Marketers as Relationship Scientists

Deepening Consumer-brand Relationships

Advertising as we know it is dying — and that is a good thing. From basic technical innovation (e.g., ad blocking going “native” in browsers,) to social trends (like cord-cutting,) to new core values (like Gen Z’s caring less and less about brands,) everything points in a similar direction. More people than ever are trying to bypass advertising that only asks from them without providing much value. It’s the end of interruptions.

An Age of Relationship Scientists

Who will benefit from all of this? On one end, consumers will. Despite the omnipresence of innovators like Amazon, consumers will continue to circumvent irrelevant interruptions with an ever diminishing effort as they go about their lives.

So, who will benefit within our industry? We believe this to be an age of relationship science — where brands and marketers have a vast amount of data at their disposal, and if used correctly, could build genuine bonds to sustain their creativity.

A New Consumer-brand Relationship Paradigm

Strong relationships between brands and consumers under this context need to comply with three basic features:

• Unique: engagement at the individual level, in a specific, granular way.
• Meaningful: relevant and impactful interactions between brands and consumers.
• Self-improving: actions tied to business results, short and long-term, on and offline.

Let’s dissect these three pillars.

Unique

Many brands try too hard to be unique, becoming cliché (“you should listen to what I’m saying, because it’s ‘unique.’”) Here we are referring to something completely different. Successful brands, including some we work with, see growth by engaging with consumers individually, and this is what unique should mean.

When we say ‘truly individual’ it’s not a metaphor. One by one, like the relationships you have with each person in your life, brands are forging real bonds. Scaling this to the hundreds of thousands or millions is not easy, but it’s never been more attainable.

As advertisers, many of us use persona-building as a tactic to learn more about our audience and how to engage with them. Still, personas are only useful as a starting point. People-based marketing, and the models within it, are changing the advertising landscape forever. On top of these basic archetypes, we want to ensure every piece of available data is used to establish concrete relationships at a one-to-one level.

Meaningful

As marketers, we should aim for our brands to be discovered, not pushed into people’s minds. We don’t want our brands to be the sign at the side of the road — we want them to be the destination.

As much as impactful, creative storytelling will help us break through the clutter to reach our target audiences, this should be considered solely as the price of admission; that is not a relationship yet. In order to build progressively deeper bonds, brands need to establish a permanent flow of micro-impacts at the individual level.

This is best expressed with a simple motto: from 10 to 10,000. Evolving from the 10 big executions a brand would use to engage with their consumers on any given year in the past, we now need and want to multiply that by 1,000. These 10,000 smaller scale executions will help us impact our relationships with consumers in more intimate and meaningful ways.

A solid “micro-persona” ecosystem — beyond generic consumer definitions, paired with people-based marketing — helps us build stronger and deeper relationships based on relevance and timing. What brands choose to do with these deeper relationships should be carefully aligned with the trust that has been created.

Self-improving

It’s important not to fall in the trap of oversimplifying what a self-improving brand relationship is. As an industry, we claim “everything is measurable;” it can be easy to set our KPIs and try to track the depth of our relationships through them.

At the same time, for these bonds with individual consumers to grow deeper and stronger, every marketer needs to act as a relationship scientist. We need to stop thinking of data as a matter only geeks deal with, and allow ourselves to play with the numbers.

To strengthen our relationships with consumers we must leverage 1st and 3rd party data, tie online engagement with physical store traffic, and connect CRM segments with social graphs. Intentional, thoughtful and sensitive usage of data means you care about both your consumer and your brand.

From assessing the impact of a channel on another, to understanding how a unique relationship between a consumer and a brand are born, connections can either grow stronger or apart. As an industry, we need to evolve (and are currently evolving) the conversation from mere attribution modeling to fully individual consumer journeys.

Originally published in MediaPost on January 5, 2018.

Jonatan Zinger, SVP, Media Insights — M8

With 17+ years of experience in the digital advertising industry, Jonatan’s profile combines online media and a strategic background focused in analytics. He’s led online marketing efforts for Fortune 500 brands in travel, entertainment, electronics, CPG, business services, education and automotive, among other verticals.