‘Marketing needs to own the customer experience’: Adobe’s Nicholas Kontopoulos on why the role of the marketer needs to evolve
Ahead of a live webinar broadcast Nicholas Kontopoulos talks through the rise of experiential marketing, brand utility as a guide to marketing strategy, and why the role of the marketer needs to evolve - arguing that adopting a customer lens will be the brand-building endeavor of the future.
In a live webinar on Tuesday, 18th of February at 12 pm Nicholas Kontopoulos will share his insights and predictions for the future of marketing. Appearing alongside ON24’s Tim Johnston, Kontopoulos will discuss the convergence of technology with changing consumer behaviours and how marketers can harness new technologies to create consumer experiences with resonance. To register, click this link.
Experiential marketing today means the blending of the physical and digital worlds. It means asking ourselves how we bring together different touchpoints and how we do so in a way that delivers a meaningful experience for the customer.
Ultimately, experiential is about understanding the problem the customer is trying to solve and engaging them on that journey, in a way that creates the right level of experience – whether through digital, physical or combined touchpoints. That’s the real challenge that we will be tackling in the webinar.
Marketers need to reverse-engineer their thinking. We’ve had a lot of talk about Omnichannel over the years. I’ve been part of that conversation. But we’ve become too technology-focused. The reality is, consumers, whether its B2C or B2B, don’t think in terms of channels. In actual fact, the channel is only a window into the brand. If we want to evolve our marketing and ensure that it is more experiential, we have to think about how a customer embarks on her journey. How does she start to think about the problems she’s solving? How does she then choose to engage?
Technology is shaping the marketer, as well as the customer. Technology has played a massive role in driving behavioral change. It’s changing the way customers make decisions and source information. And equally, we’re able to gain more intimate insights into what they’re doing. When you’re interacting with my brand through different channels, I can learn more about what makes you tick, what you like, the type of content that engages you. I can start tailoring that experience that I’m delivering to you in a much smarter way. If you use consumer behavior as a guide, whether it’s a physical or digital channel isn’t important. Harnessing those insights is where human creative intelligence comes into play.
Marketing should play a key role in what the customer experience looks like. The problem with that is that a lot of businesses operate in silos. Even within marketing, you’ve got your search teams, you’ve got your events marketing teams, you’ve got your comms teams. All these silos tend to operate independently of one another. So there’s a growing awareness of the need to collapse these silos and do that enterprise-wide. In a B2B context, that means building a tighter relationship with sales, who play a crucial role in the overall experience. If you’re in B2C, it’s making sure the experience people receive in stores matches the experience they receive in a digital channel.
Our jobs as marketers have changed. Historically marketers have been tasked with building a companies ‘brand, creating market awareness, and ultimately feeding leads into a funnel with the expectation that revenue will come out the end. We have followed a very linear process, assuming that customers make decisions in a similarly linear way. But human beings are actually very amorphous decision-makers. So there needs to be a mindset shift around how we shape brands and build value. We make promises every day to customers – our ability to keep those promises is part of our brand value. That’s more than just marketing. It’s sales; it’s manufacturing, it’s your supply chain, your logistics supplier partners. We need to think about how experience is created from an ecosystem perspective. The significant change for marketers is thinking in a more holistic sense. Really, the CMO should be the orchestrator of the customer experience. And that takes a mindset shift. So the challenge is thinking about technology from an enterprise-wide lens rather than single solutions. Single solutions won’t solve your problems.
What I am passionate about is brand utility. Trust is the bedrock of customer experience. And central to trust is utility. To establish brand utility, you have to be thinking – what are the problems we are trying to solve for our customers? How are we removing unnecessary friction? You don’t want to remove all friction. You want positive friction that creates a memorable experience. And the best way to achieve that is with a service-oriented mindset. Whether that’s keeping the consumer informed after they’ve purchased a product, sending little insights on how the product is coming together, letting them know where it is in terms of its journey getting to me. Giving them the opportunity to interact with the unboxing experience and share that.
It’s about a depth of engagement with the customer and with your brand purpose. It’s not just, I need to get my likes up, I need to get my shares up, it’s a consideration of the end-to-end experience and what that experience is driving. If we want our customers to share, we need to ask ourselves, why should they share? We need to understand why customers buy from us, and if they do, is it always for the same reason? Maybe the reason they bought from us five years ago is changing now, and do we even know why they bought from us initially? What technology now enables us to do is really listen to our customers. That is one of the first things we need to do as marketers, sit down and listen.
Nicholas will be appearing in conversation on Tuesday, 18th of February at 12pm. There will be a Q&A directly following the webinar and the session will be available on catchup shortly after. To register, follow the link.