Beyond An Enabler, Technology Today Is Your Brand

Consumers increasingly judge companies based on their brand image—and they increasingly make buying decisions based on a business’s ability to harness technology and use it to deliver features and functionality

From direct mail and the telephone, to e-mail blasts and the web, to mobile apps and a variety of other methods and mechanisms, the evolution of marketing has been more zig-zag than straight line. However, today’s business environment is forcing CMOs and other marketing leaders to rethink and re-examine some long-held beliefs.

The stark reality is that consumers increasingly judge companies based on their brand image—and they increasingly make buying decisions based on a business’s ability to harness technology and use it to deliver features and functionality.

To be sure, success now revolves around more than eye-catching apps and personalized contextualized messaging. It goes far beyond SEO, native advertising, and social media. It even goes beyond big data and analytics. “There’s a need to think about technology in a more holistic way and tie it to the customer experience,” said Scott Brinker, author of “Hacking Marketing” and CTO at content marketing solutions provider Ion Interactive. “There is a need to redefine customer relationships and journeys in very different ways—and marketing technology is only a tiny fragment of the overall picture.”

The end game? “Marketers must build a culture around their brand. Tech provides amazing ways to foster, propagate, and help customers embrace and participate in a culture,” said Rick Ducey, managing director at retail and marketing consulting firm BIA/Kelsey.

This includes creating shortcuts, feature enhancements, frictionless transactions, and new ways to act and interact. Of course, all of this spans marketing, but it also reaches to other corners of the organization, as well as partners and affiliates. And it requires a different mindset. The ultimate goal is to “make the technology largely invisible,” Ducey told CMO.com. “That’s how you hit a home run and drive revenue.”

Culture Club

It’s important to fully recognize that technology now intersects with almost every aspect of a person’s life. Smartphones, tablets, computers, connected TVs, gaming devices, and consumer electronics drive behavior and buying decisions. Moreover, how these devices operate and lead a customer through tasks transform marketing.

For example, companies such as Amazon, Groupon, Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber engage consumers in entirely different ways, offer new access points and features, and greatly simplify processes that were at one time cumbersome, if even possible. “They succeed because they re-engineer engagement and the customer journey,” Brinker told CMO.com.

In many cases, the right combination of technology leads to a simple or zero interface that masks complex functionality. Uber, for example, introduced a system that makes it a breeze to find a car and driver to get from Point A to Point B. But it doesn’t stop there. Payments, ratings, and other tasks all occur at the push of a button—or behind the scenes. There’s also an easily accessible record for tracking expenses.

Other companies, such as Groupon, allow consumers to find deals and also make it incredibly easy to make a purchase using a biometric fingerprint sensor and an automated payment service, such as Apple Pay or Android Pay. Redeeming the coupon is also simple. A user simply opens the app and clicks to the “My Stuff” tab.

In a best-case scenario, the product becomes the marketing initiative. “Successful brands inform and empower customers so that they can make great purchase choices, and they continue to serve the customer post-buy so they become brand ambassadors and repeat customers,” Ducey said.

This happens on both the back end, through various IT systems and applications, including APIs, as well as the front end, where consumers use apps and tools in an increasingly mobile-first world—and where form factor and usability are critical. It also extends to social media, said Kim Smith, chief digital officer at consulting firm Capgemini. Success, she pointed out, requires strong alignment among marketing, line-of-business executives, and IT leaders.

The challenge, of course, is to create experiences that are relevant for large groups of consumers—in a world where people have very different expectations about features and experiences. “The experience must be perceived as being very personal,” Smith told CMO.com.

One way to address the challenge is to give customers choices about how to use channels, features appearance, and frequency of communication. Smith also noted that crowdsourcing—along with its cousin, crowdstorming (which aims to take brainstorming to a more advanced and sophisticated level)—create input that can lead to ideas and innovation while forging tighter relationships with customers.

Yet, regardless of the approach—crowdsourcing, crowdstorming, surveys, focus groups, or analytics—the final destination is a greater understanding of customers and an ability to act on the information, iterate, and change in response to it. This means having a technology infrastructure in place to make critical changes and avoid getting boxed in with IT systems and other tools that may slow innovation or prevent it from taking place.

“In some cases, companies cannot innovate because they build a technology platform and API framework that doesn’t allow it to act and react quickly and iteratively,” Smith said. In the end, as the marketplace moves forward and consumer expectations grow, marketing departments and companies “find themselves boxed in. They may have oversimplified a product or service when they created it—and that may have served as an advantage at that point, but later they can’t use the latest digital tools and technologies,” she added.

Forward Thinking

One big problem for marketers, Brinker argued, is that they too often fall into an “operational” mindset that blocks innovation. They wind up so heavily focused on the daily mechanics of campaigns and initiatives that they lose sight of what it means to truly innovate and delight customers. “The bigger opportunity is really understanding what people want and how we get those experiences to them,” especially for digital natives, who illuminate the path to the future, he noted.

Forbes chief insights officer Bruce Rogers, who has conducted research on tech-savvy companies, and most recently worked with BIA/Kelsey, has found that those that make tech their brand and build a culture around it reap sizeable rewards. These organizations are doubling down on tech investments. The impact? Two-thirds of these organizations expect to exceed top-line targets by more than 10%, and 25% exceed their revenue targets.

But simply chasing technologies and unleashing them in a haphazard way won’t necessarily yield these results. The foundation for a successful technology framework lies in new ways of thinking and acting, including adopting a more collaborative approach to marketing, particularly between the CMO and CIO. In some cases, businesses are creating new roles, including chief digital officer (CDO), to address the gap. Regardless of the exact approach, Smith referred to this as “pervasive collaboration.” Different units and groups must understand what makes an organization a technology leader, and how systems, devices, and apps link together to create a digital ecosystem. Within this framework, a rebalance of power might be necessary, and new metrics and KPIs might be in order.

CMOs and other executives must ultimately focus on three critical areas, Smith said: building a social framework to foster communication up, down, and sideways; designing systems and frameworks, including the use of the internet of things, to collect and understand data in deeper, broader ways; and putting data and marketing plans into action, partly by tapping new talent sources and emerging intellectual property. This might include everything from crowdstorming tools to blockchain technology.

When organizations do these things well, they are able to move beyond a transactional mindset and connect with customers on a deeper and more engaged level that spans a product or service life cycle. They are able to create or reinvent products and features—and introduce the type of personalized and contextualized experience that many organizations strive for but few achieve. “They become trusted advisers. They anticipate customer needs and desires. They elicit surprise and delight. They build brand fidelity,” Smith said.

Brinker believes the modern organization is undergoing a profound transformation, and marketing plays a crucial role. An organization’s brand is now represented by every interaction and at every touchpoint, from advertising and sales to fulfilment and support. It’s not enough to simply monitor social media and use social listening. It must lead to new ideas and better ideas.

For instance, “You actually have to respond and do something with problems, ideas, and the aggregate data,” he said. “It’s also important to move beyond false empathy and give people the power to fix problems. Otherwise, you face pushback, mediocre reviews, and you wind up with customers that do not love your brand. They may tolerate it because they don’t have a choice, and they will flee when a better opportunity arises.”

In the end, Brinker said, it’s important to take bits and pieces from modern success stories and recombine them in a way that makes interactions easier and better for a particular business. Social media, geolocation data, web analytics, mobile payment systems, the IoT, and other technologies are simply digital wrenches and screwdrivers in the toolkit.

“Top performers use technology heavily but de-emphasize it,” he observed. “You have to change the marketing mindset and realign the business to create greater value for the customer. Technology is simply the way to make this happen.”