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Now Available - The Agile Brand
My second book, The Agile Brand, is now available on Amazon, iTunes and Barnes & Noble. It is a follow up to my 2016 book, The Agile Web.
Brands have evolved over several centuries from simple tools for recognition to something much more nuanced and sophisticated in the modern age. Being an agile brand means taking part in a relationship with consumers. While this means giving up some control over your brand, it rewards you with loyal long-term customers. The Agile Brand follows the story of branding from its beginnings to the authentic relationship with brands that modern consumers want, and gives practical examples of what you can do to modernize your brand in meaningful ways.
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News Coverage
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Blog & Articles
Is it too soon to make a prediction for 2020? We generally only think about the year immediately ahead, but while I was making my 2019 predictions for marketers, I realized that the next year was becoming clearer and clearer. 2020 will be the year of identity.
It’s once again the end of one year and the beginning of another. And with it, a chance to reflect on the previous 12 months as well as an opportunity to look forward into the next. Inevitably, this leads to recaps, predictions, and many other ways to make sense of time passing.
Customer experience doesn’t just affect a single marketing channel or department within a company. Thus, unlike many other types of measurement and analytics efforts, building a customer experience measurement plan takes the efforts of many different parts of an organization. I should know; my agency works with clients to create custom customer experience measurement strategies and plans. This process can be divided into five steps.
I spend a lot of time explaining fairly technical people to people with a wide variety of technical knowledge. That’s just part of my job, and it’s quite interesting. It teaches me a lot about the subject matter to be able to explain it to people with varying levels of understanding. Inevitably, however, some of my descriptions are going to devolve into the usage of what many refer to as “buzzwords,” so here is my defense of them.
I am quoted in this article by ScaleFast regarding my expertise in personalization:
No matter which approach you go with, digital strategist Greg Kihlstrom recommends maintaining realistic expectations, testing your efforts and optimizing along the way. “While you may want every touchpoint in your customer experience to have some method of personalization, the only way to truly understand the effectiveness of what you are doing is to make sure there is a good test for each,” Kihlstrom says.
Think of search as a means to solve problems. Your search marketing approach needs to be focused on people that are seeking an answer, a fix, or something that can help them address a challenge they currently have. Advertising and other methods can be used to plant the “seeds” of interest in a product or service, but search is all about getting results (no pun intended) quickly.
Loyalty programs are effective at retaining customers by preventing them from turning to the competition. These programs can also maximize the lifetime value of a customer by offering incentives to spend more and buy more often.
Shifts in consumer behavior and technology have shaped both our relationship with brands, and the way that those brands seek to have relationships with their customers. Branding has followed and will continue to follow the trends and behaviors of the rest of society over time, and we are now on the cusp of a new era of the brand-consumer relationship, which I’m currently tackling in my follow-up to The Agile Brand.
The agile company doesn’t stand behind a rigid set of brand guidelines, and they know that in order to succeed, they must possess genuine corporate values that are demonstrated to their customers in tangible ways. Gone are the days when corporate social responsibility could be a bunch of words printed on a wall, programs listed on a website, but full of empty talk. Customers and employees alike demand more.
Measurement insights are a key part of optimizing your customer experience. At every step in the journey, it is critical that you understand what consumers are doing and how your channels and touch points are performing. It's also important that you not only have the ability to see what has happened in the past, but you also have actionable insights to help you make the best decisions moving forward.