I recently commented on a Forrester blog entry "Defining 'Customer Experience'" (see http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/7505136), which makes the point that marketing needs to embrace more than the early phase of the buying process to include the broad suite of interactions customers have with the brand:
I think most marketers are missing the big picture. They therefore continually oscillate from focusing on successive new marketing trends, blindly following "conventional wisdom". In Cisco's example, they are now focusing on the customer experience with the transactions, products and interactions. However, they are still missing the customer's perspective.
Customers simply want to know that a product/services bundle is best suited to their needs and resources (the things a merchant needs from the customer, such as time, money, effort, etc.). Of course, this is a lot easier said than done. Even customers themselves often don't really know what they need/want and how much they value it. Their largely autonomic calculation is based on a complex set of dynamic factors that uses both logic and emotions.
Marketers have therefore tried to simplify their efforts by influencing some of those variables to make customers emotionally predisposed in favour of the marketer's promise (brand). This is where marketing began to lose its credibility. It no longer served to help customers identify and assess the validity (appropriateness or fit) of the product/service being offered. Instead, marketing chose to reshape customers to fit the mould of their products/services. And it worked!
In today's "digital economy", customer's wants, needs, preferences, processes for evaluating product/service value and validity are different. Far more complex and uniquely defined physical and virtual environments than existed the one-to-many push media landscape of the 20th century influence customers more today. People are interconnected in complex webs of communication channels and experiences. They belong to numerous soups of online and offline communities, each motivating them to act in ways that help them attain distinct community objectives that influence customers' wants and needs.
Marketers stuck in the old "influence" mode will continue to experience ever-increasing transaction costs. By contrast, modern marketers realize that predicting and modifying customer behaviour is becoming exponentially more complex, analogous to chaotic systems, such as the weather. They realize that marketing to "swarming mobs" is going to require dramatically different approaches. Brands will need to promise communities a set of values and philosophies around which to gather. They will then have to deliver on specific promises they make to citizens of the "global village" of the 21st century, much like they did in the villages that preceded the shelter of anonymity offered by big cities and mass media. Marketing in the "global village" will rely more on a verifiable reputation. In other words, marketing will have to become more a facilitator of helping customers to acquire valid products/services, because unhappy customers can quickly infect the reputation of the vendor and conversely happy customers virally stimulate community acceptance.
Marketers of the 21st century need to undergo a paradigm shift in thinking about their relationship with customers. Those who remain rooted in the ancient us-versus-them mentality, where customers are viewed as a threat to the welfare of the firm and therefore a risk that must be managed with controls, such as manipulative brands, will not be accepted by their customer's communities. By contrast, marketers who fundamentally believe in helping customers discover and experience products/services that deliver superior intrinsic value will be championed by the members of the communities they serve.
In the end, it is all about trust. Marketers who help customers to establish and maintain trust in their value propositions will be rewarded with reduced transaction costs and increased volume, velocity and value of business transactions, which means more profitable business. In a "global village" customers reciprocate when companies apply the "golden rule" to their customer relationships. That represents a paradigm shift in marketing.
Alex Todd
President & CEO
Trust Enabling Strategies
http://www.TrustEnablement.com
As always, I welcome your comments.
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