Applying trends to drive powerful solutions
Check out the great piece over on the Strategic Marketing blog on the Berry network about Decoding the Consumer. There, Alan See outlines how marketers need to reflect the consumer’s dizzy journey from awareness to purchase and beyond.
It’s a great post - with a version of what I have been repeating for a few months now: a sort of mantra that helps my clients consider how we’re integrating the experience across some specific areas that customers are really into right now. It’s a mantra because it always contains about the same elements, but naturally gets reconfigured and recreated as needed based upon the Brand purpose I’m working against. Alan talks about the ‘primary combination key’ for decoding customers as having Search, Social, and Mobile components. These are all areas that do require serious consideration, given the world we live in, and are also powerful trends that continue to shape it.
I would only add, however, that Site and Retail/Place might belong on our decoder ring - expanding it to be Site, Search, Social, Mobile, and Retail/Place.
Site and Search need to work together to provide quality content to land on for the user who’s looking for you - and that’s true whether you have a Brand.com or not. For example, if the Brand has a great partnership then the search needs to support people who are looking for that partnership information. And some Brands use their Facebok page as their landing place. The point is that there has to be a place where the Brand expresses the purpose that gives it meaning and a reason for being.
Retail/Place is all about making sure that there is a continuous consideration of the customer journey all the way to the location where they buy or experience the brand first-hand - which often times can be supplied by mobile, but there can be a role for in-store as well, so I like to consider it separately.
Do you have a mantra? What do you use to decode the world?
