As the gap between brand inspiration and commercial transaction narrows in the digital age, we need to find new ways to engineer meaningful interactions between brands and consumers. For most brands this means customer engagement should result in a commercial transaction.
At Isobar, we call this a ‘Brand Commerce’ marketing approach. It is about creating inspirational brand stories through the creative use of technology that ultimately leads to a transaction.
Essential to this process is a deep understanding of the context of a user’s digital life, especially now the digital and real worlds seamlessly overlap. We need to understand and use each potential brand touchpoint in the journey – this could be on the move, on a train, in bed while on multiple screens, and so on. The key is to create a narrative that lives across these spaces, that is informed by well-mined data and insights.
Brand commerce could be described as a consumer journey split into two stages: Brand, the inspiration stage of the journey, and Commerce, the engagement or transaction stage of the journey. In a marketing agency world, the Brand phase wins the awards, and the Commerce phase achieves the KPIs.
So, lets go back to basics: what is inspiration?
Definition:
in·spi·ra·tion
insp raSH()n/
divine influence directly and immediately exerted upon the mind or soul.
In today’s connected world, increasing competition and rising customer expectations have meant that ‘inspirational’ brands are a rare breed. Especially when the attention economy is a crowded marketplace – where the crowdsourcing digital age is making each of us a brand in our own right and where brands don’t just compete with each other but also compete with the internet. Brand loyalty stems from aligning the core values of the brand with the hearts and minds of a consumer. Despite these challenges, our job as advertisers is to tap into that common set of values and to amplify them through effective story telling.
The next stage is to leverage that brand inspiration and to transform it into a transaction. By this stage, we should have tapped into the values of our consumer, we’ve managed to create an inspirational story, we’ve amplified our shared values through an immersive experience and we have built trust and loyalty. Now the consumer is ready to engage on a transactional level. This may not necessarily be a financial transaction, but could be a meaningful engagement. For example, they might book their dream trip, sign up for a test drive, buy that special pair of jeans, register for an intriguing competition, and so on.
As digital marketing agencies, we are in the business of creating the last mile of the digital journey or the last mile of inspiration of that digital experience. And it is a critical step for any brand. We have to create a seamless experience, helping consumers at the point of transaction, otherwise we risk undermining the brand-building work we have undertaken. Let’s not lose them at the engagement stage due to a poor user experience, clunky technology or ineffective design.
Brands often mess it up at this stage. How often have you gone the whole nine yards with a brand experience and then given up at the last mile because of a confusing, overengineered, inauthentic conclusion? Too many times.
Firstly, we need to ensure that the user journey is simple and intuitive. It’s often the unnecessary complex use of technology that results in a poor user experience. Effective brand commerce work relies on user experience professionals, product managers and technologists to understand and build entire marketing ecoystems that are coherent, tell the brand story and deliver on conversion, because
it is here the intersection of technology and advertising can reach its
full potential.
Secondly, we need to ensure we have access to the right data – poor requirements definition, limited human use-case analysis and the lack of data to inform meaningful insights often result in a frustrating and confusing experience for consumers. So, execution matters. However great your idea is, it will fall apart if executed badly.
Thirdly, in order to ensure we create these transactional experiences, agencies need to equip themselves with the right skill sets – more than digital designers, we need user experience people, e-commerce experts, product managers and business analysts, as well as creatives with technology backgrounds to help inform our thinking.
We now have access to many technology platforms and channels – virtual reality, augmented reality, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and chatbots to name a few. They all offer the opportunity for rich moments of inspiration, yet the last mile in our brand commerce journey is the moment of truth, the moment to transact. If we get it wrong we expose ourselves to losing a whole bunch of consumers that we worked so hard on inspiring, and that, to me, is more painful than losing users we never inspired in the first place.
Karim Khalifa, CEO and co-founder of Digital Republic, linked by Isobar