In June 2023, SundaySky CEO Jim Dicso considers growth strategies. The software-as-a-service company provided software to create advertising videos, customer service videos, and other videos, like employee training modules, and had begun to pilot a new generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistant.
In October 2022, Quigley-Simpson & Heppelwhite CEO Carl Fremont considers how the advertising agency will integrate artificial intelligence tools into the business.
Icario Health has built a market-leading AI engine to help health insurers drive better health behaviors for their members, enabling the insurers to improve their Medicare.
Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. For example, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike have publicly announced that personalized and seamless omnichannel experiences are at the core of their corporate strategy. We are now at the point where competitive advantage will be based on the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and on how a company uses AI to understand, shape, customize, and optimize the customer journey. The obvious winners have been large tech companies, which have embedded these capabilities in their business models. But challenger brands, such as sweetgreen in restaurants and Stitch Fix in apparel, have designed transformative first-party, data-driven experiences as well. The authors explore how cutting-edge companies use what they call intelligent experience engines to assemble high-quality customer experiences. Although building one can be time-consuming, expensive, and technologically complex, the result allows companies to deliver personalization at a scale that could only have been imagined a decade ago.
As digital technology has enabled shoppers to easily research and buy products online, sellers have been scrambling after them, trying to understand and satisfy their wants. Savvy companies, however, are using new tools, processes, and organizational structures to proactively lead digital customers from consideration to purchase and beyond. They are creating compelling customer journeys and managing them like any other product--and gaining a source of competitive advantage. Building successful journeys requires four key capabilities: (1) Automation, to smoothly carry customers through each step of their online path; (2) Personalization, to create a customized experience for each individual; (3) Contextual interaction, to engage customers and appropriately sequence the steps they take; and (4) Journey innovation, to add improvements that enhance and extend the journey and foster customer loyalty. In addition, the most successful companies have a particular organizational structure, with a chief experience officer overseeing a journey-focused strategist and a "journey product manager." This latter role is critical--the journey product manager leads a team of designers, developers, data analysts, marketers, and others to create and sustain superior journeys, and he or she is accountable for the journey's ROI and general business performance.
Consumers today connect with brands in fundamentally new ways, often through media channels that are beyond manufacturers' and retailers' control. That means traditional marketing strategies must be redesigned to accord with how brand relationships have changed. In the famous funnel metaphor, a shopper would start with a number of brands in mind and then systematically narrow them down to a final choice. His relationship with both the manufacturer and the retailer ended there. But now, relying heavily on digital interactions, he evaluates a shifting array of options and often engages with the brand through social media after a purchase. Though marketing strategies that focused on building brand awareness and the point of purchase worked pretty well in the past, consumer touch points have changed in nature. For example, in many categories today the single most powerful influence to buy is someone else's advocacy. The author describes a "consumer decision journey" of four stages: consider a selection of brands; evaluate by seeking input from peers, reviewers, and others; buy; and enjoy, advocate bond. If the consumer's bond with the brand becomes strong enough, she'll enter a buy-enjoy-advocate-buy loop that skips the consider and evaluate stages entirely. Smart marketers will study the decision journey for their products and use the insights they gain to revise strategy, media spend, and organizational roles.