Attracting The Modern, Connected Customer

In mid-June, I’m going to be an one of a handful of experts serving as instructors in an Experience Lab being produced by miLES. The Experience Lab is a short series of instructor-led sessions attended by 12–16 emerging brands, through which they will create an actionable roadmap for their digital and physical experience. It culminates in a unique pop-up shop, hosted in one of the fantastic pop-up spaces that miLES is most known for.

With my background studying new models of business through projects like MAKEWAY, the miLES team asked me to share insight on the changing customer landscape—and how niche, creative independent businesses are adapting accordingly. So the session within the Experience Lab that I’ll be leading is built around the lessons learned from speaking with unique independent brands building strong customer relationships.

Here in this piece I’d like to share some of the thinking that’s emerged. And if any of it sounds like something you’d want to be a part of, take a look at the Experience Lab page—applications for attendees are open through May 13th. You should do it!

The New Customer Landscape

I’ll start with the idea that for most of the past century, the only way to grow a business was by being transaction-centric. If you wanted to grow, you did so basically by optimizing transactions of various sorts: purchase transactions, marketing transactions, HR transactions, every kind of transaction. The Fortune 5000 (and those that aspire to be in the Fortune 5000) were born in this era.

But now of course many traditional brands are struggling (only 71 of the original Fortune 500 remain after only a few short decades, btw). Something has weakened this venerable business strategy that had been previously been proven by decades of success.

That something is information. The problem these brands are having is that the best way to optimize a transaction is to withhold information from the other party—information about your part of the transaction’s true cost, value, source, or otherwise. And I don’t have to tell you that consumers now have more access to information than ever before, as you’ve already seen all the TED talks and read all the trends reports saying as much. What’s clear is that when it comes to dealing with connected, savvy consumers, optimization as a primary business strategy is becoming less and less viable.

Something that stands out about the brands that are able to thrive in this new environment is that they are a lot more relationship-centric. The smart relationship-centric business still employs strong businesses practices that respect the cost of transactions, but it isn’t obsessed with them. The relationships the businesses form with customers and other stakeholders (suppliers, employees, communities, others) are more important.

Being relationship-centric is relatively new, and it’s in part a model that is now economically viable because of the sheer size and connectedness of the internet. In the past, marketing meant pushing messaging out onto potential customers and reaching some. Now, marketing means building things that attract customers that have the power to find you, precisely because they can ignore everything that doesn’t attract them. Marketing means building strong relationships over time.

World-Building

I’ve come to use the term ‘world-building’ to describe the model of marketing that aims to attract and build strong relationships with the smart, modern customer. So my session at the Experience Lab is focused on what it looks like to build a world, through a few concrete strategies exemplified by smart independent businesses doing it right now.

There are a handful of components to a “world” of this sort, and we’ll be looking specifically at components like Product, Vision, Initiatives, and Distribution Hubs. We’ll be taking a deep look at what each of them looks like in world-building terms, so for now I’ll leave you with a quick primer:

Vision
“Lifestyle brand” is a term that can be used to describe the kind of brand that tends to build strong, customer-centric worlds. So I often describe “vision” as just a strong, well-articulated answer to the question “what does the life well-lived look like?” Because for the world-building brand, all of its products, initiatives, and partnerships simply work to make that experience of the life-well-lived more real for customers who share the same answer. It’s worth taking the time to articulate that vision well—as if you’re making a 2-minute pitch to real people, with real stakes, on a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter. So during the Experience Lab we’ll be doing just that.

Products
We’ll be exploring the strategies of smart independent brands that think of their entire experience as their “product.” The beauty brand Glossier has a line of cosmetics and skincare essentials, which could easily be considered their product. But they also focus a lot of effort on Into The Gloss, a somewhat-independent publication. What’s interesting about Into The Gloss is that it’s *far* more than just content marketing for Glossier; its audience is an active part of product development. The unique experience Glossier can foster through combining both their physical line and Into The Gloss is a unique and well-considered approach to what the “product” Glossier offers its customers actually is. Through the Experience Lab we’ll be exploring other smart models and working them into the brands that program participants are building.

Initiatives
Marketing and branding used to be about crafting the perfect big statement and then sending it out on the right channel. Smart businesses now know that a brand is a story that’s told over time, passed on through a pattern of small interactions that people can be an active part of. These brands invest in partnerships and events, in participatory experiences, and in a range of digital micro-initiatives. One particularly interesting model has emerged among brands that have intentionally grown through serial crowdfunding; brands like Studio Neat, Flint & Tinder, and Wild Mantle have used Kickstarter less as a “we need to launch our one big idea” platform and more of “be a part of our next small thing of many” platform. We’ll be taking a look at some of the best patterns of initiatives from independent brands, and unpack the story they help tell.

Distribution Hubs
We’ll discuss growth in terms of building a network of “distribution hubs.” A distribution hub is a platform, publication, or marketplace that will get your product into the places it needs to be for your work to grow.

For any type of venture that one might aspire to build a world around, there are existing ventures that have already built adjacent, overlapping worlds. They have audiences and customers that naturally want to be a part of more worlds speaking to the lifestyle they buy into, so these existing ventures can be powerful partners for getting in front of these shared audiences. Your job as a newcomer is to build the kind of credibility that demonstrates that you are in fact part of their world—as part of our class we’ll be looking at different kinds of distribution hubs, and the kinds of credibility they look for.

Summary / Overview

The modern customer — connected and internet-savvy — has challenged the effectiveness of classic marketing principles that have been traditionally taught in business schools. While many established businesses are struggling in this new customer landscape, some independent business have found ways to thrive instead — they’re focused on initiatives that foster strong customer relationships, adopting a new model of marketing called “world-building.”

In other words, your job as a maker is to be building a world for people to experience. Find your vision, articulate it well, and use it to plant a flag in the ground that says “well all believe the life well-lived looks like _____.” And then build an amazing world around it. For brands hoping to attract and thrive with the modern, connected customer, it matters more now than ever.