The COVID-19 pandemic upended a marketer’s playbook, challenging the existing rules about customer relationships and building brands. Here are 10 new marketing truths that reveal the confluence of the pandemic and a new set of rules for marketing moving forward.
New truth: Marketing begins with knowing your customer segment
The Covid-19 crisis reinforced what we already know: that brands must communicate in very local and precise terms, targeting specific consumers based on their circumstances and what is most relevant to them.
- Creating a personal, human connection within any commercial message requires defining consumer segments that describe people according to multiple dimensions that influence their purchasing behavior.
New truth: Relationships are everything
It is vital to build relationships with customers founded on trust
- In a B2B context, trust also plays a tremendous role
- As companies rely more on personal data that they obtain with consent from consumers, they must consider building even more loyalty and differentiation by designing more transparent interfaces
Your brand should stand behind great values
The pandemic truly challenged brand loyalty.
- 61% of consumers, depending on the category, became willing to consider a white label product, let alone switch name brands
- This dynamic coupled with growing consumer awareness and activism precipitated during the social unrest of 2020 should make brands very focused on the values they express
- Marketing has an opportunity to educate the broader C-suite on the importance of brand values
Marketing is at the center of the growth agenda for the full C-suite
Covid-19 has created a leadership culture of immediate collaboration focused on the urgent need for resilience.
- Marketing now has the opportunity to seize an ongoing central role in that dialogue, thereby driving the organization’s broader growth and innovation agenda
New truth: Courting customers is just like online dating
Finding your perfect match may be less about chance and more about data and algorithms
- Shift from brand marketing to build reach to performance marketing to generate leads
- Leading CMOs recognize that it is a fine balance of brand and performance marketing that delivers the best results
- They work better together
Art and Science
As marketers, we must achieve the perfect balance of humans and automation to unlock a future of better analytics and deployment of AI at scale
- We must use data as the fuel yet respect the craft of storytelling to drive meaningful human connections
- Prioritize the perspective of the customer now, next, and beyond above everything
New truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your customer journey
How can we conceal these internal disconnects from the customer, who assumes that the whole company knows them holistically?
- Marketing is often just the beginning of a relationship with the customer.
- It is not realistic to believe that the operating model for all customer-facing functions can or should report to the same place
Agility is a modern marketing approach
Covid-19 created an irreversible trend for marketing to embrace a similarly nimble mentality
- Continuous consumer listening and demand sensing enables the full company to capture the zeitgeist of consumer sentiment
- Faster decision cycles and more flexibility across key areas like creative, budgeting, and media
New truth: You are competing with the last best experience your customer had
Now that companies have their personal data, they want anticipatory, personalized experiences across the entire customer journey
- Companies should follow three strategies to ensure their experiences deliver their customers’ rising expectations
- Make brand scores a key KPI for the full customer-facing organization
- Build the right data and technology foundation to support important use cases
- Align individual and collective goals across the customer journey so any disconnects between functional silos are invisible to your end consumer
New truth: Customers expect you to have exactly what they want
Creating these experiences requires companies to place data and technology at the core of their organization
- Data enables us to create more relevant experiences across one or more dimensions of the four Cs
- Content
- Commerce
- Community
- Convenience
- As consumers demand greater personalization, companies will need to use more data and intelligence to sharpen their decision-making and drive greater relevance in their customer interactions
New truth
You need the right balance of factors (including your tech stack) to drive modern marketing success
- Technology architecture must be matched with sufficient scale in data to fuel its success, the right use cases to drive results, and the right approach to human enablement
- Human enablement involves understanding how data and technologies will be used across the organization, making sure people have the right skills to employ it effectively, and that the right measurement approach is in place to motivate innovation and success
