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Marketing’s least attractive quality is acting too desperate for attention. A customer journey must begin with awareness and familiarity, but getting that attention should not be as obvious as screaming, “Pick me!”
A better way is to be useful to the customer.
The problem is structural. Most marketers of both the “brand” and “performance” ilk have a short list of metrics they must hit: awareness, recall, memorability, clickthrough, purchase, etc. But this selfishness ultimately depletes long-term value for a brand. In intruding upon the customer to secure an advantage, marketers give up the opportunity to do what is best for them—which, in most cases, would also be best for the brand in the long term.
Redemption lies in an experience-centric approach
While a prospect may move through a somewhat linear process from awareness to purchase, the maturing of a customer’s relationship is an intricate and lengthy dance of numerous brand interactions and experiences. Much of this is what we refer to as customer experience (CX), and it plays a disproportionately important role in how people perceive brands.
Analysis using the extensive BrandAsset Valuator database shows CX contributes 60% of a brand’s value. Not surprisingly, marketers are increasingly savvy to the importance of experience—53% of global b-to-c marketers surveyed by Forrester said marketing had primary responsibility for customer experience.
The emphasis on experience over attention is causing a shift from intrusion toward intuition. Most of this work is focused on digital, as nearly 3 out of 4 interactions that customers have with a company are digital.
The proliferation and evolution of digital touch points place emphasis on innovation. All kinds of marketers, like media planners, who make the brand both salient and useful at customer engagement nodes; and experience designers, who ensure easy and effective interactions, must develop and optimize the appropriate digital experiences.
Digital touch point architecture must be rooted in customer needs
Our research at Forrester addresses this challenge of aligning touch points to needs head-on: We consider the kinds of activities consumers typically engage in (such as performing routine tasks, entertaining themselves, achieving goals, etc.) and ask what digital touch points are best suited for serving these varying needs. Specifically, we test five touch points using a quantitative consumer study: chat, notifications, voice, augmented reality and immersive worlds.
At the heart of our methodology is academic Clayton Christensen’s revered and elegantly simple idea of “jobs to be done.” These digital experiences are but a means to help consumers accomplish something.
On top of Christensen’s idea, we build a layer of outcomes. From our decadeslong research in consumer behavior and brand strategy, we know that consumers most value three outcomes: convenience, empowerment and emotional engagement. By measuring activities in their need for these three outcomes and touch points in their ability to deliver them, we can connect activities to touch points and find the most intuitive match.
Pick the experience that fits the need
We put our relational model of “activity to touch point” to the test through a variety of consumer research. Here are some of the significant findings.
Notification is a potent weapon to anticipate needs and nudge consumers. Notifications, consumers tell us, are convenient and empowering. They add value by functioning as a helper—reminding, cajoling and perhaps nagging consumers. They alert consumers, nudge them to complete tasks (e.g., check in to a flight), and achieve goals (e.g., monitor weight loss).
But the magic happens when you mix anticipation with notification. One-hundred percent of digital business executives agree that proactively anticipating customer needs can help them differentiate. Yet—and here’s where the opportunity lies—only 19% say they can anticipate the needs of their customers.
Voice delivers on convenience but otherwise falls short. The overwhelming convenience of voice should not surprise you; it won an evolutionary battle millions of years ago. But despite this convenience, voice touch points fail to be empowering or emotionally engaging.
Consequently, while voice may be the best way to accomplish relatively simple tasks (like finding the nearest sushi restaurant), it may not be ideal for more involved activities (such as learning how to make a sushi dinner for unsuspecting guests). The best voice applications are task-centric and facilitate customer engagement. At Bank of America, virtual assistant Erica handles about 1.5 million client interactions daily.
AR is rich with potential. AR does not enjoy the kind of usage that voice or chat does, but it stands out by delivering on all three benefits of convenience, empowerment and emotional engagement.
As a result, 22% of U.S. online adults are comfortable using extended reality (AR/VR) to consume information. AR significantly influences purchases—consumers using this technology browse more products, make fewer returns and convert at a higher rate. A beauty product retailer implementing AR experiences in its mobile app found a 20% lift in the likelihood of buying.
Don’t write off immersive worlds. All the excitement around gen AI and the taint of Meta may have dulled the sparkle of the metaverse concept, but don’t write it off just yet. The bones are strong, and now Apple is in the ring.
For immersive worlds, it’s less about the usage or convenience today; that will take care of itself in time as technology improves and gets cheaper. It’s about the high levels of empowerment and emotional engagement these already engender. We just need to get beyond the marketing gimmickry of today’s brand activations to build relevant and useful immersive experiences, like working one-on-one with a financial planner in a virtual environment.
The future will be invisible, and less will be more
We’ve already glimpsed the future. The best notifications of today that remind and cajole you do so by analyzing your context and feeding you the correct information at the right time so you can act. Sometimes, it acts for you—your digital coffee money is topped up, you’re upgraded to first class and your investments are rebalanced.
But this, as computer scientist Alan Turing might say, is just a foretaste of what is to come and a shadow of what future digital experiences will be. Future experiences will, with your permission, do the heavy lifting for you. They will understand you to the point that they can anticipate the need, harness the correct information, craft the right solution and implement it.
These anticipatory experiences will be invisible. They will alleviate the need for consumers to point, click, swipe, call and do many other methods of engagement that marketers have always been trained to encourage consumers to do. In this new era of digital experiences, the invisible will be engaging and less will be more.
