Digital Authority: Three Stages of Digital Marketing Strategy

We here at SMM believe that there are three basic approaches to marketing a brand: Marketing the past; marketing the present; and marketing the future. Each approach looks at how the customer interacts with the brand, and even though the references are temporal, the connection to time has much more to do with the acceleration of customer expectations than it does to relativity.

Marketing the Past

When a brand touts its consistency of customer experience, it’s taking a Marketing the Past approach. In the past, you, the customer, experienced X. The next time you interact with the brand, you will again experience X, so you can know what to expect. If you liked X the first time, you’ll like it again. Marketing the Past relies heavily on advertising — the more you see the same range of images or promises, the stronger the message is reinforced: Buy me more.

Marketing the Present

With a Marketing the Present approach, brands are pushing a here & now, immediate gratification message. The tagline is “more is better.” Enter the consumerism era, where having multiple options, buying numerous things, and amassing as much as you can reigned supreme. Think of Marketing the Present as the infomercial era — where we were promised to get more for less, and even when you thought you’d gotten it all, “But wait — there’s more!” Marketing the Present is based on marketing “the more.” The brand with more features in more styles with more options wins. And if you act now, we’ll even throw in a free gift. (Just make three easy payments of $14.99 for shipping and handling.) Thanks, Leo.

The Marketing the Present approach was well suited to the days when brands controlled the message and consumer education was ruled by what and how much the brand chose to convey. But with the multitude of digital touchpoints now available to the consumer, the reign of the infomercial (and, more generally, traditional advertising across all media) has faded into the sunset. As customers do more and more of their product research outside of brand-owned channels (company websites and social media profiles, and online advertising), marketers are realizing that they no longer control the flow of product information and are instead looking to adopt new strategies to win the hearts and wallets of their customers.

Marketing the Future

Successful brands understand that today’s consumer can pursue any number of alternatives to brand-owned channels to guide them along their buying journey. Google describes this often-convoluted online path to purchase as the Zero Moment of Truth, and savvy brands are responding by centering around the customer, continuously delivering on consumer needs to build trust and buyer brand preference and win the Zero Moment of Truth: They’re taking a Marketing the Future approach.

With the emergence of the Marketing the Future approach, successful brands focus on building and maintaining reputations for delivering for their customers both today AND tomorrow. Why? In the current climate of ever-accelerating expectations around “time to value,” the product that is held from the market until it is “finished” is the product that never sees the light of day. By design, today’s wares are always being improved, innovated. Want evidence? Look no further than the nearest app store.

When a customer decides to buy a product, the customer is also buying an implicit contract with the brand based on a shared expectation of constant iteration: The brand delivers for its customer today, and then it innovates and updates and delivers again tomorrow. And again. The new dynamic between buyers and brands is this — today’s consumers selectively trust brands that they believe will deliver both in the here-and-now AND in the future.

Successful brands that pursue the customer-centric Marketing the Future approach also tend to align themselves with partners to develop ecosystems rather than standing alone. In opening up its iOS platform to outside developers, Apple learned from the history of its early-days rivalry with Microsoft. Today, the Apple ecosystem offers more than 1.5 million apps available through the Apple App store. In contrast, look at where Blackberry used to be and where they are now…

So now, well into the 21st century, here’s where things get interesting: These Past, Present and Future approaches to marketing, while emerging sequentially with the commensurate expansion of media worldwide, do not necessarily exist in mutually exclusive eras. We did not have to pass out of the Marketing the Past era before entering into the Marketing the Present era. Put another way, Marketing the Past is not same thing as Marketing of the Past. Marketing the Present shouldn’t be confused with Marketing of the Present. And Marketing the Future? Well, you get the idea. Each strategy lays claim to the brand’s greatest perceived strength — consistency of customer experience; breadth and depth of the product feature set; or ability to continuously innovate. All three exist coexist as contemporaneous marketing strategies a brand can choose.

That said, we here at Scratch believe that a Marketing the Future approach is the most appropriate for a world where the consumer is in control of the buying journey, brands are never “finished,” and building an ecosystem of partners leads to the greatest chance of sustainable growth. We espouse the Marketing the Future approach in our support of our clients and see excellent examples of this strategy playing out across today’s most successful brands. We’ll share some of these insights in upcoming posts.

But for now, what’s your approach? We’d like to know.