Drop Marketing Shock & Awe for the Age of Unmarketing
In the last five years, marketing’s firepower has expanded immensely.
Among many developments, data, data analytics and digital technology are enabling marketers to unleash precisely targeted campaigns with impressive accuracy and content.
But, is this marketing shock and awe all too much?
We do an awful lot that’s directly communicated at a customer with as much care and attention as possible. And we’re learning and applying the lessons of shouting less and listening more as we collect data and insights.
But there’s a new shift that needs to be considered that might seem odd: it’s called unmarketing and argues let’s stop marketing at people and instead actively engage with them, in context.
This doesn’t mean the marketing campaign is dead, despite what some iconoclasts say. But it does mean embracing the concept of contextual engagement that understands that it is customers, not products, that drive revenue.
Contextual engagement means when a customer comes to you through whatever channel they choose – call centre, mobile app, web or instore – they expect you to know everything about them, their demeanour and their interactions – which may come from behavioural data online – with you right up to that moment in time.
At this point, the marketer doesn’t capitulate but needs to arbitrate the situation and identify the best mini-business case for what to do for this customer at this specific point of time. It is about striking the right balance between the customer’s needs including experiences that are contextual, relevant, timely and consistent across channels; and a business’s objectives like growing revenues, managing risks, delivering good service and retaining profitable customers.
Creating this new capability in marketing hasn’t been held back by ambition and vision. The real obstacle is that the technology simply hasn’t been good enough to analyse the volumes and velocity of data and return the most productive decision about an offer sufficiently fast enough. Just like normal conversations, the moments of truth in contextual engagement have to happen in real-time – or the moment is lost. And as we all know in today’s world, you may not get a second chance.
Technology is now catching up so that the latency or delay between capturing the data and taking an action is significantly narrowed. New next best action decisioning engines are now capable of returning an appropriate decision in seconds and then learning from every interaction. If the context has been completely understood in real time then the next best action will be the most productive possible. Indeed, with an eye to long term customer value, sometimes an informed decision to do absolutely nothing at that moment of time can be the optimum decision.
So, as surveys suggest CMOs are gaining greater control of IT budgets, the trend would seem to be for implementing these new smarter contextual engagement approaches. It’s important though that the IT strategy mistakes of the past aren’t repeated. For example, contextual engagement depends on a marketing decisioning engine hub that takes account of all channels, reflecting how customers see no distinction between mobile, web, call centre and instore when they interact with a brand. So, breaking down the silos between channels and departments is critical if these new strategies are to work.
Embracing unmarketing will feel strange to some marketers, but a refreshing gust of marketing common sense to many. There’s some natural resistance from traditional quarters that insist hitting targets to push out products matters the most. It’s still early days but major brands are reporting on the real benefits of contextual engagement. For example, a communications service provider serving millions of subscribers has almost halved monthly customer churn from 2 percent to 1.2 percent since adopting next best action decisioning technology.
So how could unmarketing drive revenue growth for your enterprise?
(Content originally posted on TFMA Insights February 2015)