There is no longer a straight path to customer engagement success, and marketing has moved well past a model that simply works by designing a message to influence consumer behavior. The customers are now in control. They resist being “targeted,” and, armed with a near infinite number of choices and an array customer engagement channels, most can switch companies with the swipe of a screen or the click of a mouse.
To build customer engagement and win brand loyalty, marketers now need to transcend traditional strategies. It requires building deeper customer relationships by changing and adapting along with the evolving expectations of customers. Beyond launching static marketing campaigns that exist in a single time and place, it requires a new contextual approach that crosses channels and connects moments.
According to Ed Burek, Director of Marketing at Pegasystems, dealing with this new generation of consumers actually requires customer experience professionals to become “un-marketers.” This is the idea that Burek discussed on stage during a talk titled, “The Age of Un-Marketing – Drive Contextual Marketing Not Just a Campaign,” at PegaWORLD 2015.
Un-Marketing is the idea that the campaign is always on. Since customers do not think about it as a singular event, neither can marketers. Brands need to be intimately aware of how customers think and act, and how to leverage this information through the right channel at the right time.
“Un-Marketing is your ability to adapt,” said Burek “It is your ability to know what is going on across multiple channels and being able to adapt to that at any point. You must be able to deliver a presentation of information to the customer across multiple channels, and be able to do it quickly and adapt quickly to what the business is trying to do based on the customer desire.”
Burek noted that most brands simply don’t know which way customers are going to go, and even the best predictive efforts are often wrong.
“You have to move beyond segmentation because even the best segmentations are still assumptions,” said Burek. “That is the old way of doing it. But if you know that a customer is going from Twitter to a website to Pinterest, and then to SMS and then go into a store, to finally do something. You know that they are crossing multiple channels, having different conversations with different people and none of that is connected, necessarily. By doing any marketing in a straight line linear fashion, you hurt yourself.”
The reality is that the new customer journey goes through numerous phases and it is not linear. To remain effective, marketing messages must be expanded to encompass all channels. Furthermore, this process cannot be thought of as just “marketing.” Burek stresses a new marketing perspective, which is to “own the customer journey.” This requires connecting the customer experience across channels and by integrating relevant data accumulated from multiple sources.
“Marketers are in charge of the customer journey,” Burek said. “We own it because no one else has a complete view of what they are looking at. Others tend to be siloed, and they shouldn’t be.”
The customer experience needs to be consistent, tangible, relevant, contextual, and nuanced for each individual. And it’s not just “pretty pictures on the glass,” as Burek described it. It is the right message, at the right place, at the right time, and in the right format. Of course, time and time again, it is stressed that this process requires brands to truly understand their customers, and it requires metrics.
Today, marketing efforts are really about the interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle, and how brands touch them through and across those channels. But given all the channels and touch points that now exist, brands need insights and automation to drive this engagement.
This, again, is un-marketing.
“It’s throwing away a linear process to be dynamic,” Burek said. “Because your customers are dynamic, your reaction to them has to be dynamic. And you need to understand them at every point and at every interaction.”
These new initiatives are integrated, they are comprehensive, they are adaptable, and they are 1-to-1.
This process may require a realignment of the entire company culture and a complete reworking of traditional marketing practices, but anything less means offering a customer experience that falls short of what is now expected.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.