I grew up as a Marketer with a relentless passion for building brand personalities and reputation imbibing visual storytelling. In the B2C setups through retail store interiors, point of purchase merchandising, salesperson messaging, and in the B2B segments through on-ground events, sales kits, brochures, etc. These, in addition to traditional mass media advertising.
Today, owing to the pandemic or indeed the dreaded Black Swan Event we are weathering, there are obvious shifts we are witnessing in marketing and brand building. While AI and chatbots have taken centre stage for marketing and brand building, what remains unchanged is that the study of human behaviour is at the core of brand building. However, as marketers, the big question we must address is whether data can completely replace human emotions.
Think of it as a journey that you get the customers to embark upon and on the way acquire knowledge about their needs, give them nuggets of experience and bring them enough reasons to retain their relationship with the brand as a lifetime customer. Shouldn’t the engagement milestones of this journey have a balance between Digital and Human connections? Let’s look at the journey and explore if the relationship between Digital and Human engagement is that of being symbiotic or a co-existence?
What is crystal clear is that we need to move on and embrace the ‘Creation of Human Touch -Digitally’
Brand Reputation
The first point of brand discovery and reassurance that the customers get today are from the positive digital public image, news articles, reviews, and search results. In the physical world, it’s quite like sizing the brand story through glitzy merchandising while window shopping or even those evocative mass media advertising. Either way reputation or perceptions precede any behaviour or action taken towards the brand.
Failing to consider reputation through new media tools as a critical building block could be an error in the digital landscape world. As business leaders, it’s important to realize that each sales and marketing effort through Digital or through Human connections reflect your brand.
Employee Value Proposition
Another way to cut the cloth for enhancing reputation would be through value propositions crafted for and through internal stakeholders. Honest brands stand out in the crowd and provides a strong reassurance to a customer. Sharing brand core values and backstories are great ways of humanizing the company which showcases the employees that make it happen. Equally important is taking every employee in the journey of brand building along and making them vocal ambassadors. That cannot happen unless your workforce is convinced about your brand’s values.
Sales Funnel
Unlike the physical world, there is an opportunity to get a goldmine of insights through managing the reputation online. Is it true that human connections are being replaced by mere data and dashboards? Leads being pushed into the sales funnel to influence and generate sales? Not really!
Algorithm-based insights can be used by sales organisation to hyper-personalise their engagement armed with detailed knowledge about the customer and their affinity towards the brand. For example, insights derived from a marketing automation engine about your customer can tell you the number of times he has visited your website, searched for the product or brand, or even opened your nurture emails and taken subsequent action. Without this information, the salesperson will always have to base the sales pitch on a few assumptions. So, why not empower them with this additional information? Why not make the customers feel that they have a personal journey with the brand?
Customer Retention
In the temptation to be on an ‘Always-on’ engagement, there lies the danger of spamming audiences with irrelevant and generic content that is not tailored for the customer and their relationship with the brand. Many customers are experiencing anxiety and burnouts, and, in these times, brands need to be sensitive to personalized content. Thought Leadership engagement along with a two-way dialogue through a human interface consolidates the retention as well as drive referrals.
Desired Response to Desired Expectations
In the digital landscape, there is no doubt that we have a wealth of data and metrics on customer behavior. In fact, the best marketers will identify customers’ needs before the customers know. However, when we design marketing campaigns, we have the necessary discipline to conclude the strategy with desired responses elicited from the customer. Let’s turn it on its head and start with the customer’s desired expectations from the brand. Let us not think about what our customers can do for us, instead, focus our energies on what we can do for them.
New Skilling
Keeping up pace with the changes of the digital world is not for the faint-hearted. There are only a few documented best practices bringing our own experiences and fundamentals of marketing to play. This needs to be underscored through a learning mindset by not just the Marketing Team but the whole business organization. The end-to-end customer journey needs to be transformed through a hybrid of digital and human connections with a clear focus on the bottom line.
This debate can continue but what is apparent and urgent is that we need to welcome the world of Modern Marketing. Embrace the changes, yes, but also safeguard the human touch! It’s what make customers feel like they have a real relationship with a brand. Without personalization and sensitivity no amount of intelligent digital marketing can truly deliver that.
The article is authored by Bidisha Nagaraj, Vice President – Marketing, Schneider Electric, Greater India
