Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business. You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Fifteen Major Marketing Trends for 2015

When it comes to the future, it's been said that there are three kinds of marketers: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened. As we do every year, for smart marketers who want to fall into that second group, analysis and insights from Brand Keys' validated and predictive loyalty and engagement metrics were collected from over 100,000 consumers this year.

Here, then, are the fifteen most critical trends that are likely to become brand marketing realities during 2015:

1. Everyone of a Kind
   Consumers will more and more crave - and expect - more and more customized and personalised products, services and experiences. This will be fuelled by the next trend...
2. Magnified Human Technology
   Digital and mobile in all forms will fuel the sense of empowerment and possibility for the individual consumer.
3. Real Brand Engagement
   Awareness is a given. Marketers will link "engagement" to how well the brand is perceived versus their category's Ideal, rather than counting "likes" or just trying to leverage imagery.
4. The Everything Expectation
   The ability for brands to accurately measure real, unarticulated, and constantly-expanding emotional consumer expectations will provide significant advantages to engage, delight, and profit.
5. Real-Time Becomes Real Important
   Increased real-time expectations already subsume brand and will now spread to areas of product availability, delivery, and customer service, all becoming more important influencers in purchase decisions.
6. It's Still The Brand, Stupid!
   Increased consumer expectations will be accompanied with added perceptions of products and services as commodities. Brands will need to be differentiated and stand for something meaningful, emotional, and important to consumers.
7. Category is King
   To engage those smarter, high-expectation consumers, brand wills need to be smarter about their own category-specific emotional values that they can leverage and believably own.
8. Brands Will Get Emotional
   Successful brands will need to identify the emotional values in the category where they compete, and utilize them as a foundation for meaningful positioning, differentiation, and a foundation for authentic storytelling.
9. Non-Fiction Storytelling
   Storytelling is fine, but the stories brands tell must reflect real brand values and category realities that differentiate and meet consumers' believability criteria, otherwise marketers will end up entertaining rather than engaging.
10. The Closing of the Showroom
    The consumer will use 5 or more online sources to facilitate actual purchase decisions, reducing reliance on traditional brick-and-mortars retail.
11. High-End Shoppers Expect High-Tech Shopping Experiences
    Retail will include a seamless transition from human-only service to digital assistants and virtual valets. Watch for more RFID, beacons, and touchscreens to supercharge the retail-shopping experience.
12. Much More Multiculturalism
    As ethnic groups grow, brands and retailers will integrate a sense of culture and culture-specific brand experience with all forms of outreach.
13. Online Authenticity
    As 'The Internet of All Things' matures, consumers will expect greater security as regards personal purchase data, which will act as a confidence builder for online sources and the brands using them.
14. Dead-On Digital
    Brands will shift their digital platform question from "should I be here?" to "what should I do now that I am here?" with success linked not to just outreach alone, but contextual relevance.
15. Going Native
    Content marketing will continue to become a specialty unto itself and tools like the Digital Platform GPS will optimize placement and resolve issues related to native advertising, digital delivery platforms and shorter consumer attention spans. Metrics will move away from counting the number of views, sharing, and likes toward real brand engagement.

"One doesn't need predictive metrics to observe that every day marketers face new challenges. But, as the saying goes, if you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old," concluded Passikoff. "These 15 trends provide brands with the opportunity to break habits and embrace new methods of brand engagement, new business models, new technologies, and new and profitable opportunities for the coming year."

Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business.

You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy. Grab this goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, technologies, research, suppliers and partners, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid CX strategy.

While most marketers could list maybe a dozen key points for improving their brand's Customer Experience (CX), the researchers and writers at The Marketing Factbook have identified FORTY main 'CX Keys' which will help you drive your customers to new levels of delight, loyalty, advocacy and profitability.

The areas in which customers have direct contact with your organization are perhaps the most obvious places in which CX improvements can be made, and this report addresses all 24 of these 'Direct CX Keys', applicable to offline and online businesses alike.

At the same time there are many other areas that indirectly affect CX (such as the supply chain, policies and processes) in which every business can make simple but far-reaching improvements. This report guides you through the problems and solutions for all 16 of these 'Indirect CX Keys', many of which are often forgotten or under-played even in the best CX strategies.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)