Last week in Chicago, B2B marketers gathered under the theme of “Change by Design” at the annual Masters of B2B Marketing Conference, presented by ANA Business Marketing. Among the various presentations by industry thought leaders and marketing practitioners were two subjects that should provoke marketing change agents to reexamine how they think about B2B marketing — a new marketing framework and the impact of artificial intelligence on marketing.
Lesson #1 – Marketers need new language for a non-linear world
Mark Bonchek, author and founder of Shift Thinking, provided a compelling argument that the language of marketing which developed during the push age of marketing leads to missed opportunities today and must change. According to Bonchek, “We segment and target audiences, sending messages through channels with campaigns to move consumers through stages of a funnel.” In an environment where people are continuously engaged in non-linear relationships, where communities add to individuals’ experiences and where shared purpose unites brands with decision makers, new constructs of language and metaphors are needed.
Bonchek advocates that brands should seek to create “gravity” to attract and keep key stakeholders in the brand’s “orbit”. These stakeholders include employees, customers, partners and influencers whose experiences and interactions with each other advance a shared purpose and create shared value. The orbits (Ongoing Relationships Beyond Individual Transactions) build upon trust, gratitude and reciprocity which helps attract new people into the social system.
Companies who have a vibrant social system today include:
• Sephora, who adds to its community with Beauty Talk, Beauty Boards and ColorIQ for the shared purpose of looking one’s best
• Vail Resorts, whose EpicMix program is a community platform that combines individual skier data with gamification techniques and on-mountain photography to enhance shared experiences
• Adobe, whose Behance community is designed to empower the creative world to make ideas happen
According to Bonchek, marketers should evaluate five potential areas for generating brand gravity:
1. Intrinsic value — what has value beyond the product being sold?
2. Peer connections — how do customers get value from each other?
3. Social currency — what do people exchange in their communities?
4. Little data — what can you tell people about themselves?
5. Return on engagement — why should customers have relationship with you?
Lesson #2 – Marketers need to adapt to a Human-to-Machine-to-Human world
Bryan Kramer, author and CEO of Pure Matter Brand Marketing, has been an eloquent advocate of moving beyond business-to-business marketing to embracing human-to-human marketing. This means finding the human connection in how companies serve customers and not exclusively relying on the promotion of features and product benefits to supposedly rational buyers. On the other hands, Jon Iwata, IBM’s SVP of marketing and communications, shared an update on the cognitive computing capabilities of Watson to help marketers create more personalized customer experiences delivered by machines at scale. The advances in artificial intelligence will soon make mass-personalization a feasible goal for many marketers. But how do these two seemingly opposing perspectives – human-to-human or machine-to-human – coexist?
My discussion with Tom Stein, CEO of SteinIAS, helped provide some insight. Stein was inducted into the BMA’s Hall of Fame the previous evening and has been evaluating the implications of technology-enabled marketing on communicating effective brand stories. I posed the question of how we will need to train AI systems to learn to be effective brand ambassadors. Stein believes, “AI will force us to do a much better job of thinking brands all the way through. Today we have abstract concepts like brand, brand as it relates to discrete audiences, how the brand needs to manifest itself internally and externally. We think about use cases on websites, about how the brand has to map to different personas, how the brand layers over the buyer journey. We think about all these things. But when it comes to AI as the customer interface, it is no longer abstract. One of the places marketers fall short is leaving a layer of abstraction between a brand messaging standpoint and what really happens on the ground in the sales organization and their interaction with customers. With AI, you can no longer have that level of abstraction because the AI system is going to carry the message to all of these people and cut across all of the use cases, all the personas and buyers journeys. And if it is not real and you don’t think it all the way through, people are either going to have a bad experience or the wrong experience and the wrong take away. But by thinking it all the way through, we are going to be much better marketers.”
To better leverage human-to-machine-to-human marketing, it is time to move beyond brand guidelines and brand standards books to designing experiences at every touch point. Stein concludes, “You can no longer sit on high and hide behind the brand book. That modality will no longer work.”
Source: Forbes
John Ellett is CEO of the CMO Accelerator at nFusion, and author of The CMO Manifesto: A 100-Day Action Plan for Marketing Change Agents.
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