Five ways your brand can win consumer hearts and minds
The explosion of automation and artificial intelligence is making humanity a premium in marketing communications. Brands have to act more human, with purpose and empathy to connect with a consumer that keeps raising the bar for engagement
Effective consumer engagement requires the right use of data and going back to the basics of trust, context and empathy, said panelists at the Braze LTR Conference in New York.
The annual event hosts hundreds of users of the consumer engagement platform and answers their challenges and explores solutions. Speakers and attendees at the conference discussed how to put “Humanity in Action,” while navigating a shifting creative and marketing landscape.
The role of agencies, consultants and even chief marketing officers are in flux, while regulations and attitudes towards privacy are shifting the ground on data sharing, as well.
Here’s some key takeaways from the conference:
Keep the user at your core
“Our world of 2019 is counterintuitive,” said Braze CEO Bill Magnuson. People are more connected, but suffer from greater feelings of isolation, he said. As communications channels multiply, it’s increasingly important for brands to keep the user at the centre of their efforts, said Magnusson. “It’s the posture of a caring and empathetic listener,” he said.
Consumers are experiencing a “bifurcation” in their lives, where they want all data-driven technological parts to be frictionless but crave real-world connection more than ever in other parts, said Marissa Thalberg, former CMO of Taco Bell and an advisor to its parent, Yum Brands.
Empathy: the key to cracking what consumers want?
“The journey to understand our customer begins with empathy,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, Forrester VP and principal analyst. He presented the results of the second annual Brand Humanity Index survey that sketched a “pathway to humanity” for brands trying to build meaningful customer engagement.
Brand humanity is made up of three factors, said Chatterjee: natural communication that sounds like one person speaking to another, shows an awareness and respect for the consumer’s preferences and boundaries and triggers the right emotions.
The BHI study surveyed more than 3,366 consumers and 1,617 senior-level marketers to create a “Brand Humanity Model” for businesses. This is meant to provide a method to assess a marketer’s ability to deliver human communication at scale.
The survey studied best practices to identify the critical dimensions of brand humanity maturity, asking marketing leaders around the world to rate their current programs based on criteria including technology, data management, team structures and more.
The study found 96% of firms say human communication is important to the organisation, but only 22% can claim to be “brilliant” at it, while 29% are “great,” 26% are “good” and the rest are “basic,” said Chatterjee. He explained that brilliant brands track interactions in real time to create a live individual vision of its customers in order to reach them with an integrated approach and marketing technology stack. Many respondents struggle to tie together insights and execution and one-third said they track customer interactions, but not in real time.
“If you don’t connect the dots, you have an incomplete picture of your customer,” said Chatterjee. “Listening is not enough, because listening gives you a lot of noise.”
The stakes are high, said Chatterjee; if a brand is perceived as communicating with humanity, consumers are 1.7 times more likely to purchase from it and 1.9 times more likely to recommend it, he noted.
Source Campaignlive
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Comment
No comments found.