Creativity in the age of Omni-channel — Part 1

Nowa­days, the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing era is long gone: we are now liv­ing in a world where the dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies are in the ser­vice of glob­al mar­ket­ing. Cur­rent­ly, the only way to real­ly make a dif­fer­ence for a brand, beyond the cre­ation of high added val­ue prod­ucts or ser­vice, is to be able to cre­ate a unique client expe­ri­ence, some­thing tru­ly out of the ordi­nary and out­stand­ing, cre­at­ing emo­tion. The main objec­tive of any cam­paign should be to cre­ate inti­ma­cy between the client and the brand, at the moment when the client is the most avail­able. The real chal­lenge lies in the brands’ abil­i­ty to emerge from the noise — in a world where every sin­gle brand has a web­site, a Face­book pres­ence and/or a mobile app — by being cre­ative, orig­i­nal and dif­fer­ent. There­fore, cre­ativ­i­ty, the capac­i­ty for a brand to imag­ine, cre­ate and dis­trib­ute pow­er­ful dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing expe­ri­ences, is absolute­ly essential.

But does a brand achieve this objec­tive? In the first part of this arti­cle dis­cussing cre­ativ­i­ty in the age of Omni-chan­nel, we will see how mar­keters can take advan­tage of tech­nol­o­gy to boost cre­ativ­i­ty and cre­ate rich­er inter­ac­tions with their clients. Next week, we’ll explore in more details what are the pil­lars of cre­ativ­i­ty in this omni-chan­nel environment.

The Omni-Chan­nel challenge

Much more than an “inte­grat­ed” vision, the term omni-chan­nel means focus­ing on a seam­less approach to the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, using all avail­able cus­tomer-fac­ing chan­nels, both phys­i­cal and online. Omni-chan­nel is also the era of con­ver­gence between sci­ence and art, between data and cre­ativ­i­ty: the meet­ing between rich and appeal­ing con­tent, and the con­sump­tion of the data issued from these contents.

Tech­nol­o­gy (like per­son­al­iza­tion, geo-local­iza­tion, or dynam­ic tar­get­ing) now allows mar­keters to cre­ate and deliv­er com­pelling expe­ri­ences to the right audi­ence at the right time, through the right chan­nel. How­ev­er, the real issue is still the capac­i­ty of a brand to push the right mes­sage, a unique com­mu­ni­ca­tion stand­ing out from the crowd, at the right moment, in order to obtain a conversion.

Embrac­ing omni-chan­nel then means uni­fy­ing the expe­ri­ence your cus­tomers receive each time they engage with your brand, but also keep­ing a close eye to what excites and what annoys them.

Cre­at­ing a mar­ket­ing message

From the col­lec­tion of cus­tomer data to the seg­men­ta­tion of audi­ences, the cre­ation of the mar­ket­ing mes­sage and the deliv­ery of a seam­less cam­paign across all chan­nels, adopt­ing an omni-chan­nel approach to your mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy is all about the abil­i­ty to intel­li­gent­ly tar­get the right mes­sages to customers.

To achieve that, it is vital for brands to be able to lis­ten to their cus­tomers, to pre­dict the behav­iors of their clients using the data col­lect­ed, to assem­ble a cre­ative mes­sage by think­ing out of the box, and then to deliv­er it dynam­i­cal­ly across all rel­e­vant medi­ums, at the right moment.

Cre­at­ing mem­o­rable moments — being able to get inte­grat­ed in its client’s life by mak­ing them live a unique expe­ri­ence in order to pro­mote a prod­uct or a ser­vice – has always been and still is, one of the fun­da­men­tals of mar­ket­ing. It is only the options avail­able to mar­keters which have increased, final­ly allow­ing them to tar­get and per­son­al­ize the rela­tion through cre­atives which keep on get­ting more fas­ci­nat­ing and bet­ter performing.

So, what are some of the chal­lenges you face in the age of omni-chan­nel? Do not hes­i­tate to share your views in the com­ments sec­tion below, before our fol­low-up arti­cle about the pil­lars of creativity.