Consumer Experience is Job 1 in creating a brand

Consumer experience is critical to building highly effective brand relationships with them.   The Page Group has always worked on understanding how the consumer connects with your company, products, and services in developing programs that are effective in sustaining long term brand relationships.  Adobe’s presentation at the Adobe Summit gets into the logic of building highly effective consumer experience as a core element of success in building strong brand connections with consumers.    By understanding the consumers needs, and building towards a better consumer experience with your brand you may achieve a longer lasting successful brand relationship with them.   By building strategies driven off of the behavior of your consumer and that  connection they have with your company, and products, you can build effective platforms that sustain and maintain strong brand relationships with them. 

Adobe Summit: Marketing Is Your Product And Customer Experience Is The Brand

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Marketing is on a reinvention journey, the first step of which is a stronger focus on customer experience across the entire organization, according to the keynote session this morning at the Adobe Summit, in Salt Lake City, where almost 7,000 digital marketers are in attendance.

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

  • Consumers want instant access to information on whatever device they choose.
  • Marketing doesn’t end when a brand finds the right audience or when someone clicks and buys the product.
  • “Consistent” and “continuous” are the two words that describe customer expectations today.

“We are experiencing a big sea change with more people connecting to the Internet,” said Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems (CMO.com’s parent company). “There’s more of a focus on the customer experience. But are we thinking broadly enough about what the product is?”

According to Narayen, customer expectations for personalization are raising the bar for marketers.

“[Marketers must] expand the definition of what the product is,” Narayen said. “Your product is your marketing. And when your product is marketing, it puts marketing at the very center of the company.”

Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of the digital marketing business unit at Adobe, told attendees that “the digital reality is that the customer experience has become the brand.” Because of that, he said, enterprises are forced to reorganize in order to portray themselves seamlessly across channels.

“Marketing can no longer be one department among many,” Rencher said. “It should be the epicenter of an organization’s digital transformation.”

Consumers want instant access to information on whatever device they choose. “Consistent and continuous,” Rencher said, are the two words that describe customer expectations today. Marketers must know the customer, love him or her, and respect the history they have with that individual, Rencher said.

The key to being consistent and continuous, according to Rencher, is mobile. It is forcing marketers to engage in “marketing beyond marketing,” he said, “meet consumer expectations, and create linked experiences at every touch point.”

Marketing doesn’t end when a brand finds the right audience or when someone clicks and buys the product, he told the packed audience at the Salt Palace Convention Center. All customer touchpoints need to abide by direct marketing principles. By way of illustration, Rencher introduced Laurie Buckingham, chief development officer at Coca-Cola, to talk about how that company is creating experiences far beyond typical marketing.

Since its launch in 1892, Coca-Cola, time and again, has worked to remain relevant to new generations of consumers. According to Buckingham, the company’s mission today is to create “moments of happiness” through digital and other experiences.

According to Buckingham, Coke’s internal motto for experiences is that they must be “liquid and linked,” meaning they flow like water and aren’t controlled by the brand. Instead, Coke listens to its fans to create happy experiences. In that sense, digital plays a role in building lifetime value, Buckingham said.

“We are trying to create engaging experiences and tie in happiness,” she said. “We have to surprise people.”

One example of such an experience is Coke’s “Small-World Machine,” which was set up in malls in Pakistan and India–two parts of the world that have been fighting for centuries. The machines provided a live communications portal and showed that what unites us is stronger than what sets us apart. The key to engaging through the machines was simple: People could complete a task, such as touching hands, drawing peace, love, and happiness symbols–together.

“Marketers must take the principles of digital marketing and make them consistent across every aspect of the consumer experience and the enterprise,” Rencher said. “Forward-thinking brands, [like Coca-Cola], clearly see this as an opportunity.”

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1 Comments to “Consumer Experience is Job 1 in creating a brand”

  1. Damian Magano says:

    I need to to thank you for this wonderful read!!
    I definitely enjoyed every bit of it. I have you saved as a favorite to look at
    new stuff you post…

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