Video Transcript

Thank you. After that introduction, I’m a bit blushing, but yeah. So let’s try this again. CRM relationship marketers of the world, welcome to PostFunnel Summit!

There you go. So, many times I get asked, “Why do we even produce these events? Why should we care? It’s a huge headache, and why do we do this?” And the answer is quite straightforward, Optimove’s mission is to empower brands to exhibit emotional intelligence, right?

And that doesn’t only mean producing the industry-standard product for CRM relationship marketing. It also means building that community. And that’s why we’re here today to talk about best practices to get everyone together under one roof and speak about relationship marketing, what it means, what are the best practices, and so on, and so forth.

Last year, I kicked off the event by talking about the evolution of the customer. This year, I want to talk about the evolution of marketing. There’s a very interesting book called “Marketing 3.0” by Philip Kotler. I definitely recommend reading it. And the book was written in 2010. Back then, like a lot of other good books, “1984” by Orwell, Philip Kotler predicted very well how marketing is going to evolve.

So let’s look at how we modeled the evolution of marketing. It all starts 1950, “Marketing 1.0.” You have a good product, you’re good to go, right? We all know that the famous saying by Henry Ford, “You can have it any color you want as long as it’s black.” You have a good product, you have a good production line, you’re good to go.

That’s your market. That’s your brand, right? The direction of the communication is one-to-many. Say it to the masses, Don Draper style, right? That’s “Marketing 1.0.” There’s a good definition for this by the American Marketing Association, “Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers,” right?

You have a good hammer, print “Acme” on it, you’re an amazing brand. And then came what I call the apocalypse of marketing. 1990 was the year that email was used for the first time as a marketing channel. Everything changed ever since.

We have data, right? And I’m not talking about performance data. I’m not talking about click-through rates, open rates. I’m talking about data breadcrumbs that our customers leave when they interact with us. Now, once we have that, we’re able to understand our customers better. We’re able to segment and personalize starting from high F name up until, you know, very evolved and very interesting segments and micro-segments.

This is a good definition for a brand in “Marketing 2.0,” “a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of your prospects.” Brand is not something you make, it’s something you manage. Now, the biggest problem with “Marketing 2.0” is that we lost our customers’ trust.

Data has been exploited by marketers, right? Everyone’s bombarding anyone. Everyone’s getting tons of messages, so-called “personal,” exploiting all the marketing channels, and more than anything, we can’t access the customer anymore.

We can’t get that access to their inboxes. We can get access to their attention, right, because we’re bombarded. And what happened was that we lost our customers’ trust. Then what happened is “Marketing 3.0.” Now, what drove 3.0 is, A, social media. We can’t control our brands anymore.

It’s all out there. It’s viral. After that, what happened was that customers have evolved. They expect more, they want more, they need more, and they’re much more demanding. So “Marketing 3.0” was born, where the definition of it is “Person-centric marketing.” The architecture is many-to-one because it’s not only that, the brand that’s communicating with the consumer, it’s social media channels, it’s their peers.

Everyone knows anything about the brand, right? So, it’s a very difficult relationship to manage. A good definition for the 3.0 is this, “A brand is essentially a container of a customer’s complete experience with a product or a company.” We’re talking about experience. It’s an experience economy, right?

Three-point-oh is relationship marketing. We’re not marketing to our customers, we’re managing a relationship with them. And it’s two-way directional. We don’t speak at them, we speak with them. Now, let’s look at some stats and facts to make sure that the case is clear, and let’s look why we must embrace 3.0.

Seventy percent of customers agree their loyalty is more difficult to maintain than ever before. Brands want loyalty, they must try harder. We need to reinvent our marketing. Consumers see 77% of brands as not meaningful. We need to create meaning.

Personalization isn’t enough. We need to think beyond that. Seventy-six percent of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Understanding is no longer nice to have. It’s a standard. Sixty-three percent of customers say that organizations should make getting to know them better, should be a top priority.

Let’s think about the other side of the step. It means that 63% of customers are getting irrelevant communications. Sixty-nine percent of online shoppers say that the relevance of a company’s message influences their perception of a brand. Relevance.

These are words that we haven’t heard before. We need to understand that every interaction with a customer actually shifts how our customers think about us. The definition of relevance has changed. Consumer expectations for trust grew by an average of 250% year-on-year. Trust.

Have we ever heard that before? This is starting to sound like, “Who do we want…you know, who do we expect trust from?Our spouses, our friends?” Relationship marketing is about managing that relationship with our customers and building trust. “Marketing 3.0” is about person-centric marketing. We need to be obsessed about our customers.

If you think that building a flowchart saying, “That’s the customer journey,”that doesn’t work anymore. It’s wrong by definition. We want our customers to lead their own journey. We want self-optimized campaigns, right? The customers choose, and that’s how we rebuild that trust. As always, there’s a paradigm shift from one-directional, asymmetrical marketing to reciprocal symmetrical marketing.

We’re not talking at them, we’re speaking with them. From transactional marketing, generating demand and selling products to relationship marketing. Building experiences. And, again, restoring trust. We lost our customers’ trust, now we need to restore it. What does this even mean? Let’s look at a few examples by household brands of how they shifted top-down to exhibit this 3.0.

Lyft redefined the relational roles of its industry from driver/passenger to friend and friend. Their tagline is, “Your friend with a car,” right? They encourage passengers to sit by the driver. Now, that’s a relationship. American Express, from issuer cardholder to club member, that’s friendship.

Disney, Disney amusement parks, sorry, from operator/writer to member and guest. Our customers are our guests. We welcome them. Nike, coach/athlete. And Starbucks took it one level up. Starbucks’ mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”

They don’t sell coffee, they build a community. Now, that’s relationship marketing.The cynics out there might think that, you know, I’m talking whatever, so let’s look at some stats again. BrandsView is making the world a better place, have seen their wallet share grow 9X.

Sixty-one percent of consumers will recommend brand that align with their values. So, it doesn’t only fuel your attention, it fuels acquisition, word of mouth. Sixty-seven percent of customers say they will pay more to get a great experience. So it’s not only they’re expecting it, they’re also willing to pay for it.

What’s not to do, what’s not to understand? Seventy-one percent of consumers will recommend a product because they received a great experience. As I mentioned, we’re in an experience economy. Every interaction, every moment with a consumer shifts how they think about us, affects how they perceive the brand.

And we must exhibit emotional intelligence in our communications, not speak at our customers, speak with our customers. Let’s pause here, take a step back, and answer the question, what are we doing for today? So we’re here to answer the question, how do we achieve this “Marketing 3.0,” right? How do we achieve true person-based marketing?

How do we restore customers’ trust? How do we strengthen the brand-consumer bond? And today, we’re going to tackle these questions from three main aspects, the evolution of marketing, the evolution of the consumer, and technology as an enabler. So we got an amazing agenda waiting for you guys today. Please share the love, #pfsummit.

Huge shout out to our sponsors. We wouldn’t be able to be here today without them, Mobivate, Wiraya, Xtremepush. They all have table tops on my left-hand side, your right-hand side. Go by. They’re all fully integrated with Optimove, completing a solution, a product solution that enables 3.0. Just a few logistics.

Please be respectful of time. We have a packed agenda. When people call you in to sit, please take a seat. This is an amazing venue, but the acoustics are lousy. So, try to keep it down. If you want to have a chat, networking is great. Take a step outside and do that.

But acoustics are lousy here, so please respect the people that are sitting in and listening to the content. That’s it for me. Thank you very much for joining us, and have a lovely rest of the day.