Winning Brands Will Own
Customer Journeys
Neil Vose, recent import from London to start-up Quirk in
Durban, was asked how South African digital agencies differ from their peers
internationally.
He is impressed by the depth of talent in South Africa, but
says that companies need to consider digital as more than just an add-on. It’s
not about web-site design and marketing a Facebook page, but understanding it’s
a new economy with new challenges:
“Your digital strategy should solve business problems. It’s not
about the tools; these are freely available, what is needed is to instil a
culture of exploration and ideation”.
Neil believes both clients and agencies need to change.
Clients need the agencies to demonstrate their expertise and commitment, from investing
in heavy-weights on the creative side who can produce big-hitting content
pieces, to ensuring they have great data analysis capabilities – which must
include team-members who understand consumer
behaviour as well as digital data and analytics.
Companies need to think big, in terms of step-change, and
ensure their products and services will still have resonance to customers in
the future. However, in South Africa, there’s a sense that the bottom-line is
currently healthy, so what’s the issue?
The problem is, new digital and content platforms are
driving structural industry change. The iPod and iTunes fundamentally changed
the music industry; AirBnB is eating the lunch of the big hotel groups; Uber is
transforming taxi services. Companies must anticipate that disruptive new entrants
will be able to undermine their current business model, and therefore, must seek
to strategise and innovate now.
Neil’s sense of urgency is palpable: “The business
revolution is sooner than we think. Companies need a clear articulation of what
digital means to them, their employees and customers. Companies need to set the
vision, set the road map, and cascade from there. Marketing is only one aspect
of the strategy, it’s not just about demand generation but also about customer
service, fulfilment, distribution, and the employee value proposition, amongst
others. There need to be key milestones to deciding on a future investment or
not. Above all, companies need to be clear about : What are we really selling?
How can we engage with people more effectively on a more frequent basis to
ensure brand loyalty? While digital and
content can enable ongoing positive relationships with customers, agencies need
to go beyond that and become true partners in this process.”
The problem is that this requires a cultural business shift,
but at the same time peoples’ behaviours are already changing, driven largely
by digital. With South Africa on the
brink of a far greater smartphone penetration, and with a large, young
population, companies need to become ready for the future and have a plan. Embracing
digital is not about making incremental changes, but about fundamental
step-change.
Of course companies must have pride in their current
products, but they must also be unafraid to test and learn, be prepared to
attain a different level of insight through immersive experiences, and be
willing to explore, in detail, what customers need by engaging directly with
their journeys. Although strategy must be led by the customer experience, any decisions
must be backed up by hard-core data.
Finally, brands need to focus on transformation through understanding
that currently, products and services are not evolving in an incremental
manner, but that revolutionary step-change is occurring.
As in London, South African agencies need to be given a
proper mandate with sufficient time and enough money to make it happen so they
can invest in creating small, specialist, but highly diverse mixes of people
with the right skill-sets, from technologists, sociologists, psychologists,
writers and marketers to economists. These teams must be tasked with coming up
with new products and innovations based on an intimate, granular understanding
of the customer journey.
Neil hasn’t come across many companies in South Africa undertaking
many different trials of different concepts, then scaling the most successful. Instead,
many of the new agencies in South Africa sell packages such as social media
services, or inexpensive, agile
web-building, or content creation. There’s nothing wrong with what they are
doing, but digital strategy can’t be about a one-off project, but about truly
understanding the customer journey. So, it’s not just about using a social tool
like BrandsEye, which is fantastic, but which talks to the here-and-now, and is
used tactically, but over and above that, to ask big questions relating to what
the big change opportunities are.
Neil would look to see agencies employing discrete, small,
targeted budgets – especially with mobile budgets, learning from them what
works and doesn’t, and only then take these to scale. Walmart and Marks and Spencer, for instance,have
created Innovation Labs that are stand-alone with a profit-and-loss.
In terms of the mistakes
he sees South Africans make, he feels that, “People get carried away by fads. Whether
it’s Facebook, Snapchat, Wechat, Whatsapp or MXit – using any or all of them
may be good from a tactical perspective, but what is the strategic intent? South
Africans are investing piecemeal in digital, and not asking themselves: What is
the business driver for digital investment?”
He also feels that there needs to be more collaboration
within the sector: “The future lies in partnering – recognising where good
people are and what they do and where you need to partner with them” and he
feels strongly that South Africans could work together more effectively at a
sector-wide level. In fact, partners can extend to the customers themselves,
HSBC’s Innovation Lab is firmly focused on customers.
While South Africans are providing great value in terms of demand
generation, storytelling, brand perception and ensuring share of voice and
sales, where the digital space needs to move is to value creation and an
increasing focus on what services will be driven by digital – ecommerce,
biometrics in retail banking, call in services. The key question must be: “How
do we create ongoing value for brands and businesses through digital services?”
Brands want to work with agencies that will help them build
a sustainable business; that’s the other revolution, sustainability is
important and it’s not just about the sale any more. Of course, sales are necessary,
but not sufficient - we have to look to the future, to what are the right
products and services, going forward. There is a huge opportunity for both great
product creation and developing great services. Digital agencies must think
holistically, in terms of what drives human interaction. Marketing has always
been a combination of art and science, but we are increasingly seeing hard-core
human behavioural science being brought into the mix. Those brands that learn how
to own customer journeys will remain or become tomorrow’s winning brands.
Originally published at The Marketing Site.
