How marketing can change the world — Customers on the mind
Marketing has changed. And as time passes, it’s going to keep changing. It’s inevitable. We’ve seen rapid changes in the technology we can use to deliver messages — in a lifetime, we’ve gone from Direct Mail to SnapChat. We’ve seen shifts that have unexpectedly disrupted cultural dogmas — like the idea that it may be better to share a car than to rent a car. And we’ve seen shifts in our competitive landscapes — we can’t keep relying on trying to win a race to the bottom on price or features.
It’s hardly newsworthy to say that, but it’s a reminder that we have to be cognizant of what we’re actually here for. Marketing is — now more than ever — about putting the voice of the customer back into the room to create remarkable products that will sell. We can’t lose sight of that.
We Should Use Our Role To Create Good Stuff
By putting the voice of the customer into the room, we have the power to transform how brands interact with people. We can take the traditional, staid way of marketing communications and invert it. This means using the voice of the consumer to not only create better products more aligned with their wants and needs, but also to revitalise the methods by which businesses delivers value to their customer. It’s not so much about using digital as simply another channel to deliver the same old stuff, but actually using it to innovate and disrupt.
With Econsultancy discovering that Customer Experience is the primary way that organisations seek to differentiate themselves from competitors over the next five years, it’s clear that organisations are aware of the challenge the faces them. We can’t win the race to the bottom, and it’s experience that is going to keep our customers happy.
Given that we know what to do, the question now is how? That’s where the difficulty arises. How do we actually, tangibly realise this vision to create products and services? How do we actually use digital to change the way that organisations do business with their customers?
Good Stuff Is Created Through Agility, Not Digital Transformation
Lately, digital transformation projects have been a popular method for undertaking these types of change. These large-scale projects — often engineering and IT driven — involve huge scads of work. New IT infrastructure, reorganisation and reskilling of teams, and confronting the (often) archaic working practices that currently exist.
However, these digital transformations are risky. They often require large amounts of time and investment, and, by putting all of an organisation’s eggs into one digital basket, run the risk of failure and often makes organisations lose sight of the problem and become too focused on solutions. Failure in these large-scale projects is crushing. It can set back changes by many years, cause untold disruption to employees, and cause a rift between organisations and customers by forcing sub-par, unfinished or worthless products and services onto customers.
Instead of lengthy digital transformation projects, we believe that digital transformation happens through small steps, iterating, testing and learning. Lots of little leaps.
Through agile working, we can quickly create digital products (and transform organisations) in ways that almost guarantee success. By relentlessly focusing on the problems and constantly validating how well we are solving them, we’re able to make sure that we’re always marrying up the goals of the organisation and the users. By taking small steps, we aren’t forcing huge changes on people which can be met with resistance. And by working methodically to integrate digital, we can make sure that we don’t ghettoize digital teams — a risk which can so often happen with digital transformation projects. Instead, we can make sure that digital capability is distributed evenly (and usefully) around an organisation.
By Creating Better Products, We Change The World
What’s the impact of this agile approach? Perhaps it sounds presumptuous, but it means we — as marketers — can change the world. We can mitigate risk for both our customers and our employees, by gradually introducing them into new ways of working. We can make sure that our organisations meaningfully use digital to change the way they operate. And most importantly, we can make sure we’re only creating the products that delight our users, while also driving success for our businesses.
By Johannes Smith, CEO, and Aaron Bali, Senior Data Planner at Hugo & Cat
To find out more about connected digital transformation, drop us a line at hello@hugoandcat.com
