Last week in Shanghai I had the opportunity to share my thoughts with crowd of experienced and enthusiast marketers. Here is the storyline.
Every time we make a purchasing decision about something that matters to us, we strive for balancing our rational side, supported by accurate information and data points, with our emotional motivations, primarily related to social benefits and connections with the brands we are evaluating.
It happens with the next car we are looking at, the travel we are planning for next summer, the watch and the bicycle we have been chasing for the past few months, or any business solution and partner we are evaluating for the company we work for. The very same human being that 9 to 5 (or most likely 8 to 20, these days) is proudly and diligently assessing, evaluating, reviewing before making any business decisions, doesn’t abruptly become an irrational consumer driven by instinct and gut. On the contrary, this human being is behaving similarly within his professional context and the personal environment.
We are all sophisticated buyers in any of our areas of interest. This is true for both personal shopping as well as for business buying decision. We like to be sophisticated and articulated in the way we select a bottle of wine for our date with the new girlfriend, or the analytics solution that will be adopted by the management team to monitor business results. But while our rational side is concerned about value (price, performance, outcomes), our emotional side wants to make sure we feel confident, happy, admired and successful.
If personal motivations are not enough to overcome cold numbers, then our bias (or love, in some case) toward a brand will make our decisions deviating from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. Brand and companies that over time have been able to build a strong relationship with us.
Today’s technologies, together with the understanding of personal motivations and human connection to brands, are redefining how marketing is operating at a large scale to engage individuals. We are moving away from dehumanized segments or archetypes and trying more and more to:
- look at customers as individuals,
- create a unique customer experience that blows them away,
- respond to them in real time, with real sincerity and understanding.
To do that, we need to connect data and information to build a picture of our customers. Not an easy task, given that just in the social domain every single minute there are about 50,000 app downloads, 2 millions of Google searches, 200 thousands tweets, 2 millions of Facebook likes, or 500M Wechat users, of whom 23% use the social network to research on brand decision and as a source of information on brand experience. Marketing automation tools and social listening techniques can help marketers to build such individual profiles, with customer preferences and behavioral analysis.
Knowing customer behavior enables the creation of personalized buyer journeys, with messaging and touches that are tailored to meet individual preferences, across the different buying stages in the client journey and different channels of interactions between the company and the customers.
The secret is to design a seamless experience that is maximizing the chances to progress from one stage to the next one, learning from past purchase behavior to deliver the right offer at the right time, segmenting and prioritize high quality marketing responses, deliver relevant content to the right audience.
Selling wine is not much different from selling a technology solution. You need to make your customers to love you.
