DIGITAL DOWNLOADED: Breaking the marketing barrier

In the following opinion column, Soon and Gerard Lim of XM Asia Pacific argue that brands can only experience true transformation by deciding to embrace digital as a primary game changer. 

As sure as Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological pedestal, the near future will see brands surrounded by authentic consumer dialogue without being poked and prodded by hired ‘guns’ such as bloggers and community managers. The future is a society where brands and consumers form a behavioural bond of mutual trust; where the former listens and transforms to meet the needs and desires of the latter. In return, consumers will allow brands to be part of their lives and share personal data readily. The future will see big and small data being used with greater transparency. Brands and consumers will have a shared goal of building ever-improving, personalized experiences to enrich and fulfil daily lives. 

The biggest challenge every CMO faces today is to continue to build and preserve relevant brand equity in the face of higher consumer expectations amidst the complex and ongoing digital evolution. 

Marketers have to start by acknowledging that brand building practices, born in the era of the World Wide Web’s inception, were a throwback to the Dark Ages. Today’s marketers need to embrace the ethos of designing a branded experience that incorporates marketing technology platforms as core to the 21st century DNA.

An empowered marketer is one who fully understands marketing technology platforms such as Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce to implement their strategies with greater impact. Today, brands are starting to build “connected experiences” but are still largely constrained because marketers do not understand how to optimise the platforms they have bought (or have yet to buy). Brands have the abil-i-ty to act on data collected contextually and in real time to target and re-target individuals in a timely, personalised and relevant way.

Ultimately, a brand only experiences true trans-formation when an organisation decides in totality, to embrace digital as a primary ‘game-changer’. The first step is always the easiest. Start by defining your brand’s intent. Part of that requires you to build your brand’s relevant social context. 

Today, brands continue to build ‘disconnected’ brand experiences. Therefore, the impact of what social can do for a brand is still limited to hiring bloggers or to ‘buying’ fans in certain instances. We fail to spend time on how we develop our brand’s experience map. A map that guides and informs us of how everything connects the brand back to the consumers, in meaningful ways, that allow amplification and increasing participation. 

Forrester’s recent report found that future brands would need to build essential parameters such as ‘being trusted’, ‘remarkable’, ‘unmistakable’ and ‘essential’. To ensure that a brand transforms effectively, we need to start building a consumer-centric experience approach where the marriage of design and technology drives future businesses forward.

In a world of highly critical and sceptical consumers, your brand represents 24/7 x 365 experiences, floating in an endless sea of competitive choices and distractions. It is only through creating a seamless and satisfactory brand experience that your brand will start to build the right type of ‘social equity’ — that is organically grown with increasingly great influence. 

Unfortunately a brand today cannot afford to isolate just one person or segment at a time, a brand needs the ability to react and connect immediately.

So what do marketers need to embrace in order to retain a competitive edge?

1. Design always with the consumer in mind
2. Invest in owned marketing technology platforms as the leveller 
3. Break down business silos by building consumer experience teams
4. Change the way we traditionally measure brand value and equity to reflect the increased influence of social and brand interactions

We live in exciting times. If Felix Baumgartner can become the first man to break the sound barrier, brands today can break the marketing barrier. Start building trust at the speed of sound by placing ‘connected experiences’ and your con-sumers at the heart of your strategy.  

And if you need more inspiration, just google ‘XM Burberry’.

Paul Soon is regional director and Gerard Lim is managing partner of XM, Asia-Pacific.