Blog Posts

The Unified Experience

If marketers hope to take complete charge of the customer experience, they must start out with one goal in mind: make a meaningful difference in the lives of customers. By knowing what truly matters to customers, they can lead the way in designing a signature experience that will create true brand loyalists.

The Social Brand

Social media is on the cusp of a new era as people retreat behind closed doors to join private groups where they can safely interact with their trusted circle of family and friends. Marketers will have to reset their social strategies and intensify their efforts to form communities of interest amongst brand enthusiasts.

Who Needs Marketing Anymore?

Marketing is in crisis. No longer respected by corporate chieftains as a strategic function, it has been demoted to simply making ads. The only way for marketing to stage a comeback is to become a difference maker once again.

The Only Number That Matters

Proving the value of marketing means showing that the investment is paying off in faster business growth. But that is only possible if marketing adopts a more unified approach to measurement.

Acting on Purpose

Coming out of this pandemic the time has come for every company to take stock of the role it plays in the world and define its true social purpose. But that job cannot be left to marketing alone – it demands a top down commitment to a purpose-led vision and adoption of a new governance model that treats all stakeholders fairly

Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again

The pandemic has triggered many unexpected shifts in consumer behaviour that are here to stay. Now is the time for marketers to look past this crisis and get ahead of change instead of continuously chasing it.

Competing On Insight

Marketers have more customer data to work with than ever before – so why are they still struggling to convert numbers into meaningful insight? Getting answers that lead to breakthrough strategy starts with knowing the right questions to ask.

Will Marketers Finally Give Up On Personalization?

Mastering the practice of personalization can seem overwhelming for marketers, leaving them to wonder whether the cost and effort is worth the trouble. But giving up on the dream of one-to-one marketing would be a shame

Too Easy to Ignore: Why Brands Are Losing the War for Attention in the Era of Peak Content

Content marketing may be nearing a saturation point. Most brand content is invisible, lost in the clutter. To have any chance of being noticed, marketers have to find a way to make the brand story impossible to ignore

The Relatable Brand Comes of Age

The rapid growth of direct-to-consumer brands may seem like a replay of the dot-com bubble in the Web 1.0 era. But what makes this new generation of DTC brands different is a genuine love for their customers.

What Comes Next?

In an age of massive disruption, every business is under pressure to innovate. Marketers are best positioned to lead the way – but how can they balance truly breakthrough thinking with the need to deliver results today?

The Evolution (and Future) of Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing has taken 30 years to mature into a mainstream discipline. Today its principles and practices form the bedrock of a new marketing model based on putting customer needs first.

The Big Shift

Marketing has reached a turning point: either it abandons the brand building model first invented nearly a century ago, or almost certainly fall victim to the forces of disruption. While no one knows what a next generation planning model looks like, everyone agrees it will take a big shift in thinking to get right.

The True Value of Customer Journey Mapping

The growing number of channels and devices has made it hard for companies to deliver a unified customer experience across touchpoints. Journey mapping gives companies a fighting chance to tame the complexity and catch up to the rising expectations of customers.

The Power of Personas

Marketing personas bring the defining characteristics of customers to life, helping to build universal consensus around their needs. For brands seeking to deliver a better customer experience, it is a powerful tool to foster greater insight and empathy.

How to Build Brand Belief in an Age of Zero Trust

Public trust in business as a force for good in society is at an all-time low. To convince people otherwise, consumer brands must prove they are committed to making the world a better place.

Time’s Up: Can Ad Agencies Put the Past Behind Them?

Now that customer experience trumps media advertising, brands need marketing partners who will help them think differently. To stay in the game, ad agencies will need to reinvent themselves.

The Loyalty Trap

Ever since reward programs first became popular over fifty years ago, marketers have been trapped into thinking that customer loyalty can be bought. But customers today are looking for more than just rewards – they want to be treated honestly and fairly.

Where is Location-based Marketing Today?

For marketers to succeed at location-based marketing, they need to create “ownable experiences” where a brand can uniquely help people in the context of the moment. Anticipating what a customer intends to do will become just as important as knowing what they have done in the past.

Wave Goodbye to the Attention Economy

Now that no one is paying much attention to advertising anymore, marketers have a reason to be concerned about their future. How can marketers adapt to a world where people hardly pay attention to advertising?

Leading with Values

For a company to deliver an outstanding customer experience, it must first embrace the values of the people it serves.

The Connected Experience

Marketers have been slow to adapt to a post-campaign world where the old familiar rules of brand-building are obsolete. To connect with customers today marketers must not only manage channel complexity, they must make the brand more relevant and central to their lives.

The Value Matrix

There are many ways to segment customers based on value. But to know who is truly valuable, data analysis must be combined with market segmentation and loyalty research. This triangulated view will not only inspire creative thinking – it can even be used to predict future behaviour.

Putting Customers First

Businesses everywhere are under pressure to give up the ‘make and sell’ model, fearful of digital disruption. But while they concede the importance of improving the customer experience, the path to transformation can seem like an impossible journey: can businesses ever hope to keep pace with their customers?

The Marketing Ecosystem

Half a century ago IBM revolutionized the computing business by separating programs from hardware. Today a comparable revolution is underway: the shift to browser-based applications in the cloud. But that poses a dilemma for marketers: how do they combine multiple standalone applications to form a unified marketing ecosystem?

Joining the Conversation

In this age of uninhibited self-expression, when almost everyone has something to say or share, marketing must modernize its communication model to have any chance of joining the conversation.