businesses in terms of new practices to focus on, here are four lessons that may serve as a guide.

 

Romance and serve your current customers

Whether you are a local restaurant, a massage therapist, or a hardware wholesaler serving the trades, now is the time to accelerate how you connect with existing customers.  This goes beyond the adage that retaining your existing customers can be more profitable than acquiring new ones (although that does tend to be true).

In our recent consumer pulse surveys, after COVID-19 and the economic impact, people are worried about the unknown. They need businesses they can trust and rely on. Many customers want to see the businesses they regularly buy from endure. 

A recent Salesforce consumer survey revealed:

“55% of respondents noted the top priority they want small businesses to focus on is to make them feel safe. While most state mandates have issued safety guidance for small businesses to follow (keep those masks on!), customers appreciate seeing small businesses go above and beyond to ensure proper sanitation and responsible social distancing.”

People want to know what a retail business, restaurant or, even, hardware store, is doing to keep the place clean and reduce customers’ risks. With so much confusion from federal, state and local government and a lack of consensus about something as clear as wearing masks, people want reassurance that a local business is taking reasonable steps to try to keep them safer.

While no small business, Starbucks knows what it takes to build trust in their communities. Their blog is full of ways to help their customer cope with what’s going on and more confidently buy from Starbucks:

A how-to guide for digital ordering at Starbucks

At home? You can still work from Starbucks with virtual backgrounds

From shattered glass, Starbucks murals become first ‘blossom’ in a neighborhood rebuilding

Now is the time to show you care about your customers based upon their concerns.

 

Create regular, meaningful and increasingly personalized communications with them

Customers and agents want to know what you are doing to serve them and about relevant offers and services. Email marketing and organic social media marketing help you keep in touch. While these channels serve known customers (or agents) best, certainly organic social media (non-paid) also reaches prospects and communities. (According to a Salesforce survey, social media usage spiked — 54% of consumers noted spending more time on social media services, some with an increase as high as 25% as compared to pre-COVID times.)

Hartford Prints is a small design and printing retailer based in Hartford, CT. They are a quintessentially local business and retail storefront. With the lockdown, they had to figure out how to remain relevant. They serve up weekly emails to customers with timely offers, news about their community commitments and new offers like virtual classes.  They stuck to their knitting – going beyond selling letterpress cards to actual customer printing and mailing for customers.

At Travelers, we deliver personalized emails to our agents featuring useful content for their small and medium-sized business customers. Articles like: “Employee Training to Consider During COVID-19” and “Should You Pivot Your Business Model?” aim to help businesses with valuable content that’s a bit different than a lot of the same content being delivered out there.

 

Quality over quantity. Everyone is overloaded with email and other digital communications. Building a steady cadence of genuinely valuable, highly relevant, personalized content is more important than delivering a high volume of content.

Build your 1^st party data to personalize and market to your customers and sales agents

This is foundational. That means it won’t feel that good doing it until you start applying it to marketing and achieving results. 1^st party data is just the data you own about your customers or agents – who they are, how to contact them, what they have bought, what they care about and more. It’s what makes personalized marketing even possible, and it’s the future of marketing.  If there is one thing that vexes non-digitally native companies big and small, it’s catching up on managing the data they have on their customers. Small business can leapfrog ahead and start collecting your customer information in a methodical way. You can do this via a simple CRM system or an email marketing platform.

• Always get your customer’s email address(es)
• Collect phone and text information as well as their contact preferences
• Connect their contact information with purchase history
• Allow for these customer data profiles to grow over time to include preferences, interests and other future information

 

Collect regular feedback and insights from your prospects and customers

Our consumer pulse surveys help us understand how people’s outlook changes over time. One of the top three concerns for the past few months has been that fear of the unknown. When uncertainty rules the day, it’s difficult to know when folks are ready to shop and buy or move ahead with that project. It’s hard to know just what they’re worried about, and it can change from day to day.

Andrew Reid, CEO Rival Technologies, summed this up in an article in Entrepreneur,

“Now is not the time to rely on assumptions. Any data you have from 6 weeks ago—let alone 6 months ago—is already out of date.”

Whether you have the capacity for regular surveys, analysis of call center logs or simply ask 1-2 questions following a transaction, getting real time feedback from customers will help guide your activity today and tomorrow. No business wants to appear tone-deaf to community or customer concerns. Regular feedback can help tell you how you can best communicate not just what you communicate.

 

Upgrade your digital customer experience

While obvious, it may be hard for smaller businesses to spend more to get a better Web site or experience. All I can say is try. People are adopting new digital habits for the long haul. That dodgy online ordering service can undermine your revenue.  

Aim towards a ‘friction-free’ way to get answers to prospects and customers, order and deliver products and services. Nothing alienates new, digitally native customers more than a crappy Web experience. The world just got suddenly more digital. Given choice and limited dollars to spend, many customers won’t do business with a company that hasn’t made their digital experience a seamless one.

Here are some simple suggestions:

If your goal is ecommerce (sales):

• Create a more seamless purchase flow
• Allow customers to get fulfillment alerts via any channel (e.g. SMS, Email)
• Drive customers to enrollment in CRM for future marketing

If you are driving leads:

• Work with custom landing pages so you can personalize the experience from ads and emails
• Integrate interactions into campaign management (email+) & CRM system to re-market

If you want to improve consideration for your brand/company:

• Do ongoing SEO research to better understand what people are looking for now
• Publish better and more useful content to help them with current challenges
• Always include clear calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive them to a next action

 

Here are some other great resources for marketing during the long haul of COVID-19

How to Adapt Your Marketing During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Neil Patel

Coronavirus Small Business Guide – US Chamber

5 creative ways small businesses are succeeding during the COVID-19 quarantine – Fast Company

How Businesses Have Successfully Pivoted During the Pandemic – HBR

The Reopen, Reinvent, Grow Business Guide – Travelers Insurance

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

For small and mid-size businesses who want to build their brand (and, therefore, their business) thoughtfully and with intention, click on the link for 5 questions that will help you sort out what your distinctive brand is all about.

