Succeeding online used to be about launching web sites. Dot com and done! Fast forward twenty years and web sites are just one of many touch points competing for consumer attention. In addition to web sites, newsletters, catalogs, blogs, kiosks are also important assets within a brand’s overall owned media portfolio. Why owned? Because owned media assets are things directly controlled by the brand. Nobody else. However, owned media remains unclear and misunderstood by many. That’s not surprising given the messy, complex and overlapping relationship owned media has with other types of media, namely paid and earned. But what is becoming increasingly clear is the need to own your owned media to succeed online today. Let’s get a little deeper into this.
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I recently visited Six Flags in Illinois – a massive and totally awesome theme park. The purchase journey presented a number of options to buy the tickets: Mobile, Print, Collect and Post. Everyone one of them was a pain in the ass option with the exception of mobile. Who prints stuff when they’re on holiday? How many foreign travellers have a US address? Who wants to wait in line to collect tickets? However, I do have a mobile. To me, that was the only relevant option. Going frictionless means making it easy for me, the consumer, to engage with your business. What I’m seeing in the market is large scale failure in going frictionless by the majority and insane levels of success by those that are getting it right. And the gap between leaders and laggards is growing.
Going Frictionless: The Story
We are all consumers. You absolutely must create product and services that are simple, accessible and work to deliver frictionless consumer experiences. It’s the new norm. Consumers expect companies to have their house in order. Going frictionless is today’s brand challenge.
Know that there are two important audiences going frictionless needs to cater for:
- The consumer; we must deliver seamless and consistent engagement across all touch points in the journey.
- The enterprise; we must design systemic and sustainable business processes that craft consumer journeys from frictionless experiences at every touchpoint.
You need both. There is no point striving for frictionless consumer experiences if the enterprise cannot support them in a sustainable way at scale. Equally, the enterprise needs to craft connected experiences that consumers feel are frictionless. These two audiences are two sides of the same going frictionless coin where one informs and is informed by the other.
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Well, thank you for sticking around for the third and final post in the series where we share a few tips on content engine operationalisation.
The first post in this content engine series highlighted the top ten content challenges faced by organisations looking to deliver scaleable personalised experiences. We followed up with a second post that outlined a content engine blueprint to address those challenges. We conclude the series with a few practical tips to operationalise your own content engine.
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What content challenges prevent you from engaging in broader and deeper customer relationships? Broader with more channels and deeper through personalisation. It’s 2017 and we continue to fight the good fight to deliver the most basic personalised experiences within a responsive web channel. Why is that?
Because it’s hard. It’s not easy to create, manage and deliver content in a predictable, repeatable and scalable manner. However, that’s precisely what we have to do for omni-channel personalised experiences. So what if we designed a content engine to do just that? What might that look like? In this three-part blog post series we explore just that. Starting with the challenges in this post, we move onto a blueprint for a content engine and before operationalising it in the final post.
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In today’s experience economy, becoming customer centric is a necessary and well acknowledged transformative organisational challenge. Let’s break that down. We see the customer as the consumer and the organisation as the enterprise. Over the last few years the focus has largely been on delivering superior consumer experiences. However, we should also recognise that great enterprise experiences result in better consumer experiences. With the current thinking splitting corporate investments 80/20 in favour of consumer experience over enterprise experience, are we missing a trick here?
Enterprise Experience
Consumer experience is the sum of all interactions we have with a brand throughout the consumer lifecycle. If done right, we advocate for the brand and want to further engage with them. The enterprise experience is exactly the same but targets audiences inside the organisation rather than outside. These internal audiences – agencies, partners, IT, executives, vendors, business units – follow processes and use technology to create those superior consumer experiences. The organisational challenge is about empowering these internal audiences with modern tools and techniques that have come to rely on as consumers.
If this is what enterprise experience is about, why are organisations falling short of the mark?
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Last week I had the good fortune to attend an unconference session run by Chris Satchell. He’s ex-CTO of Nike. He understands customers. Now as Chief Product Officer over at Comcast, he led with this thought provoking one-liner:
Your brand is your customer journey.
Think about that for moment.
We’ve all heard that your brand is not what you say it is but how others perceive it. Brand perception boils down to how your customers engage with you. The journeys you take them on. It’s the sum total of all customer experiences – for better, for worse – across all touchpoints. Your brand is your customer journey, but they must been connected.
The challenge lies in mapping out these interconnected customer journeys. They are hard to create in the first place and really difficult to sustain ongoing success. Continuously changing over time, connected customer journeys require so many people across the business to collaborate. But that is exactly what success looks like for those companies building superior brands. The ability to design and deliver connected customer journeys is a critical component of competitive advantage in digital today. No longer an optional, connected customer journeys are the new norm.
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