Companies strive to be consumer-focused. The only way to maintain your focus on the consumer is to view your business from the perspective of people who consume your products or services.

That means understanding who your customer is, and remembering that perception is everything.

However, the task of seeing your company from your consumer’s point of view is much easier said than done, because the world around your consumers is continuously and rapidly changing.  Marketers must detach their perceptions from their own points of view and project them onto their customers. Imagine the circumstances and real situations where consumers use, interact with and are exposed to your products and communications.

Creating Value

In the most fundamental sense, marketing is about creating value, and value is a very subjective notion. The human brain perceives value in relative terms.

Value is perceived

• Relative to other products and what competitors are offering

• Relative to our past experiences and expectations

• Relative to the context in which information is presented

• Relative to our moods

• Relative to our needs, wants and interests

Some of these factors are elusive, transitory and abstract, and more difficult to predict. Others impact value perception and influence purchasing behavior in much stronger ways. In today’s context, innovation, authenticity and user experience are the dominant drivers of economic value.

1. Innovation

Today’s consumer enjoys a myriad of commercial choices and benefits from continuously expanding and improving innovations. Paradoxically, only a few innovations appear to remain competitive or relevant for long periods of time. Most innovations are based on superficial “newness” that doesn’t qualify for IP (Intellectual Property) protection. These are the products that are quickly copied by fast-responding competitors.

In a Harvard Business Review publication, Ted Levitt comments:

“In spite of the extraordinary outpouring of totally and partially new products and new ways of doing things that we are witnessing today, by far the greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is imitation.”

An  interesting aspect of the quote is that Ted Levitt made this statement back in 1966.

One can only imagine the rate at which “copying” has intensified over the years with the increase of new brands and stiff competition. Many businesses that were once leaders or small and agile have turned into laggards, reactive and short-term focused. Under pressure to grow, they have increasingly turned into imitation with heavy reliance on market research reports to plan new product development based on best market sellers.

While this approach can be lucrative for some lower-priced point businesses, premium positioned companies have suffered brand devaluations. Like currencies, value perception of a company’s brand and products are exposed to the risk of devaluation by way of losing meaning and relevancy in the mind of consumers. Too many “me too” products or extending too much in ways that deviate from the core positioning of a company can dilute the brand and undermine what it stands for, decreasing the appeal, demand and sales of products.

Our website is interested in inspiring the kind of change that leads to more sustainable competitive advantages. Innovation at the deepest levels of R&D is surely the preferred way to go, but it is also likely to occur sporadically.  So what can the marketer do in the meantime to continue with the brand momentum? The answer relates to marketing revitalization.

Marketing Revitalization

Brands are like living entities that can thrive or die in their respective markets depending on how well they keep up with meaning and relevancy. For a brand to remain vibrant, it must produce dynamic marketing to keep things refreshed. At the very least, marketing should be as dynamic as the pace of change affecting market conditions.

Marketers need to be able to recognize changes in consumer behaviors and technological transformations, react quickly and rethink marketing strategies accordingly. A “healthy” level of imitation is good, but it needs to operate in a culture that promotes long-term, broad, proactive and outward thinking. Curiosity and imagination are the keys in this process; the desire to understand what’s happening around and beyond direct competitors and other industries becomes crucial to gaining insights into consumer behavior changes and spotting opportunities and threats.

Ultimately, successful marketing is about having the right culture and talent in place.

2. Authenticity

Today’s consumers have become more sensitive to authenticity than ever before. The proliferation of product choices and marketing noise, growing environmental concerns, the past collapses of the financial system and numerous corporate scandals have fueled this trend. However, the word “authenticity” has been too often used and abused, affecting its meaning over time. Hence the need to review the true essence behind this movement. 

Perhaps the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was the tipping point that started the major resetting of our consumer behaviors. We paused and questioned our consumption habits, the meaning of our purchases, and the scope of corporate responsibility. We started to reflect on which companies/brands deserve our loyalties and which marketing practices are truly genuine. All things considered, consumers have become increasingly judgmental beyond the functional merits of goods & services. Consumers are placing more interest in meaningful and deeper emotional values as well as social implications related to how responsibly businesses are conducted.

Companies are expected to be good and do good. What that entails is very broad, but in a nutshell, it relates to transparency, trust and purpose.

In the past, the narrative referred to business ethics – acting responsibly towards your customers, employees and business partners.  Now morality is also part of the discourse. Commercial entities are expected to play higher purposes that help bring positive change in the world and align with contemporary social concerns such as equal opportunity, inclusivity, environmental sustainability and community well-being.

To sum up, brands are to behave more humanly. They are expected to be emotionally invested both ethically and morally in doing the right thing. Companies must rethink their mission and core values accordingly and act to build value with brand purposes that genuinely go beyond the immediate commercial benefits. Most companies are in a wait-and-see mode or committing to social responsibility and purposeful marketing only superficially. These companies run the risk that the myth, trustworthiness, meaning and seductive powers of their brands will erode. Companies can benefit from being proactive at deciding to be on the right side of history and acting accordingly.

3. User Experience

As consumers become surrounded by an ever-increasing abundance of choices, differentiation based on product characteristics becomes more difficult to achieve.  The opportunities for impressing, pleasing, and retaining customers go beyond merely offering more options, tangible differences and traditional customer service. Even high quality is no longer a differentiator in some markets. While quality remains a must-have product attribute, it is usually taken for granted in the premium and high-end sectors.

So, what’s a marketer to do?

Today’s consumer is paying more attention to the transient yet memorable sensations and impressions - experiences - that result from their interactions with the goods and services. As Maya Angelou famously stated, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Stan Davis suggests that as the market’s rate of change continues to accelerate, we are increasingly placing value on the transitory aspects of offerings. He stated that “we learn to value what moves not what is standing still, to use it and use it up rather than own it, and to value intangible assets over tangible ones.” Moreover, what the authors of the book The Experience Economy suggested would happen has already come to pass. Experiences are now replacing services as the new driver of economic value. Companies need to shift focus from optimizing customer transactions to enhancing customer experiences.

Experiential marketing uses attention-grabbing techniques to add life into a brand. A successful experience will leave the consumer excited, talking about your brand, and hopefully becoming a loyal customer who becomes your advocate. Activities in an engaging physical environment for experiential marketing involves planning customer-engaging initiatives and paying attention to all possible ways to delight the customers at all touch points including aspects of light, color, sound, temperature and even smell (scent marketing) to stage powerful marketing experiences that connect with the consumer on a visceral level.

We must pay close attention to reevaluating all the consumer interaction contact points to map a journey that can lead to enhanced brand experiences before, during and after purchases. Hence, business-customer interactions must be dominated by integrated marketing and omni-channel approaches as described below.