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

Five Priorities for Marketing During the Next Phase of COVID-19

How do we market and manage our businesses as the country experiments with “opening up?” How do marketers balance their original growth strategies for 2020 with the new, much different reality? Is this about post-crisis or merely managing intervals in a crisis? It's a lot to untangle. 

There used to be an adage business folks bandied about in the early aughts, “the only constant is change.” Well, that could now be rewritten as “the only thing certain is uncertainty.” We just don’t know what will happen between the behavior of a virus, the impact on the complex system of global economies and the changes in political leadership to come.

Still, we have to make progress. Humans are, by nature a planful bunch. Clearly the key today is to adjust strategies and remain nimble to shift given circumstances. Based on the last fifteen years of experience associated with social media adoption, brands have become nimbler. In March, brands put marketing programs on hold, made huge operational shifts and adopted crisis communications to respond to employees, customers and financial stakeholders.

Here are five priorities for marketers as we emerge from the first phase of this crisis and segue into the next, marathon phase:

Re-align Marketing Strategy to Business Goals

Don’t throw out your strategy. Adjust and re-align it to business goals that respond to new realities. Some businesses will suffer greater or longer-lasting disruption. The airline business and travel, in general, will suffer for a prolonged period. Movie theaters may not recover as the businesses they were before the crisis. People will still buy homes, fewer perhaps, but that business doesn’t just stop. That being said, shopping for homes may shift as people rely on virtual tours as they seek ex-urban places to live now that virtual work (and the threat of compressed populations) is more possible.

Chances are before COVID-19 (BCVD), you had a growth strategy in some part of your business. Now, you may need to shift to improving retention. That’s a reasonable shift in goals. Now, re-align your marketing strategy to that priority.

Kathy Bachmann, GM of Americas with the consultancy Analytic Partners Inc. told Paul Talbot in Forbes about the type of strategic shifts some brands are taking in their business:

“Here are some examples of the types of shifts we’re seeing and expect to see in marketing approaches and investments:

• Directing investments toward marketing tactics that drive online sales.

• Reducing marketing investments on campaigns to drive short-term sales or business outcomes, while keeping brand-building campaigns live – essentially saving dry powder.

• Shifting budgets to promoting at-home and delivery-based options (i.e., at-home fitness solutions/equipment/apps, grocery delivery, restaurant delivery, etc.)

• Shifting focus from promoting premium products to entry-point or everyday items….”

 

Our businesses will change in big and small ways. Consumer habits will change temporarily and permanently. We need to adjust, and we need strategy to align our organizations to do more than react to crisis. Don’t settle for just reacting to the crisis.

 

Join with Research for a 3-Legged Marathon

Think you know what your customers want or are worried about? Wait a day and it might change. Now is the time to adopt new practices to get constant input and insight about customers and sales channels. That certainly means strengthening any voice of the customer programs you have (grabbing feedback from customers during dozens of interactions). We are running a series of consumer and distribution channel surveys every two weeks to keep a pulse on how people’s attitudes and behaviors are changing (e.g. a rise in ‘fear of the unknown’). This is on top of our real-time feedback from social media, regular insights from search behavior (e.g. “what DIY projects are people planning/doing based upon Pinterest and Google searches”), and our VOC programs.

For anything new, we are engaging customers in qualitative co-creation sessions virtually. We need their current views to help us bring something to market that makes sense. One way or another, join with research at the hip and keep them embedded in your efforts for the foreseeable future. Embrace the 3-legged marathon.

 

Demonstrate What Your Brand Believes in and Distinctly Delivers

Many brands stream stories through their social channels and even via paid media of their support for the healthcare front line, the service workers delivering packages and their own employees who do their job in the face of adversity and uncertainty. Unfortunately, there is a sameness to all of these montages. They are largely being done to benefit employee morale and assure the rank and file that their work has meaning. Nothing wrong with that.

Still, as we emerge from this first phase of the crisis, brands will benefit from demonstrating what they believe in and what distinct role they can play in people’s lives. This may sound like the usual call for brands to invest in “brand” or embrace a purpose. Sort of. Post Covid-19 (PCVD), brands will need to demonstrate how they are helping people live their lives under the oppressive uncertainty we all face. The question is what does your brand mean now.

McKinsey takes a look at what marketers need to do during this immediate crisis and afterwards:

“Our analysis of consumer decision-journey behaviors showed that 87 percent of consumers shopped around: they were willing to consider other brands. We believe that behavior could be even more drastic given the scale and nature of this disruption…Marketers should begin revisiting what their brand means to customers. Agile marketing practices—typically focused on performance marketing—will need to be adopted at the brand-building level, with communications managed rapidly in test, learn, and refine cycles of continuous improvement.”

That notion that we apply rapid test-and-learn practices on brand-building is new. Having a static notion of your brand position won’t cut it anymore.

 

Put Some Jet Fuel into Digital Transformation

Clearly this jagged-edge “zig” we are all living through has demonstrated the urgent need for more digital ways to deliver products and services, customer experience and manage ourselves. We need to make digital change happen faster. But it is not as simple as green-lighting all those digital transformation projects that your business couldn’t find a way to fund BCVD. Funding will be scarce.

This is the time for leadership to step forward, roll up their sleeves and work with their most innovative business leaders to place some bets. You cannot delegate the selection of digital transformation projects/initiatives to the next tier. Digital transformation most often requires participation across the org chart. It’s up to the C-suite to declare big priorities to stimulate true collaboration and commitment.

Where to start? Accelerate that part of the customer journey that current circumstances reveal is more urgent. Double-down on that CRM implementation or expansion that will quickly make a fully remote field force more productive. Choose those projects that are so foundational, they can no longer be ignored (e.g. fix customer data) and those initiatives that will help the most people interact with your business digitally.  

 

Be Generous with Your Customers

What do your customers need most right now? If you ask them (see the 3-legged marathon above), you will find out that what you ultimately sell or deliver to them is actually helpful. If you are a bank, you can offer them guidance on managing their finances in a recession. If you are a restaurant, you can go beyond take away to allow them to subscribe to a meal-a-week delivered to their door. Yes, touchless or whatever makes folks feel more comfortable. If youy are an insurance company, you can recognize that people are driving lsss and give them a break on the car insurance bill.

