Blockchain IS NOT the Answer to Marketing with Customer Experience in Mind

This article was posted to Harvard Business Review and seemed to have gotten a lot of play… What Blockchain Could Mean for Marketing.

The following is my comment and viewpoint. Unfortunately very few HBR contributors engage commenters… 

In my opinion Blockchain Technology does nothing to solve this problem. It’s NOT a technology problem, it’s a marketing/sales mindset problem.

It’s the marketers who value this bombarding of consumers, and use of programmatic ads… they have the ability/technology to stop, they simply don’t want to. Every marketer can see a campaign had a 1.5% industry average click rate, they don’t need blockchain to know it’s 98.5% spam – and… consumers share their data now without blockchain, it’s just so many marketers are not JUST lazy… they only interested in what they deem the ‘additional” sale. For the most part they don’t care how many times they need to knock you over the head.

They only look at the upsides of bombarding consumers, they do not take the time, or have the inclination, to take the downside into account. Until they do, there is no technology that will make a significant difference.

#RetailRelevancy… #NoLetUp!

My post related to this topic, and a mission for me in 2019 to make this Top of Mind for Marketers: The Most Overlooked and Critical Component of Customer Experience…

Originally posted at TedRubin.com

The elegance of nothing

What ever happened to details?

The red sole of a Louboutin shoe, or the elegant tag on a pair of Tom’s? The sweeping fenders of a Porsche 911 or the needless complications of a fancy watch…

Today, a certain kind of customer is using a Muji notebook, or wearing a plain Everlane t-shirt. Is this what we’ve come to? One might come to the conclusion that consumers have rejected all the effort that designers and marketers have produced in a statement that rejects design. Not so fast.

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The Five Main Challenges Facing CMOs Today

From employee advocacy to peak data, let’s lay down the big challenges CMOs around the world are facing right now – and what they can do to improve their marketing in each area.

1. Understanding and embracing the power of employee advocacy

Empower your employees and they will power your brand. In today’s hyper-connected world, brands simply must embrace new ways of engaging with customers online, and your employees can help if you’ll let them. If you’re not looking for ways to involve your employees, then you are missing a huge opportunity.

Your employees are the best way to humanize and personalize your brand… and truly the best way to scale relevant, contextual content creation

Did you know that employee created content (ECC) receives eight times more engagement than content shared from the company itself? On top of that, employee content extends brand messaging by over 500%. Crazy, right? So why aren’t more companies getting employees engaged in content creation? It’s well known that companies with engaged employees outperform their peers; involving employees in content creation can help to create a sense of common purpose.

2. Brand personality and connection

It’s time to stop making excuses, and start bringing in-person social skills to the digital world. All of the positive benefits are out there waiting, and it’s up to us to make the effort to realize them.

3. Delivering a truly omni-channel, integrated experience

This requires you to connect the dots internally as well—which means connecting your employees so they can collaboratively deliver that seamless experience. You can’t be omni-channel to the outside, if you don’t take down the silos and become omni-channel inside. We often hear a lot about omni-channel marketing from an external viewpoint, but I think it’s also important to look at it from an internal perspective. Is your internal communication structure helping to build consistent company messaging and culture, or is there infighting about who handles what?

Before an organization can have an effective omni-channel marketing strategy, it’s important to examine the internal communication structure. I think the CMO should be heading this up, because brand messaging (whether internal or external) is really a marketing function, even though there are different departments that feed into it. However, very few companies have a CMO who has broad enough oversight of everything that’s happening within a company regarding brand messaging. They’re in charge of consumer messaging, but brand messaging also affects employees and vendors.

4. Overabundance of data

CMOs need to always remember that data will only take you so far; it’s judgment and instinct that will win the day. My advice is to make absolutely certain that your CMO and CIO have close ties, and learn to not only “play nice”, but to do their best to understand the vital role they play as a team. The kind of communication required to deliver the ultimate customer experience needs to run across and run through both channels. For them to be successful requires an enterprise-wide cultural shift.

5. Programmatic and digital spam

Brands are running headlong into brand equity destruction through incessant programmatic and digital spamming. The rise of retargeting and digital yield techniques is killing brands, and brand equity for the long-term. It makes me wonder how many brand managers, and more importantly CMOs, bother signing up for their own email distribution lists, or shop their brands from an anonymous browser to experience what their customers are being subjected to. Customer experience is no longer simply about product, delivery, and service, but about how the customer experiences our marketing.

My hope is that as the new marketing world matures, building better customer relationships will become everyone’s primary objective, from sales, to marketing, to customer service — even IT departments. If that’s the true objective, then “customer relationships” truly has a chance to be the x-factor in achieving Return on Relationship and enhancing ROI for the long term.

#RonR … #NoLetUp!

Originally posted at TedRubin.com

You Have My Full Attention – Don’t Waste It

You Have My Full Attention – Don’t Waste It

It is very, very rare to have your customer’s full attention. No matter how good your marketing is, people are still thinking about the food in the oven, the letter they have to mail, or the game they watched last night. Even when someone comes into your store, they’ll be focused on the products they came to see. So assuming you have the right stuff and it’s easy to find, you won’t get much chance to tell them anything else.

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Entrepreneurial Persistance

Entrepreneurial Persistance

I like to think that business mindset is made up of an individual’s “collection” of attitudes. And in addition to attitudes of confidence, gratitude and optimism, I think it’s also absolutely essential to add an attitude of persistence. Persistence is essential… it is probably the most important key to business success. It can be considered an attitude, but I think of it more as a habit—and one that every business owner needs to cultivate.

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Nobody Has True National Localized Influencers Like Macaroni Kid—No One!

Nobody Has True National Localized Influencers Like Macaroni Kid—No One!

Are you more likely to pay attention to a product recommendation from a Google ad, or from a local parent you know and trust? If someone you know in your neighborhood offered you a useful product sample to try at just the right moment, wouldn’t you be more likely to try it with an open mind than if you were handed something randomly by an employee at a store? Most people prefer to learn about products (and a million other topics) from people who they already trust. Macaroni Kid does a better job than anyone at building a national infrastructure of trusted local influencers, and big-name brands are taking notice.

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