Digital Sense

The Common Sense Approach to Effectively Blending Social Business Strategy, Marketing Technology, and Customer Experience

Travis Wright, Chris J. Snook

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119291718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Compete in the digital world with pragmatic strategies for success

Digital Sense provides a complete playbook for organizations seeking a more engaged customer experience strategy. By reorganizing sales and marketing to compete in today's digital-first, omni-channel environment, you gain newfound talent and knowledge from the resources already at hand. This book provides two pragmatic frameworks for implementing and customizing a new marketing operating system at any size organization, with step-by-step roadmaps for optimizing your customer experience to gain a competitive advantage. The Experience Marketing Framework and the Social Business Strategy Framework break down proven methods for exceeding the expectations customers form throughout the entirety of the buying journey. Customizable for any industry, sector, or scale, these frameworks can help your organization leap to the front of the line.

The evolution of marketing and sales demands a revolution in business strategy, but realizing the irrelevance of traditional methods doesn't necessarily mean knowing what comes next. This book shows you how to compete in today's market, with real-world frameworks for implementation.

• Optimize competitive advantage and customer experience
• Map strategy back to business objectives
• Engage customers with a pragmatic, proven marketing system
• Reorganize sales and marketing to fill talent and knowledge gaps

Today's customer is savvy, with more options than ever before. It's critical to meet them where they are, and engagement is the cornerstone of any cohesive, effective strategy. The technological revolution has opened many doors for marketing and sales, but the key is knowing what lies behind each one—what works for your competitor may not be right for you. Digital Sense cuts through the crosstalk and confusion to give you a solid strategy for success.

Section II
Building a Customer-Centric Organization

3
Introducing the Experience Marketing Framework

As you already know, we work and live in an always-on, always-moving, mobile-first reality, where business happens at the speed of speech and thumbs. This present-day reality will compound in speed, accuracy, and efficiency 1,000 times over in the coming decade. Qualcomm (one of the largest chipset providers in world) actually had an internal corporate directive in 2013 called “solving the 1000x challenge” while Chris was consulting for them. The Experience Marketing Framework (EMF) will help you navigate this reality with agility to find the powerful simplicity on the back side of all this added complexity.

As we introduce the EMF, please repeat the following three agreements to yourself daily for context and consider posting this prominently in full view in your workspace.

The Three Agreements to Customer-Centric Accountability Cultures

1. I admit that I am powerless over the demands of always-on marketing.
2. The power (our customer) that is greater than our organization gives me the singular focus necessary to restore my sanity and find focus.
3. I will take a fearless inventory of our insights, vision, and execution annually and score them with brutal honesty against the customer needs, competitors' strength, and external forces that threaten our existence.

The Framework to Ask Powerful Questions

It is important to note that these next few chapters are not about giving you answers as much as they are about giving you the framework to ask the right questions. The EMF was conceived in an effort to provide you and your organization a complete foundation and structure to ask the fundamental questions needed to build your road maps in a way that aligns your major business objectives to the priority needs of your customer. All of this is set within a model that can optimize the reliability of your processes and draw out the creativity of your people.

As we dive into the next few chapters, we will provide you categories of specific questions and steps to take your team through that will both baseline and enhance your approach to build your strategy with humanized tactics that are built with digital sense.

We are both proud, card-carrying, antiestablishment members of Generation X, and therefore we have a deep appreciation and love for ’80s metal, early ’90s hip-hop, and grunge. Music is a universal language and a perfect example of the power and beauty of conquering dissonance when properly composed. It also proves that great results don't always require months' or years' worth of labor. When top talent is free to come together in individual expression but aligned focus, magic can happen. A musical example of this is the creation of the Guns N' Roses classic hit “Sweet Child O' Mine,” which was literally created in less than five minutes (see Figure 3.1).¹

Figure 3.1 Guns N' Roses

Cognitive dissonance is the clash in an organization when two or more disharmonious elements or ideas try to coexist. In an organization, this is commonplace wherever the culture is weak or the objectives are unclear. In a digital world, this can be amplified in its negative impact because of the speed by which information (true or false, verified or unverified) can and will travel to each individual. To overcome dissonance as an organization in the digital world, an even deeper commitment to frequent (crucial) communication and to establishing a common language and framework from which everyone is operating is paramount.

The EMF was created after an inspiring nudge from Ethology founder and CEO, Jeffrey Pruitt. Pruitt's passion to help brands think about experience marketing and performance media at the strategic level, instead of just digital marketing as a myriad of tactics and channels, was the catalyst for building this framework. We enlisted Chris's colleague and VP of Customer Experience, Tony Quiroz (@TQ_AZ), to flush out our ideas around the initial EMF in late 2015 (see Figure 3.2). We are grateful to both of these individuals for the inspiration and insights they provided along the way to making this model a reality.

Figure 3.2 Initial EMF Sketch from Chris's Whiteboard, July 2015

We will spend the next several chapters diving deeper into each layer of the framework, discussing what the EMF answers and avails on both a day-to-day basis, as well as in forward-looking planning cycles. We will walk through the pragmatic use of each layer and loop one at a time, but first, let's summarize the EMF with visuals and a summary description of what it will help you achieve and why it matters in the first place.

The Experience Marketing Framework

• The EMF (Figure 3.3) maximizes client/customer success by delivering reliability and innovation to the customer experience.
• Experience marketing is defined as the union of purpose-driven strategy, human-centric tactics, and data-fed iterations.
• A simple “learn, plan, do” approach quickly leads to reliability, which ensures the maintenance of market share.
  1. Learn the client/customer's business goals or consumer needs and persona
  2. Plan projects/launches/campaigns with a focus on measurable interactions.
  3. Do the work, release to market, measure, and iterate.
• Innovation ensures market share growth and arises from insights. Insights can occur while executing but will be generated more reliably by adding dedicated cycles of research to your operational procedure and road map.
• A complementary “discover, design, deploy” approach leads to more seamless onboarding of innovations and commercialization of key insights gathered while executing.
  1. Discover the most vulnerable/opportunistic touch points in your customer journey.
  2. Design by assessing what's feasible (technology), viable (business), and desirable/usable (human), and build on top of a data structure that will measure what's most valued as it relates to the problem you are setting out to solve.
  3. Deploy and iterate based upon the data loop to optimize for reliability.
• Vision guides strategy. Strategy is the art of applying insights to specific touch points in the customer journey, guided by business goals, calibrated by scope, and prioritized to a schedule.
• Success = a great customer experience: well executed, uniquely crafted, and sustainable.

  

  Figure 3.3 The Experience Marketing Framework (Snook, Quiroz 2015)

The EMF helps organizations and leaders deliver on the two commitments (Figure 3.4) of reliability and innovation that fellow Wiley author Jeanne Bliss (@customerbliss) called out in her book Chi...