When business locations open again, what do we all want to know? That you care enough about your customers to have special cleaning protocols in place to reduce the chances of your doorknobs and surfaces carrying the virus. “Generous” means “liberal in giving or sharing; unselfish.” Call it doing the right thing; demonstrating empathy; simply caring enough about your customers to listen closely and aim to serve them in a generous way.

Like a lot of folks, we tried to order from local restaurants regularly to keep their businesses going.  When I would pick up, I noticed a range of safety behaviors from the pizza place that hadn’t changed a bit and forced nervous dads into a small takeout pickup room where no one wore masks or gloves to the other Italian restaurant who arranged curbside pickup from masked and gloved staff. This second experience demonstrated a business who was empathetic to the concerns of many of their customers.

Think about what would really help your customers now. Do that. Then optimize for efficiency. People need brands who care about them.

 

Here are 4 useful POVs on how brands are leaning into PCVD marketing:

• How The Coronavirus Pandemic Impacts Marketing Strategy – Forbes
• How Marketing Leaders Can Both Manage the Coronavirus Crisis and Plan For The Future - McKinsey
• Preparing your marketing plans for the Coronavirus downturn – The Drum
• Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis – HBR

 

The Tenured CMO’s Survival Guide

Some CMO’s only expect to be in their position between 36-43 months. For those that are in for the long haul – at least 6-8 years – there are key initiatives beyond short term sales that must be tackled. You can’t wait these out. The “tenured” CMO is the one who has made it past the first 12 months that for one reason or another kicks out a lot of ‘bad fits.’ If you have made it that far presumably you can assimilate to the culture of the place. You have also figured out how to sustain or improve short term business results.

Next up are those bigger, foundational jobs that will suck energy and resources before having a payoff. If you avoid them, you may not only put your job in jeopardy but the competitiveness of your company in the future.

Here are four marketing must-do’s for the tenured CMO:

 

First-Party Data Strategy to Build Lasting Value & Competitive Advantage

Whether you sell direct or through a channel, your marketing organization’s ability to have solid first-party data on your customers and any channel partners (e.g. third-party sellers like independent agents or brokers) is key to competing tomorrow. That first-party data should expand with every transaction and includes demographic, psychographic, transaction and other behavioral data. Some good sense needs to be applied to not collect everything under the sun (and protect privacy). But, in general, more is better.

The strategy needs to include the ability to access and apply the data to marketing and customer experience use-cases. Your data needs to be on the cloud (if possible) to allow you to more easily combine with third-party data sources like Acxiom, Experian, Bombora, and more.

Command of your own customer and channel data serves as a defense against the walled-garden marketing channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon. They have made their intentions clear. For now, they will not let user data out to partners in any significant way. Your first-party data strategy is also a hedge against the “cookie-less” future. 

While I am sure the number of marketers working towards self-sufficiency is far greater than those who have achieved it, Mark Grether @mark_grether highlighted the shift in Martech Today:

“Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of marketers are data self-sufficient, or working towards the goal of self-sufficiency. Even before GDPR, marketers were shifting priorities and investments toward a heavier reliance on data. Because of this, there is a trend towards bringing these efforts “in-house” closer to the CMO and not under the purview of an agency. In fact, Unilever cited that its recent $1 billion acquisition of Dollar Shave Club was in part to gain access to the brand’s “unique consumer and data insights.””

Integrating Human-Centered Design to Get Closer to the Customer

Of all the ways to get closer to the customer to design better products and services, the practices of human-centered design watch the video above) feels like the most powerful. Inviting customers in to co-create a product, to inform its design and how it is marketed, will do more to ensure our marketing teams (or senior executives) don’t get too swept away with their hunches.

Dave Thomsen from Wanderful Media calls out the strength of more feedback, more often:

“When you’re working at breakneck speeds with tight deadlines, taking time out to gather feedback from users can feel like a luxury that’s easy to put off. But there’s no substitute for the nuance and depth of insight that can come from an in-person conversation. And with a couple of well-crafted Craigslist ads, a couple hundred dollars to pay your participants and an afternoon, you can quickly check key assumptions, uncover opportunities for improvement and gather inspiration for new ideas.”

Working side-by-side with customers (vs. behind one-way mirrors) breeds compassion and empathy. Those are two keys to truly customer-obsessed organizations. Human-centered design is a great way to bake it into culture.   

Here's a great summary from Greater Good Studio - What is Human-Centered Design 

 

Better Revenue Attribution and Belief

The need for better revenue attribution is not new. Still, it’s shocking how hard it is for many marketing organizations. Big consumer product goods companies and ecommerce companies seem to have this licked. For most others it remains a work-in-progress. Many CMOs are stymied by the difficulty in proving that a dollar spent in marketing (across 12 channels over an extended period of time) results in a causal uptick in sales. Building all the hard data pipes to prove it and report it daily (unless you are ecommerce) may be prohibitive.

Demonstrating the correlation between strong marketing programs and business results via highly instrumented pilots may be the better strategy. Then comes the second part of the CMO’s job – building belief in the senior executive ranks. These are the colleagues vying for limited annual budget dollars. They may be IT leaders, product leaders, finance folks. They are not marketers. Communicating the evidence of these pilots and getting them to acknowledge and buy-in to those results takes some adept maneuvering. Never assume the results speak for themselves. You can have produced the most definitive results, but if you haven’t gotten the “management committee” shark tank to acknowledge it, all may be for naught.

Do you want to be a marketing services leader or do you want to be the CMO in line to become the Chief Revenue Officer?

 

Build an Operating System That Delivers Against Key Goals

I have spent a lot of time planning out the next marketing organization structure. Is it aligned to products, customers, channels, marketing operations like ‘demand gen?’ While it matters which you choose or which hybrid you build, in this age of “agile marketing” how you work together may matter more. 

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just adopting agile marketing as a method. First of all, it doesn’t exist. Many of us have been working to apply the principles and ceremonies of ‘agile’ to marketing. Listen to the Agile Marketing podcast and it corroborates my experience applying it to an enterprise marketing organization – some things work and others don’t. (See The Boston Agile Group's approach here). CMG built a variant on an emerging view of agile marketing as an OS. It’s pretty strong and yet relies on significant change management to actually put it into practice.

