A New Imperative
There is a significant and mounting problem facing businesses today.
Vast numbers of people doing marketing, running analytics, and managing businesses no longer understand how to compete. The complexity of gaining traction in the current consumer market has overwhelmed businesses with myriad new competitors, analytics tools, social media platforms, marketing techniques, and product proliferation resulting in mass confusion around what matters. The distance between market leaders and the remaining field of competition is so great, the only way for everyone else to contend is at a human relationship level. Tactics will never win against those that are connecting with customers meaningfully. Forging relationships is disruptive.
Brand Equity
The effectiveness of data-driven digital campaigns has slowed as marketers have realized peak optimization. With diminishing returns, the question being asked is: “Now what?” And, while technology continues to flourish providing infrastructure and analytics such as Shopify, Klaviyo, RivalIQ, Criteo, Funnel, among countless others, NONE provides the means to understand WHY and HOW brands can win and maintain customers for the long-term. Brands need a way to understand and measure how effective they are at engendering lasting relationships with their customers, i.e. generating ‘brand equity.’
A 2022 Harvard Business Review report reveals that businesses of all sizes are realizing the critical value of customer engagement, but executives say that disconnected tech stacks and siloed data are limiting their ability to optimize customer performance. What that means for business managers is they are left without a holistic picture of performance that reflects how effective they are at generating customer engagement, aka customer value.
To be differentiated in the market, brands need clear principles and positioning strategies. But in order to clarify these strategies, brands need to understand the highly personal, intrinsic, and often intangible motivations for people’s shopping behaviors that inspire engagement and drive brand loyalty. The current industry zeitgeist does not have a framework to house, measure, and act on the emotional motivators of customers.
“Growing limits on the use of customer data cannot simply be circumvented through technical solutions. Any sustainable first-party data strategy must have the customer relationship at its core.”
The conventional wisdom regarding ‘go-to-market’ strategies, processes, and especially data (big and small data) ignores measurement of brands’ effectiveness of forging meaningful relationships with their customers, mostly because they can’t, but also because they aren’t thinking in those terms.
Here’s the rub. While the marketing world has become obsessed with data driven customer targeting and promotions oriented automated message delivery, the cognitive processes, decision making criteria, values, and motivational behavior of the consumer have transformed. Most brands have missed the boat. Specifically, most brands are missing the groundswell change in the consciousness of today’s consumer, which is a new definition of what it means to live a quality life.
“Freedom is now defined by one’s ability to flourish via the relationships one creates. Freedom is about inclusivity. Autonomy is death. People (aka customers) are questioning centralization and top down hierarchies. More and more people are valuing distributed, collaborative, lateral connectivity for the good of the network. They see the world as an extended fictional family. They are beginning to see themselves as part of a larger consciousness and part of the biosphere. They are beginning to connect the dots, that everything they do affects everything else and every other being on the planet, this is a ‘biosphere consciousness’ that has never occurred before in history ”
Understanding how connections between us take effect is the foundation to understanding how to create a following.
This change in consciousness means there is a new imperative for brand leadership to understand how connections are made between us, between people, between brands and people, as the foundation of how to create a following. Customers are looking for brands that they can be in relationship with, that are transparent, values driven, share a global consciousness, and don’t just create products and services that are of quality, but demonstrate they are also connecting these same dots within the context of this extended ‘fictional family.’ Never before has it been more true that individuals are seeking to be part of a newly imagined empathic civilization, and as such, brands are becoming an integral part of forming such a society.
Without the ability to understand how this affects one’s brand, and without the ability to measure your own brand’s ability to forge relationships with people, with customers, and without the ability to operationalize these values, your brand will be left behind, competing on standards that are no longer relevant.