COVID-19 has upended lives and livelihoods across the globe, forcing people to find new ways to work, shop and play. Stay-at-home consumers abandoned ingrained shopping habits overnight, went online in droves, and compressed a decade of digital adoption into a few months.
While businesses have responded quickly to a flood of new online customers, they are facing unprecedented disruption, with up to 75% of consumers experimenting with new brands, products and channels. These dramatic shifts are changing the role of marketers and marketers, with McKinsey research showing that 78% of CEOs look to their chief marketing officer (CMO) to drive growth.
Marketing leaders have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to combine creativity, analysis, and purpose— Growth triple play– Helping their company grow twice as fast as its peers. Salesforce’s global innovation evangelist, keynote speaker, and best-selling author Brian Solis shares with McKinsey his insights on the future of marketing and the interlocking role these three elements play in driving growth.
Make marketing more experiential
McKinsey: When you look to the future of marketing, what do you see?
Brian Solis (31:41): We should start with what marketing is and shouldn’t be. At its core are the people on the other side of the screen and in front of us, who have expectations and aspirations.
The future of marketing is to understand what those desires are, whether through analytics, or just by talking to customers. The role of creativity, purpose and analysis in future marketing means that marketing is no longer what it used to be, just as the future is not what it used to be.
(32:32): Marketing is now more experiential – it’s what customers see, hear and feel, and it plays a role in transforming the entire customer journey. If it’s driven by creativity, purpose, and insight that truly represents the people we’re trying to attract, then that means marketing will help businesses grow through relevance and empathy. This is what customers are looking for.
Creativity + Analysis + Purpose = Innovation and Growth
McKinsey: How can marketers use creativity, analytics, and purpose to drive growth?
Brian Solis (02:41): Growth is driven by customer success, success is driven by engagement, and engagement defines the customer experience. To provide the type of experience customers want, we need analytics.
At Salesforce, we talk about building a customer 360-degree company that is organized around customers to deliver real-time value throughout their journey and their entire lifecycle. I think this pandemic has emphasized to everyone that there are real people on the other side of the screen, and we all go through this pain and learning and growth, both as individuals and as markets.
We also realized that personalized engagement really means customer-centricity. It’s not about transactions, it’s how marketers operate and measure before. But when you add purpose, a set of values, a set of things that we can align between the business and the customer, it changes the whole dynamic, which is what customers are looking for in a brand.
(05:20) The thing about growth is that you can’t have it unless the business helps you drive it. To help businesses collaborate and co-create for growth, we must truly understand them. One of the pillars of marketing in the future, purpose, means that we need to understand not only the value that we stand for as a business, but also the value that our customers stand for.
Salesforce found that 61% of customers have stopped doing business with a brand because the brand’s values do not align with theirs. As a result, customer loyalty is on the horizon, which means acquisition and retention are more important than ever.
Think Like a Customer – 360 Company
McKinsey: Which capabilities or attributes will be critical to marketers in the future?
Brian Solis (07:58): I don’t think any brand should pursue normalcy these days.
This is an opportunity to create, invent and innovate. The attribute that businesses need to succeed in this area is to really start thinking like a customer 360 company, which means that customer insight must not only be at the center, but it must also be empathetic. I call it digital empathy, and it uses data in a way that humanizes the person on the other side of the screen, but also reveals what life is like through their lens, not just through our goals, not just through our goals our ambitions.
(08:51): That means we have to teach things like empathy, creativity and listening skills. It also means teaching creativity in practicing new ideas, unconstrained by traditional marketing boundaries. That means giving data not just to marketers, but to anyone across the organization who touches customers, because now it’s all about marketing.
I call this new journey a moment of kindling. Once you get someone’s attention and understand their intent, you can deliver the best, most personal, efficient, convenient and amazing experience we couldn’t before. It’s available to us now, which is why the three pillars of creativity, purpose and analysis are truly driven by digital empathy.
Using analytics to understand the “accidental narcissist”
McKinsey: How should marketing leaders approach customer experience?
Brian Solis: (10:21): For marketers to build an effective customer experience, they need to be driven by the things that help them make their customers successful.
(11:03) The bar is high. I call clients “accidental narcissists” today because technology has convinced them that they can get whatever they want in minutes, anytime, anywhere. Analytics will help us understand these trends in real time. With AI and automation, we can actually learn how to predict and deliver on these trends in advance.
Then we need digital empathy to humanize these things and look inward to inspire our sense of purpose. Coming up with a mission statement and hanging it on the wall is no longer good enough.
We have to be driven by what matters to people and what we stand for, because together we are a community. It’s not just a marketplace — it’s a relationship between customers and businesses, powered by marketers, creating experiences that connect us to this community.
What it means to start with the customer
McKinsey: What advice do you have for organizations to start this journey?
Brian Solis: (13:37) The first question I get from an executive — whether it’s a service executive, a CMO or a CIO — where do I start? Start with the customer. But don’t stop at the customer. You also have to remember that employees are also part of the customer experience. In fact, employee experience plus customer experience—EX+CX—equals growth. Because it is the humanization of these experiences that will inspire your stand. It will inspire your goals.
Now is the time to reimagine your brand around that purpose and values. You also have to be bold, innovative and innovative. You have to be willing to take a stand and say you don’t want to do business with certain customers. To achieve this, you need data-driven empathy. Data must be at the center and must be reliable, consistent, and representative of the customer’s experience, including their journeys and aspirations.
Data-driven empathy is about humanizing data, but human empathy is about seeing and feeling what other people do in the world. I believe that these pieces combined—digital plus the human side—will help marketers and C-suites understand what to prioritize, where to invest, where to experiment, and what to forget and let go. Only then can we begin to be a people-centric brand powered by personalization, analytics, technology and innovation.
Transforming CMOs into Unifiers
McKinsey: How will the role of the CMO evolve in the future?
Brian Solis: (36:42) Of course, before the pandemic, CMOs were already doing a lot of work on digital transformation, performance marketing, and big data to help companies thrive over the past 20 years.
Brian S (37:57): Now we have a more conscious client on the other side who has been awakened by the pandemic and reminded that they are empowered. They have the tools they need to make decisions, find the solutions and services they want, live the life they want, and work the way they want to work.
This means that the role of the CMO must now be experience-driven, with humanity and empathy at its core. But it needs to use technology in a way that provides customers with a more human, relevant and meaningful experience throughout the journey.
I see the role of the CMO actually evolve into that of the cross-functional experience officer, empowering other customer-facing parts of the organization to deliver the consistent experience customers need at the moment of truth.
This means that the CMO must act as the unifier, bringing people to the negotiating table who have not necessarily worked with them before, because the customer’s experience is really the sum of all their engagements with the brand. It’s not just a moment, it’s all moments.
Someone has to be the conductor of it all, embrace it all and say, “This is the standard by which we’re engaged” so that we can brand, market and sell on that standard — and measure the customer’s experience. Since it’s about experience, the unifier has to be the CMO.
