by Prakash Patel (@prakashpatel_1) I am living in a “Groundhog Day” world with a twist of digital, where we sometimes still do not understand our consumer.
“When consumers hears about a product today, their first reaction is ‘Let me search online for it.’ And so they go on a journey of discovery: about a product, a service, an issue, and an opportunity. Today you are not behind your competition. You are not behind the technology. You are behind your consumer.” — Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer, VivaKi.
Now, take one of my all-time favourite advertising quotes by forward-thinking David Ogilvy: “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife”. Why are we still unaware of who our consumers are? Why do we still treat them around our own agency models, channels or marketing departments and struggle with integration?
Neither ground-breaking nor new
Just the other week I had the opportunity to be on a panel with two of South Africa’s great creatives and businessmen, but what surprised me is that they were both debating the essence of the best agency model for today’s consumers, one being the collaboration model and the other the group of specialist companies — both models neither ground-breaking nor even new.
What they weren’t talking about was the consumer and integrating marketing, the challenge facing marketers today, and their views about the best or new innovative ways of reaching and connecting with today’s consumers.
I believe our role today has to be about the total consumer experience, regardless of it being online, offline or even blurred. We need to stop using buzzwords such as customer centricity, thrown in with words such as omnichannel (yes, a topic I have covered thoroughly before). I believe we now need to start living and doing what we preach… throw-away words should not win clients or awards (well, sadly, they will of course). We need to…
“Start marketing to today’s consumers through their eyes as the consumer.”
Treat them as if they were your wife, husband, partner, children or friends. We so often go to work and think like marketers and forget that we are also consumers. Surely, this is in essence what customer-centricity means or even what omnichannel marketing is all about. You, the consumer.
Now let’s think about how technology, digital and mobile have fundamentally transformed consumers beyond recognition when compared to how they behaved over decade, or even a few years, ago. Regardless of the product or service you may be seeking to buy, these days all research tends to start with a click or a tap, through a browser or search engine, where you then investigate, plan, compare and even purchase a product or service, then use and share your experiences by recommending (or complaining) about it with others on blogs, posts and forums.
Our experience, from being stimulated through to buying and recommending, has fundamentally changed and is now challenging everything we have done and need to do ‘differently’. Remember the Apple ad, Think Different? Nothing could be so true in today’s world. It’s been 20 years since this ad was made; let’s continue to think differently.
Why is there such a disconnect?
So I sometimes wonder why the various business processes that drive awareness, marketing, buying, selling or even complaint-handling haven’t changed for decades or have become even more dysfunctional and fragmented in how they operate. Why is there such a disconnect, when we ourselves behave differently?
Why do we constantly find ourselves running through the same debates and discussion about models and how best to integrate our services? Why do we need to put media into a box for us to operate within? When I switch on the TV, I do it because I want to watch a programme; when I use my phone to get a quote or search for a product, I don’t think, argh, I am now using a different medium and I must behave differently.
These days we behave seamlessly, navigating ourselves from one medium to another and back again without a second thought. This to me is beyond omni-channel or integration; it is about understanding the total customer experience OR digital disruption and the total digital customer experience.
Look at our customers as a totality
We need to think beyond and take a look at our customers as a totality — an experience that covers every channel, every touchpoint and every department. Most approaches to date have been to throw teams and tech at all the individual groups of the marketing and sales funnel, and to create more and more campaign-based efforts to optimise each area as individual short-term focus points. A brand will only be successful when the total customer experience is the focus of improvement holistically.
This is not to suggest that companies will only work on one large project to achieve this. Businesses will need to start potentially small and expand as they go and learn — but they will need to have an overarching holistic vision, that they are all working towards, to bring together all elements in a cohesive and integrated manner. The change needs to be from ‘moving quickly and reaping early rewards’ to ‘moving quickly and working towards achieving a strategic objective’.
And this is the key challenge for marketers and agencies to get their head around, especially as marketing departments are currently working separately to create more and more digital experiences than ever before. The challenge now is to change how a business strategises the bringing together of these separate departments in order to ensure delivery of a consistent brand experience which integrates everything a brand does (physical or otherwise) to create a total customer experience — as we already do in the real world as a consumer.
Next time I will focus upon CRM and how it is more fundamental than ever before to how we can achieve the total customer experience.
Prakash Patel (@prakashpatel_1) is chief strategy officer at Fogg Experiential Design, a digital and experiential agency based in Johannesburg and Cape Town that believes in the power of creative ideas and the technical magic that brings them to life.
He has over 25 years of experience in advertising, digital and data planning, a passion for integrated marketing strategies, and believes that the holy grail of marketing has always been — and always will be — data. Prakash contributes the monthly “#3D” (Data-Driven & Digital) column to MarkLives.com, exploring how data-driven and digital marketing can add value to marketing communication.
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