by Naimul Huq, W2O Group (excerpt)

The 2000s were the big bang of social media, heralded by the rapid expansion of new channels through which a brand can reach a customer.  Silicon Valley sent marketers on a meandering hunt as new variations of content and character length occupied their time. With content production still (as always) largely restricted to visual media, audio and copy, no matter what the platform, the universe of digital media has started to cool and form into stable elements.

At SXSW in 2017 W2O Group hosted its 7th Precommerce Summit, an annual gathering of marketing’s best thinkers for a day of exploration and consideration.  Each year, as speakers from around the country describe their keenest insights, a variety of themes naturally emerge in reflection of marketplace trends.  Like any good trend they stand out on their own accord.  We will be producing a substantial amount of content in our effort to showcase the great ideas we encountered this year at SXSW, but the first idea we wanted to highlight was Customer Experience.

A lot has been written about customer experience lately. In this post we’ll focus on what we discussed at PreCommerce this year.

We are a product of our experiences

At the highest level, a customer comes to your brand expecting the experience they expect.  Sounds tautological right?  It is, and that is meaningful because it often overlooked.  As Brian Solis said on Friday, to many consumers, a magazine is a broken iPad.  All of their preconceived notions about how your products should function are the result of their previous experiences with similar or earlier products. In the next 10 years a generation who has consumed media exclusively through screens will graduate to the consumer economy.  Kids who have only ever read books on kindles, watched videos on pocket screens, and pinched to zoom are starting summer IT support jobs, saving birthday Venmo deposits and cashing out their WoW inventories to buy, well, everything.  How can a brick and mortar brand hope to get those customers to visit them instead of Amazon?  By creating compelling experiences customers can’t get anywhere else. […]