Shifting Past Owned, Earned And Paid Media
You say we live in the age of transparency. Thought leaders and industry experts tell us that ratings, reviews, and ubiquitous connectivity allow consumers to see through brands completely. I was part of that movement screaming from the proverbial hills with articles, speeches and a documentary. But it is a complete exaggeration.
Brands are not transparent. They are translucent. While we can’t rely on obfuscation and duplication to cover up bad behavior, consumers still see brands through a lens.
In fact, they want to see brands through a lens. Nobody remembers the pre-Gorbachev era when products didn’t even have branded packaging. Consumers don’t just want products. They want experiences.
This is what makes this generation so exciting for future-oriented marketers. The experience economy expands the creative canvas to combine product development, brand marketing and experience marketing.
Consumers want brands to create a translucent lens as long as it adds value rather than friction to their lives. This is what makes modern marketing so exciting for those who are ready to join the revolution.
Modern marketing is simply an exchange of data
Brands need to stop viewing advertising campaigns, websites, and social media as separate experiences. This goofy thinking creates a fragmented consumer experience. Brands need to change their mindset to see modern marketing as a data exchange.
In studies we conduct for our customers, we typically find over 40 different turning points where consumers make decisions and access information from brands.
Sometimes the information they’re looking for is as simple as a user-created photo, and sometimes they spend hours interacting with immersive content. Now let’s pause for a moment to think about what information really is. Information is data. Consumers want the same thing as brands. You want comprehensive, integrated, dynamic data. Data that provides the crucial inputs for deciding how to invest time, money and energy. Just like brands.
For this reason, the industry has to move away from a campaign model to a data exchange model. Consumers do not want the same data to be repeated across multiple channels. They want information that is personalized based on their contextual needs and behavioral history.
When you view marketing as a data exchange, brands are held back from the sluggish expansion of traditional online campaigns. It removes them from the social media memes that strive for irrelevant engagement metrics. It removes them from videos that are desperately trying to go viral. It removes them from websites that treat every customer the same way. Instead, brand history can grow one on one as consumers delve into product research and take a journey through the sales funnel.
On the brand side of that equation, every time we provide data to the audience, we get data in return, the most basic of which is demographic. Psychographic data are more interesting. Most important is the behavioral data. Every time she clicks, she tells us something about herself.
If we look at the travel category as an example to which we can all relate, these clicks tell us about their family structure, budget, location, travel preferences, motivations, and buying barriers. We know where she wants to stay, when she wants to stay, why she wants to stay, what she wants to do, how much she wants to spend, who she wants to travel with, what obstacles stand in her way and what motivators can get her over the last purchase hurdle.
This level of personalized data is revolutionary in nature, but not difficult to grasp. It is crucial that the overarching mindset and internal structures of the brands change in order to take advantage of the opportunity. It’s not complicated, but corporate structures are slow to change. This is one of the main reasons many of the most successful brands are relatively young. You are not hindered by old organizational models.
When you view marketing as a data exchange, you are moving beyond the concept of own, earned, and paid media. They realize that everything is just one thing: millions of consumers connected to brands through data. This shift in mindset is helping brands make strategic decisions about optimizing budgets, choosing key performance indicators, aligning technologies for personalization, and optimizing supplier performance.
It may not be the sexiest aspect of marketing, but it is one of the most important.
Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by: Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg, excerpt from their book Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption, published by powerHouse Books
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