During a recent trip to London, I spent time with the Smart Focus team to discuss the promise and shortcomings of omni-channel strategies. It was a pretty productive collaboration resulting in a video that explores the new digital customer, an ebook focused on omni-channel experiences and a webinar on the future of marketing. Customers are more connected and more informed than ever. Digital marketers now need an entirely fresh perspective to succeed in a world where customers and prospects experience their brand in multiple ways…
The New Marketing Contract and Why Context is the Future of Marketing
We live in a time of great technology evolution and revolution. Innovation is not only upon us; it affects, even disrupts, us as marketers and as consumers of other businesses. Your customers are more connected than ever before and they’re always on. The number of touchpoints between businesses and customers has exploded. Technology is everywhere and something new is always on the horizon. Wearables. Smart watches. The Internet of Things. Everything is changing. Indeed, today’s consumers are more empowered than…
Embracing the Audience: 5 Tips on Customer-Based Marketing
After I presented at the Digital Media Summit in Toronto, Sylvia Ng, VP of Growth and Analytics at ScribbleLive, asked for an interview to discuss challenges and opportunities ahead for digital marketers. Following is her summary of our conversation. I wanted to share it with you here… In the midst of endless blogs, podcasts, tweets, instagrams, and snapchats, how does a brand or business get noticed? Creating a truly effective marketing campaign is about understanding your brand, and more importantly,…
How Marketers Can Thrive in an Era of Digital Darwinism
While in London promoting What’s the Future of Business (WTF): Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, I spent some time with the folks who produce The Digital Marketing Show. In this short video, I share the rise of Generation C and how an era of connected consumerism created the perfect storm for digital Darwinism to accelerate. We also discuss how the future of marketing takes more than technology, it takes a philosophical shift to create meaningful and shareable experiences. It’s…
The Future of Business is About Experience Architecture
Digital Darwinism is forcing businesses to #AdaptorDie. Many realize that customers are different. At the same time, leaders understand that how employees want to work is also changing. Yet, they’re frozen in the past, undermining the future simply because they do not know what to do and how. After all that is known, it is the unknown and the fear of venturing into the unfamiliar that becomes paralyzing. I spend a substantial amount of time inside businesses researching digital transformation…
Creating Truly Personal Omni-Channel Customer Experiences
When I was in London, I visited the Smart Focus HQ to shoot a series of videos, host a webinar and also sign books for local marketing professionals (videos and webinar accessible here.) While there, something unplanned and very cool began to surface and I’m excited to share the result with you here. We assembled all of the content, organized it, and developed additional material as a dedicated ebook. I’ve embedded it below or you can read more about it…
Customer Experience is Becoming More Important Than the Product Itself
Customer experience is the sum of all engagements and interactions a customer has with your business in every step of their journey and lifecycle. It’s what your customer feels, thinks, says (to you and others) and more so, what they do now and in the time to come that counts for everything. CX is measured not by NPS (Net Promoter Score) but instead by the sentiment and outcomes in every moment of truth throughout the relationship. That.is.the.experience. And, it’s yours…
Companies Profit When Customers Suffer
You’ve heard it a million times, a happy customer tells a couple of people and an unhappy customer tells everyone. Yet to this day, executives tend to run business strategy with an emphasis on transactions over experiences. More so, business value is expressed in short-term performance metrics and reports to an audience of shareholders and stakeholders over the very people who keep them in business…your customers. It’s all a bit absurd when you think about it. I know, I know…it’s…
Untethered From Tradition: How I Got Here
I didn’t set out to be an author, speaker or digital analyst/anthropologist. It just happened over the years. When I was younger, I studied economics and journalism. I actively experimented in online marketing. I was also a musician/songwriter. So, how did I get here? I spent some time with my friends over at Onboardly to answer just that. I’d like to share the transcription of our conversation with you here… The Freedom to Experiment 1. You’re a best selling author,…
The Future of Everything? It’s About People Connecting with People
These last few years have been an interesting ride. As fun as it has been, it is the next few years that will be the most telling and also transformative if all goes according to plan. As quickly as time flies, it’s important not to lose sight of the things that remind us of why we’re on this path together. I recently stumbled across a conversation with Eric Jacobson in which I shared what was driving me at the time…and…
