Published thoughts concerning Strategic CX
Why traditional Personas are dead and content needs to speak to occasions.
Creating ‘Persona slides’ as part of the rationale behind a creative idea always felt weird to me.
You know the slides where you tell your client that it’s ‘Suzie', 45yrs old, married with one kid who earns $50K+ per year and lives in an apartment, who is going to be the one that loves the campaign the most? A.K.A the Target Audience.
I felt hugely presumptuous creating these slides. How did I really know that Suzie was the target market – at all times - for the product my client was selling?
What the hell is 'Agile' and why as a Marketer do I need it?
As a marketer I pride myself on the creative nature of my role and think of myself and my fellow marketeers as wordsmiths and crusaders of delightfully clever ideas. So how is that I now need to adopt what was originally a geeky software process into my daily thinking?
The Internet of Things - how devices are talking to us about the things we love
The Internet of things (IoT) is defined as a network of physical devices embedded with electronics that enable these objects to collect and exchange data. It's also a new phenomenon that promises to revolutionise how these 'things' interact with us people.....but what about our dogs? Yes dogs.
What is UX? How is it different from CX?
I feel compelled to write this article, if only to help next time I'm faced with the inevitable "So what do you do?" question.
Customer Experience (CX) is the sum total of how your customers feel after engaging with your brand, across any and all touch-points.
A Customer Journey Map is a really good way of visualising this. (UX) is simply short for User Experience. As the name suggests it's a term to describe the level of enjoyment, or lack of enjoyment a person gets while interacting with a particular product. (e.g a really bad search functionality or unclear instructions or can't load a photo to your profile). So you are always going to want good UX at every stage of your customers' experience.
Why telling stories over just making claims, drives business success
There's a lot of chat about how businesses engage better with consumers when they somehow tell the story of their brand. Something I recently wrote about here. But do people really want to hear an emotive, personal story from a brand?
Digital Storytelling – A picture paints a thousand words
Facebooks’ Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandburg, recently shared in Marketing Week that the traditional Marketing Tunnel as we know it has 'collapsed'. The gist of her share was consumers no longer go through typical stages of research, brand discovery and then purchase. Rather, they engage with anyone and everyone at all stages and on all platforms and in this new environment “creativity still wins the day"
Why research new ideas before you build them?
Customer Experience (CX) Research is spoken about a lot, but is it critical or cumbersome?
Speaking to your customers as well as staff and other stakeholders before you embark on a project is critical. Often the project team tasked with developing the new product or service, will not be the end users of the product, or the ones paying for the service.....and even if they are and you have a 'super user' or a 'product owner' involved, they probably won't work or think in the same way other people may.
So how do you design the experience that's right for your target audience - both emotionally and functionally?