The Marketing Equation Reboot

There are times when it can be useful to not just know what is happening in the world around us, but why it’s happening. Like any other subject, history serves as the most compelling pedagogue. So too is the case for the field of marketing. If you’re a seasoned veteran, you may appreciate the nuances of history beyond the tectonic shift that are impossible for anyone to overlook. If you’re an initiate in the field, it might be enlightening to gain a historical perspective to at least appreciate how different the world in which you’ve grown up looked not that long ago. Up through the late 90’s this 50+ year era of mass marketing could be distilled down to a simple mathematical equation; brand = promise + experience. This is a very remedial construct but if you spend time with it you’ll grow to appreciate the depth beneath it. I’ve used this equation for nearly my whole career… until the early 2000’s when I “rebooted.”

What had changed the equation? During that period, I noticed four historical markers that together explain the inflection point that demanded a new brand equation; and corresponding shift for marketers.

1. Internet commerce
2. The value of social currency (your numerous digital connections and interactions)
3. The fusion of branding and the “user experience” (Apple/Steve Jobs coined the term “user experience” in 1993)
4. The ubiquity of Starbucks which literally showed the world you can build a brand through almost 100% focus on experience

It was around the late 90’s and early 2000’s when these forces spurred me to re-evaluate my framework for branding which is now; brand = story + experience. For me it was just in time because it was also when I stepped into the breach as CMO of Burger King.

You don’t design experiences. You design for experiences.

Obviously, the key change in the equation is that the power of storytelling better reflects the advent of content marketing and perhaps more importantly, that a brand’s story is now a co-creation. Equally important however, as soon as the customer became co-authors of our brand story they then gained at seat at the table to engage brands about their expectations for their experience.

No more can brands rely on the promise-making and all too often promise-breaking that dominated the last half of the last century. Marketers that are patting themselves on the back for successfully transitioning from promise-making to storytelling, but don’t understand the role of experience design will remain addicted to advertising and now what some call new, content marketing… and the more of it they do, the less effective it will become. Any brand manager who does not respect the power of experience design in building their brand does so at their own peril.

If you agree with my formula for branding, great! But don’t make the biggest mistake there is in experience design… you don’t design experiences. You design for experiences. What does that mean? Think of the proverbial dirt path where people have chosen a shortcut to save a step or two (reducing friction). If you’re focused on how to get people to stay on your “sidewalk” your customer will not only continue to take the shortcut but you may never understand why. You can paint the sidewalk or do anything else you can think of to make it look more appealing, but the dirt path will still be the preferred choice. A marketer with a sensibility for experience design would consider paving the dirt path or planting flowers along it. Are you designing customer experiences or designing for customer experiences? If you ask me, the latter is the only way things “add up.”