 

Some marketers see promise in the “flywheel” model (see video above). This has been made popular by Hubspot. The flywheel is really portrayed as an alternative to the sales funnel yet it has strong implications for how your marketing organization can operate.

Creating a Marketing OS that works for you is highly personalized to your organization. My best suggestion is to rally your teams around common processes which may have shared artifacts like a common brief, channel plan or content Kanban board. Regardless of who the marketing team members report to or what discipline they come from – email vs. social vs. performance – if they share a common approach and tools to planning and execution that will become increasingly effective.

 

A Portfolio Approach

CMOs with an ambition to endure need to deliver value in the short run and they need to place bets on foundational capabilities that will help the organization compete next year or the year after. Tenured CMOs build a portfolio approach to their jobs and bravely place bets on tomorrow.

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

One of the real gems of planning methods, Drivers and Barriers, examines a particular customer persona at a stage in their journey, e.g., discovery, education/engagement, etc., and using any available research, identifies the drivers and barriers. Click the link to learn more. 

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

AI-generated text is one thing, but visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures. Click the link to learn about the innovators like KittyKat. 

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

Practical Steps for Digital Transformation in Business

"Digital Transformation" is big business for the world's top consultancies. The pressure for business to adopt digital practices has never been greater, and still it may feel inaccessible to many. You don't need a 6-7 figure consulting engagement to get started. 

Here are some models for assessing and organizing how a business leader can manage digital change that can help.

Going Digital

What does “going more digital” in your business mean? In short, business leaders are faced with making sure their businesses can compete and achieve their ambition at a time when digital channels, technologies and behaviors are changing basic business processes from marketing, sales, operations, talent management and more. You ‘go digital’ because you have to in order to meet your goals today and tomorrow.

Larger businesses have been feeling the pressure to adopt more digitally-based capabilities like marketing via digital channels or streamlining operations by integrating data and supply chain management. They have been investing millions in digital transformation. See the digital change stories from Nestle, Walmart and Aetna. Small startups have made digital a competitive advantage as they build their business around these changes without the ball and chain of legacy systems or cultures. Often their whole business is made possible by new digital platforms and behaviors. See Venmo, AirBNB, CoverHound, HelloTech and many, many more.

For everyone else, there is that careful assessment of what changes can be made in the business to reap a financial benefit quickly while committing to building new capabilities that may payoff beyond the current fiscal year. Where does a business leader start?

There are two approaches that may make sense for your business: Portfolio Management and Journey-based Transformation.

Portfolio Management

Whether you are a regional construction company with $100M in revenue or a new retail store hoping to break $1M in annual revenue, you can create a practical plan to “go more digital’ around a portfolio management approach.

Woody Driggs, EY Americas Advisory Digital Transformation Wavespace Leader has a solid POV on managing three portfolios: Protect, Optimize and Growth. “Protect” asks you to identify that part of your business that is mission critical and where you may have significant risks. Think customer data and privacy or any areas of your business governed by regulation. “Optimize” has you find those parts of your business where an incremental improvement can deliver cost savings or some other benefit in the near term. “Growth” is a bit more speculative and requires you to plan for bigger changes that can help your business grow into the future. This may be in response to industry disruptions  - e.g. how hard it is for construction companies to find experienced workers. Woody suggests you manage this third portfolio as a private equity fund:

““For a successful growth portfolio, a company needs to try to understand future trends and changes that will impact customers,” he says – for example, the ways in which Gen Z consumes services differently, or the shift in the healthcare sector from a focus on paying for procedures to paying for outcomes. “They then need to make a plan by working backward to apply resources to these scenarios while determining their market feasibility at the present time.””

 

Journey-based Transformation

Whether you are a B2B business like a medical device company that sells to hospitals or medical practices, or a B2C business like a retail store that sells online and on main street, you can easily re-imagine your business through the lens of the customer. This starts with simple frameworks that break down your business into phases that span from marketing to customer engagement to loyalty and retention.

There are lots of ways to document a customer journey within a particular business. There is also a bit of an art to documenting the real journey versus the one that senior execs may think is happening.

Click here for a gallery of customer journey maps to give you a sense of that diversity.

Take a simple journey like this:

Now, examine how your business supports the customer in each phase and determine what Incremental improvements can be made via digital processes that make for a better experience and reduce cost. Next determine what bigger, Growth changes could be made that would help the business grow and compete in the near future. These are the big, transformational changes like selling directly online or developing new products based upon digital insights. Essentially, this is applying a portfolio approach to the journey phases. This ensures your innovations will deliver value to your customers and are not digital for digital's sake. You don’t have to be a Fortune 100 company to benefit from this type of analysis and management.

Once you have a view of what you might start with, it’s time to prioritize. You will not have the resources to make improvements across the board. Start with a known priority – you may need to acquire new customers or improve retention with the ones you have. You may need to improve the performance of your salesforce or simply drive down the costs of servicing existing customers. Then look at what can be done more easily – low-hanging fruit – and those changes that may take more time with some foundational effort happening immediately.

 

Last Word

Digital Transformation is never easy (here are reasons why digital transformations fail). Still, these are methods that any business can use to begin to get a handle on what they can do to make their business more digital over time. 

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

For small and mid-size businesses who want to build their brand (and, therefore, their business) thoughtfully and with intention, click on the link for 5 questions that will help you sort out what your distinctive brand is all about.

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

 

Three Ways to Scale Humanity in Marketing Technology and Automation

For those of us trying to scale marketing’s impact via new technology and data solutions, one of the big tricks is holding onto some humanity in these approaches. Marketing automation quickly gets, well, automated and devoid of personality. What can you do to retain and apply humanity at scale? How do you avoid the pitfalls of marketing that tries to be more human and personal but ends up reeking of stock phrases and machine-made personal touches.

The problem may not lie in the new technology so much as the habits of big companies. Just think about all of the stars of Fast Company extolling the wisdom of personal customer service and human touches. They are almost all small companies. And the big guys who get held up as poster-children of the personal touch - Zappos, Neiman Marcus and the Ritz Carlton - are the same service-side players that always get featured. It’s hard for big companies to embrace their humanity and address their customers in colloquial, conversational language that reveals a bit of the humanity of the people behind the scenes.

