Here it comes, kids. I’d just about gotten my stomach settled after the nausea-inducing wave of inbound marketing, marketing automation, and ad tech … then the next wave hit. That wave, of course, is experience marketing. That’s right. Since feeling has replaced thinking, we have to put ourselves in the minds of our prospects for the purpose of anticipating their every want, need, whim, and impulse.
And by what means are we going to divine those ephemeral wants, needs, whims, and impulses? Come on. You can do it. Bingo! Big Data. Give yourself a cookie.
Yep. According to the experts, branding and brand differentiation as we’d come to know and love them are dead. In their places, companies will have to create one-to-one relationships with their customers across all their favorite channels: email, social media, and telephones; in stores, on desktops, and via tablets and other mobile devices.
And how will they undertake such dauntingly individualized communication? We thought you’d never ask. To reach each prospective consumer in the medium in which that consumer capriciously chooses to be reached, businesses will have to:
… iterate dynamic content, engineer wireless web-readiness, deploy web-enabled technologies in robust e-markets to integrate virtual experiences, synthesize cross-media interfaces to streamline sticky content, and engage mobile experiences to harness holistic models.*
That means that, if you and I have left any digital breadcrumbs in our wakes that suggest even a fleeting curiosity in the same brand of car, for example, the brand will be inconsequential. Rather, you might be informed on your Samsung Galaxy Tab that said car rates #1 in side-impact crash tests, while I might be simultaneously informed via my iPhone 6 that said car is driven by Oprah and is featured most frequently on every obscene iteration of The Real Housewives.
The brutal irony is that experience marketing will only ensure we never experience marketing. What we’ll experience, instead, is some bludgeon-like manner of direct selling that panders to every one of our most fleeting and superficial indications of interest.
If you find yourself feeling a little queasy about all this, trust your gut.
* The content for the pithy passage above was generated with this.
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Image by OpenClips, courtesy of pixabay.com.