That being said, marketing technology can aggravate this tendency. Here are three examples where marketers are trying to use technology to strengthen that human connection.

 

Show me my field rep

We recently launched a new approach to email marketing with our independent agents. Two of our marketers could see what a truly great email approach could be, one that strengthens our relationships with these agents while at the same time drives actions that mattered to them and to us.

They designed each email to start with something quite simple: a photograph of the field rep from our company that represented that independent agent. The emails were personalized to the agent and the sender was their field rep. This type of personalization is foundational to good email marketing. The photograph was that extra touch that made the difference. It wasn’t easy to pull off and my hat’s off to our internal team who connected the images associated with employee profiles on our intranet to serve up via the email system.

The gymnastics needed to make this work might cause many to question, is it worth it? The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ anything we can do to share our humanity with our agents and customers helps us make the connection we value most – being trusted partners who genuinely care about our customers and our communities.

 

Handwritten notes at scale

I had a boss who would send me handwritten notes 3-4 times a year to acknowledge some accomplishment. Ultimately, I really appreciated these notes. Rarely do I receive a handwritten note from the CEO of a partner company (I refer to the companies we use for various functions and technology in marketing as ‘partners.’ I don’t like the word ‘vendor’ or its implications). Actually, I cannot remember ever getting a handwritten note. Emails, sure. Handwritten notes deliver a different impact.  But how would you scale that?

Bond has figured it out. They have created a web-based service for sending out handwritten notes at scale. You can see the rows of handwriting machines on their web site, each capable of a variety of writing styles. Now, I doubt the recipient is fooled into thinking the CEO of a company wrote them this perfectly printed note. Combine four things and I don’t care: the note card format, a sender who is a real executive, the script lettering and, most of all, a human, conversational message.

It’s funny that it’s this last piece, the actual copy, itself that companies likely struggle with the most. If we all just wrote a bit more conversationally and friendlier, we might achieve more humanity in our Web sites, our direct mail, even our advertisements.

 

Chatbots: friendly but not chatty

Too much has been written on chatbots. If you want to catch up on the whole concept, here’s a decent summary from Deloitte Digital.

We have been developing AI-fueled chatbots over the past year or two and one of the biggest learnings has little to do with the whiz-bang artificial intelligence and machine learning that promises to make these chatbots sharper with their answers. A tricky piece has been weaving in a friendly, conversational tone that doesn’t become too chatty and get in the way of the communication. Everyone interacting with a bot should know it’s a bot. Trying to trick people into thinking they are interacting with call center rep is not cool (and not likely to work.) Making the interactions pleasant, more than ‘just the facts, m’am,” and even with a bit of a smile can go a long way to reveal our own humanity in a simple interaction.

Mya is a chat bot developed for the talent acquisition field that conveys that human touch well. The folks behind it began running a recruiting service for college grads called First Job and then pivoted to develop Mya as their core gig. The dialogue style is conversational and meant to help nurture talent and update talent databases. The humanity is subtle and doesn’t get in the way of the communication. Think about it – the best way to add humanity is with humor or story, both of which would make interactions too long. Short and sweet and human.

 

Humanity Builds Trust

If we want to strengthen trust between brands and customers, one way we will do that is by revealing our humanity. Think about the classic equation for trust which I first learned from David Maister:

Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation

The intimacy in the equation comes from our willingness to reveal our humanity. Think about how you are doing that in your marketing. And think about how that can scale via martech.  

 

From NextNow Digital:

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

The importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link. 

Three Examples of Content Marketing to Enable Your Sales Channel

If you sell through a sales channel and especially if you sell through an independent sales channel, a portion of your marketing effort goes towards enabling their sales effort. That’s old news. Most B2B marketing started by creating sales collateral to put in the hands of the sales staff. Then came the “consumerization” of B2B marketing where marketers connected directly with prospects and customers via digital channels and began building trust and laying the groundwork for preference.

How marketing supports sales channels is changing. This is largely because buyer habits are changing. Three-page sell sheets may still have a role but it’s a smaller one.  Buyers are doing their own research online. They (we) look for quick ways to get smart on a subject like retirement, insurance or home buying, that may be complex or jargon-filled and inaccessible. Then we talk to a sales agent.

Think about how investment firms like Blackrock create awareness and demand from investors while helping the financial advisor with content that helps them be smarter or actual content they can pass along to their clients.

Content that respects our time – short explainer videos, “Three Tips…” articles, 1-minute diagnostic quizzes – help us get smarter without having to take a sabbatical from work. Content needs to be designed to be of-use and responsive to whatever decision is likely in front of a buyer. That’s the new interpretation of ‘customer-centered.’

We want it on our phone and on our laptop. We discover it via our social feeds as well as search. We favor content passed along by a connection. Anything like a twelve-page whitepaper feels old-school or, at the very least, requires a time investment we keep putting off into the future. (How many 10-page pdfs sit on my hard drive waiting for that perfect moment when I can actually read or scan them?)

To help the sales staff today, we need to do three things:

• Educate sales about their buyer – how habits are changing, what is different about them today and will likely be different tomorrow. The notion that the sales person has the sacrosanct knowledge of their customer and how to sell to them is just, well, over.
• Give sales digital content that helps them connect with today’s and tomorrow’s buyer – more of that bite-sized, utility content designed around what the buyer needs to get done and native to the many screens they use.
• Train sales to become social sellers – tune-ups on how to connect via LinkedIn and Facebook and even interact digitally (e.g. text & email) with the next generation of buyers who just expect that.

Here are three examples of how brands or technologies are working to enable their sales channel to adapt and succeed.

 

Freddie Mac and the Borrower of the Future

Freddie Mac wants their lenders to be more familiar with today’s home-maybe-buyer. The core premise of the research and insights-heavy site - The Borrowers of the Future - is summed up, “What's on the mind of future borrowers? It may not be what you think.”

Articles sum up the ‘so what’ for lenders and convert societal trends into very practical terms:

• How Are Home Sharing Platforms Affecting Home Buying?
• Want to Help Millennials Become Homeowners? Try Townhouses
• High Housing Costs Are Root Cause of Low Homeownership Rates Among Young Adults

Experts from academia and Freddie Mac capture ideas in short videos. That places Freddie Mac at the heart of the solution. The whole site demonstrates their expertise vs. claiming it. It positions Freddie Mac as the “guide” not the hero of the story. In this B2B site, the lender is clearly the hero. As Donald Miller outlines in Building a Story Brand, being the guide is a powerful role for any brand to play.

 

State Street Listens

The investment firm, State Street, wants to help advisors and investors stay abreast of trends that will affect their investment strategies today and tomorrow. As a big firm, they have research budgets and capabilities not everyone would invest in. Their new “Listen” site publishes topical summaries of trends in five categories: Culture, Innovation, Markets, Perspective, Clarity. While these themes may be broad or high-minded, the actual articles get a little more down-to-earth (although not as practically titled as Freddie Mac):

• Building a New Workplace for Generation Z
• Memorize This: Three Tips for Remembering Clients' names, Faces and More
• Overruling the Heart: How Science, Data and Experience Can Curb Lovesick Investing

The articles are by-lined by State Street Advisors thus establishing their expertise. ‘Listen’ articles feature in their LinkedIn channel making them easy for advisors to pass along in their own feeds. State Street is working to give their advisors more that they can use to engage their clients and prospects more often. This goes beyond the robust research reports they are known for into more scannable content with a quick POV. 

 

Sales Content Platforms: Seismic

Seismic is a platform for sharing content with a distributed sales force. There are a few solutions like it out there. Conceptually, I am more than intrigued by the promise of a platform like this. Practically-speaking it does seem like advanced science for most sales people and organizations.

The breakthrough of this type of platform is how it connects marketing with sales via a data-driven solution.  Marketing wants to create content that works hard for sales. The performance and sales analytics – what content is being used most, what content is associated with a sales event- remove the guesswork or biased anecdotes from well-intentioned sales leaders. Now we can know what content works hardest.

The platform puts more content in more formats at the fingertips of sales people. They can find it easily. They can sort it and think about how content aligns to wherever a prospect is within their buyer journey. With Seismic securing another $100M in Series E investment and with John W. Thompson, Chairman at Microsoft, joining the board, the VC community is demonstrating belief in their platform.

 

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Marketing has always supported sales. The change that’s coming is the full instrumentation of the sales and marketing functions and their technology-enabled integration. Business leaders will overcome the tribal conflicts between sales and marketing as each function aligns around common KPIs revealed in a completely transparent dashboard of performance. Marketers can scale the impact of sales and know when they are truly winning. By delivering content that helps people make decisions quickly and easily wherever they are in their day or in the journey of their lives, marketing and sales can be aligned in serving today's customer.

 

From NextNow Digital:

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

The importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link. 

Three Predictions for Brand Marketers in 2019 (It's All About the Data)

If I really knew what was coming down the pike, I would quietly invest in the market that benefits from my so-called predictions and be done with it. I am not much of a gambler. Still, that doesn’t mean I am wrong, but I certainly acknowledge that I might be.

With that bold statement of confidence, here are my quick predictions for marketers next year:

 

Brands will need to take a stand on marketing and customer data stewardship

Brands need to protect their customer’s data in two ways. The first is cyber security - protecting the customer data in their care from breaches. The second is protecting customer data and privacy from misuse. Think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Both protections are a part of a brand’s customer data stewardship, but it’s the second risk – misuse – that brands will be held accountable later next year.

So far, brands have largely ducked the issue in regards to marketing data. Many are happy to let Facebook take the heat while growing their use of that ad platform (and other data targeting) to reach prospects and customers. No brand wants to be accused of misusing customer data. Better to let these monolithic media companies take the blame. And just what is “misuse” anyhow? Using new data sources and combinations to more effectively reach and engage people with content, offers and messages that are increasingly relevant to them is the positive promise of advanced customer data management. The dark side is the misuse of the new knowledge that brands may accrue on their customers. The examples often cited are health care insurers amassing behavioral data about customers that cause them to stop insuring them. I don’t know if that is happening but I can certainly imagine it.

The Cambridge Analytica example is similar. Gaining access to Facebook user data and unbeknownst to the end user, a company mined that data “to develop "psychographic" profiles of users, and target users with pro-Trump advertising, a claim that Cambridge Analytica denied."

Consumers are paralyzed by the complexity of data and privacy. According to the NYTimes,

“Research by Professor Turow and his colleagues has found that most Americans give up data for relevant ads not because of convenience, but resignation. Rather than participating in a rational exchange, he argues, consumers are giving up their personal information with “a feeling of futility.”

In 2019, the inertia caused by the complexity of the consumer problem will likely be broken by a confluence of events: the application of the GDPR-like California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the next brand-goes-too-far data-use scandal, the hubris of the VC community eager to back marketing data startups (especially AI) that promise an invasive set of capabilities and the 2020 election cycle which will show some of this ‘misuse’ in action.

As brands get serious about strengthening customer trust, a few will step forward voluntarily with their own, “customer data stewardship promise.”

Marketing personalization will remain nascent until 2020

Marketing personalization is a hot topic. Customers want it as revealed in the Segment 2017 study summarized by eConsultancy (chart above). Marketers are investing in more advanced capabilities to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time via the right channel. The martech stack for personalization expands. And so on.

Ecommerce companies are the leaders. They can immediately see the direct impact on sales for sites and email now governed by personalization engines (i.e. “Customers like you also bought…”). The investment has short term gains. But even becoming Amazon overnight is hard.

Then there are the other businesses who can imagine the benefits of personalized marketing. Pretty much every brand out there. 

Since this new capability hinges on solid customer data, it’s going to be slow going for a while. The VC and consultant community will push hard for personalization in 2019 eager to see their investments pay out. But brands who get serious about personalization need to get their house in order on data and that requires a cross-enterprise solution. New, significant case studies on marketing personalization won’t start to materialize until 2020. Think of 2019 as the year most marketers figure out just how hard it is and the foundation they need to have in place with data.

 

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) will really become a thing

Customer Data Platform is a made-up term. But so are so many terms in marketing. Who would have guessed that ‘account-based marketing’ would have grabbed hold the way it has?

The marketing data world is awash in jargon: DMP, CDP, data lakes, CRM, data warehouse, datamart, and more. Browse a few marketing blogs to compare the definitions for just DMP and CDP and you will see it’s still a little wild west out here. (You can check out my post on the difference here) 

A workable definition for Customer Data Platform comes from the CDP Insititute:

"A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems".

This definition has three critical elements:

- "packaged software": the CDP is a prebuilt system that is configured to meet the needs of each client.  Some technical resources will be required to set up and maintain the CDP, but it does not require the level of technical skill of a typical data warehouse project.  This reduces the time, cost, and risk and gives business users more control over the system, even though they may still need some technical assistance.

- "creates a persistent, unified customer database": the CDP creates a comprehensive view of each customer by capturing data from multiple systems, linking information related to the same customer, and storing the information to track behavior over time. The CDP contains personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results.

- "accessible to other systems": data stored in the CDP can be used by other systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.

eConsultancy has a great grid (from the CDP Institute) that quickly compares the features of different data assets like CDPs:

The reason CDPs will take hold as a concept is that companies already have master data management (MDM) initiatives underway to organize customer and stakeholder data for the benefit of the entire organization – but not necessarily designed around the needs of marketers.

The marketing and customer experience professionals need a marketing-specific resource, one  that is connected to the MDM system yet designed to power marketing content and delivery. CDP’s will become key to delivering personalized marketing. It is certainly possible to design the core functions of a CDP without buying a SaS, CDP-labeled solution. Building it via the IT function is risky and costly business. eConsultancy sums it up,

“A CDP is built with the marketing function in mind. Could you build a CDP yourself? In theory you could, and many custom IT projects try to achieve what a CDP does. Obviously, there are quite some big investments, time and risks involved in a custom project like that.”

CMO’s know that great customer data is foundational to tomorrow's successful marketing. In a recent Forrester study, CMO’s reported the following challenges (and more) to achieving marketing priorities next year:

• Poor quality, inconsistent, or inaccessible customer data                   43%
• Poor alignment or collaboration with IT                                             43%

CMO’s will latch onto CDPs as the marketing data solution that can more easily be communicated to IT while not wholly relying on an IT-build and implementation. CDPs will take hold because marketers need a manageable concept they can rally their people to implement. 

The immediate future of marketing hinges on the strength of 1st party data and 'data agility' - the ability to work quickly and easily to combine 1st party and 3rd party data for some benefit. 

 

Other Interesting Predictions

• 6 digital marketing predictions for 2019 - Smart Brief/Kent Lewis 
• Content Meets Technology: Marketing Predictions for 2019 - Martech Advisor/Casey Wuestefeld
• The 5 Biggest Marketing Trends For 2019 - CMO.com/Giselle Abramovich

 

From NextNow Digital:

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

The importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link. 

The Importance of Authentic Brand Storytelling

To connect with customers and communities, brands need to put more energy into brand storytelling. This is as much advice I am giving myself as anyone else wrestling with marketing at a large, enterprise brand.

It’s not enough to pump out a lot of content engineered to return well in Google search results. Traditional “buy” messages – often called “bottom-of-the-funnel” advertising – are likely not enough for most companies whose products compete against others that are not well differentiated in terms of benefits. Anthem-like brand films are good when you have something to wave a flag about, but even then, this is a lot of “inside-out” messaging.

Brand stories that demonstrate how people within a company work to solve customer challenges are different. And they cannot be constructed from whole cloth no matter how cynical a marketer you are. They are “discovered” within the people and operations of a company and then shaped to be as relevant as possible for an audience.

Two Stories

I want to share two stories from Travelers. We discovered each within the company. They reflect the commitment of people who care about our customers and our communities.

 

 

These brand stories are about people digging into hard problems – the opioid crisis and the growth of cyber risks and crime. Each is told by a real person.

If there is any pride in these storytellers, it is in the knowledge that they are trying to apply their specialisms – safety and health, risk management, recovery and more – to real problems people and business face. Few people wake up each day within large companies solely motivated by improving the share price. Financial health is a means to an end. The impact a thriving business can have on its communities is substantial.

 

 

Brand stories like these help customers and communities know a company and even understand what they sell - beyond the advertised products and services. This is customer-centered marketing in that they aim to frame what we do in relation to the benefit for our customers and their stakeholders.

Lessons Learned for Strong Brand Stories

• Find real stories of people earnestly solving problems
• Tell these stories succinctly in a way that respects the audience’s time and interests
• Use a genuine voice or storyteller to reveal more and, gasp, allow for some intimacy
• Lead people to more content that digs even deeper and does connect to what you sell
• Share the content via the channels and moments that make sense to your customers and stakeholders
• Make brand stories a key ingredient in a content marketing program designed around the complete buyer journey

Relevant Resources:   

• Storytelling, Brands and Some Words Of Wisdom – Forbes
• Why Only 10 Percent of Content Marketers Have Embraced Brand Storytelling – Content Standard/Skyword
• 8 Helpful Brand Storytelling Tips for B2B Businesses – Startup Nation

CES 2018: Four Wishes for the Future

I am just back from CES 2018 and found myself trying to sort through that experience of hobnobbing with 184K of my closest friends. What did I see or experience that really mattered to me? There are plenty of great recaps of what was shown and what happened at CES 2018. One of my favorites is the CNET CES 2018 hub. When we attend, I always appreciate the briefing that CNET’s Brian Cooley does for our team. He’s a great analyst and guide.

So while I could talk about the neat bits and bobs in the Smart Home category like Kohler’s Alexa-powered mirror or Vivint’s increasingly big booth; or Samsung’s 146” snap tech TV; or the autonomous Lyft ride; I am going to think ahead towards some simple wishes.

The event is exhilarating and tiring, and I prefer to surrender to optimism and look ahead to what might be.

 

Here are my 4 wishes coming out of CES 2018:

Big Vision Like Ford’s Living Street Gets Rewarded by Wall Street

“If you can change the street you can change the world” said Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford during the main keynote at CES 2018 (watch it here).

The vision is about restoring cities and a shared sense of belonging sacrificed by tech starting with the advent of the highway ‘operating system’ if not the automobile, itself. We need to harness tech to improve lives and restore a sense of community.

The Living Street vision combines car and infrastructure IoT. It includes the Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC) – an open and collaborative platform; Cellular Vehicle to Everything (CV to X) – a partnership with Qualcomm to leverage the direct communications of 700K vehicles on the road; and self-driving business model(s) – establishing an API-led approach being tested with the Postmates delivery service, Dominoes and Lyft.

Jim delivered an inspiring and aspirational message at a show dominated by gadget geeks. A tech-rendered view of a new urban utopia seemed to spin off the architect’s CAD system onto a ribbon of video screens behind him that were reminiscent of the very roadways that need a re-think. (all thanks to Alex McDowell, production designer extraordinaire.)

Mr. Hackett cited physicists and ethicists as his close friends and influences. He made it clear that he thinks about some heady stuff.

I was inspired. I appreciated that he had ‘purpose’ at the heart of the thinking – craft or restore our vital cities towards vibrant and healthy communities. Ford partners with other great brands who are deeply expert in what they do. That type of brand collaboration provides a competitive edge and also telegraphs a healthy humility that Ford cannot figure this out on their own.

If Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford does not show off some commercially appetizing vehicles at the follow-on event, the North American International Auto Show, he may not have a long enough tenure at Ford to see The Living Street actually come to life.

He must sell cars and trucks today to hold onto investor confidence. I hope that the Ford stock retains value and grows. I am a customer. I hope Wall Street rewards the vision and that Mr. Hackett continues with strong vehicle sales now to fund this future vision. 

 

The Smart Home and AI Lead to an Anticipatory Environment

Smart Home tech was everywhere. There were more sensors of every variety, cameras combined with light bulbs and robots, and applications against more and more use cases from showers to kitchens to litter boxes.

Often demos of these products began with the opening of an app on smart phone. Increasingly it began with a voice-command to either Alexa or Hey Google. The possibilities and modality in the apps was impressive. Still, after the third swipe or button-click to turn something on in the home or the awkward voice command, “Alexa, open the blah, blah, blah skill...,” I just get a little tired.

The tech hobbyists have the patience to establish “scenes” which bundle several actions together. Blurt out, “Alexa, night time,” and you could dim lights, lock the front door, turn the room temperature down and more.

But I want that to all happen automatically when I walk in the door - because I have done it before, it’s Tuesday night, and it’s what I like. We need the tech to anticipate us and drop the cognitive load to zero – or as close to zero as possible. I want control and simplicity and not necessarily in that order. 

By combining artificial intelligence and the machine learning within it, smart tech can teach itself what experience to manifest based upon my behavior, not twelve button clicks in an app.

Brain Cooley (@briancooley) mentioned ViaRoom, an AI-powered hub-of-hubs meant to learn your habits. I expect Google, Apple and Amazon, at least, to offer their own versions of this intelligence going forward.

Technology that accurately anticipates needs will be a leap forward.

 

Marketing Becomes True Customer Experience

CES is not a marketing show. The marketing “hub” at Tech South was particularly scattered and anemic this year. Still, the event is great for brand marketers. We want to get glimpses of innovation in consumer’s lives, talk with smart people who are working to bring those innovations to market, learn from others what may be next, discover new potential channels or how consumers are or will be spending their time, and more.

Still, some marketers are just trying to understand where to put their ads on a smart fridge or a dual screen smart phone.

Interruptive advertising may really be in its last legs. Joe Marchese (@joemarchese) from Fox developed a POV that we ought to be planning marketing around a fixed asset – people’s available attention. His Attention Rate Card is a way to scale, buy and sell access to customers. He takes an old idea – the attention economy – and breathes new life through the practical lens of how we purchase media. In this model, we can buy access but we must earn the attention by delivering real value to the customer/prospect. We earn that attention by being genuinely relevant and useful to people, not finding new ways to wedge in ad messages.

I love marketing. But it’s time for it to become “customer experience” where everything we do to sell the right product or service at the right time to the right customer becomes an authentic value to that customer. Either we reminded them of a product when they were truly shopping, or the brand provides a service and becomes relevant or we help them accomplish something important.

If we accept a broad view of ‘customer experience’ as our relationship starting before we even know that customer through acquisition and loyalty and ahead to losing that customer and winning them back, then marketing needs to become that big view of customer experience.

It’s a semantic change. I get it. But the line between marketing and customer experience needs to go away. And we are more apt to see customer experience as being in service to the customer and, therefore, all about delivering value. That’s what marketing needs to be going forward.

 

AI-powered Virtual Agents Become the New Interface 

Judging by posters and billboards around Vegas, it was easy to see that the battle is on between Hey Google and Amazon’s Alexa to become the dominant voice interface or agent inside of everything. Alexa seems to have a bit of a momentary advantage, yet most of the bets I heard were on Google to win.

But voice is only part of the story. CNET’s Brian Cooley (@briancooley ‏) showed a slide on virtual agent dominance beyond voice and Google owned the lion’s share of that pie chart. Next up is virtual agent plus artificial intelligence.

Whether it’s the spoken question or the typed phrase or the submitted image, the new ability to have machines learn your intent and give you the most useful answer could change how many interfaces are designed going forward.

Think about Web sites. Most are designed with three basic interfaces: navigation, browse and search. Users can try to click through a navigation hierarchy to get to something they need. They can browse pages to discover something relevant. Finally, they can use the site search to find something they need.

Site search is the closest interface to AI agents in a chat format. Most brand sites are organized around products and search results reflect that. If you are not familiar with what a product is called, your search will be frustrating. Never mind that most brands under invest in the quality of their site search.    

Imagine a robust AI chat interface where you can type in the question you are trying to answer (or speak it into the microphone) and immediately get an answer and relevant link to the best content. Web sites become an AI chat window plus a beautiful way to browse. Find something specific quickly or simply browse for ideas and inspiration. That’s it.

No more big, spidery Web sites. No more product manuals. No more keyword search. Perhaps.

Here's another interesting POV on the interface topic: Why Google A.I. is the last user interface (Computerworld – Mike Elgan, @MikeElgan )

 

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