3 highlights from Connections ’19 – and 1 big lesson for marketers

Last month I was in Chicago for Connections, our annual event for B2C service and marketing Trailblazers and, while it’s tough to pick just three highlights, here goes.

1. New capabilities

Last year at Dreamforce, we announced Customer 360 – the ability to easily create single identities from Salesforce data. And it was game-changing, being able to see that the customer who walks into a physical store one day and shops with a loyalty card they set up 15 years ago using a Hotmail address is the same customer who shops in the app the next day with a Gmail address, or via Messenger. 

It’s only been months, but that’s already so 2018! Now, we’re thinking broadly about what marketers need – to unify any kind of data from any source. 

And with the next generation of Customer 360 there’s no need for a net new product that all of our customers would have to go and buy and implement – a customer data platform, or CDP. There's been so much chat about CDPs over the past six to 12 months. But we've always had customer data at the core of CRM. We're just evolving.

I love being able to come home from an event and say to customers “you've always had the base of this shiny new tool, and we're going to help you do more with it”.

But there are also the tactical tools that’ll make marketers’ work easier – Einstein improving our ability to predict when and how to send an email, Commerce Cloud making it much easier to whip up pages and get products to market faster, or the real-time Interaction Studio capabilities that underpinned the amazing customer case studies of knitting together offline and online experience. 

2. Customer Trailblazers

The customer case studies captured everything we mean when we say ‘Trailblazer’ – people who are relentless in changing their organisations for the better, helping their colleagues unlock their potential and their customers succeed. 

It’s not technology that makes innovation work – although technology is part of the equation. It’s people who are always looking to develop - like Fawad Ahmad, SVP Digital and Customer Experience at State Farm Insurance.

Ahmad told the audience that he had aimed to get all of the business together, to make sure they huddled around the customer – whether that meant an interaction out on the farm with a State Farm member, or it meant a real-time, connected digital experience.

The result?

“We’re dominating on our experiences, we’re ranking number one with how we’re dealing with digital, and we’re starting to see the wins,” Ahmad says. “And the only thing that changed was instead of saying ‘why?’ we said ‘why not?’.”

Trailblazers are also inspiring and passionate – an exact description of e.l.f. Head of Digital Ekta Chopra.

“She is an unstoppable force-multiplier,” says e.l.f. CMO Kory Marchisotto.

Chopra has been able to tear down the normal silos that exist between IT, marketing, service – to really drive change in the organisation and to turn great marketing into intelligent, personalised, connected marketing.

We know from our latest State of the Connected Customer research that this is exactly what customers not only want, but expect – 64% expect tailored engagement based on past interactions, 62% expect adaptation based on their actions and behaviour.

And almost three-quarters – 73% – say one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies. In-the-moment satisfaction and really connecting with customers creates extraordinary experiences, so a company is able to set the bar rather than striving to reach a bar set by someone else.

And that’s the difference Trailblazers – the people behind innovations – make. 

Will the next Trailblazer on stage be you? 

3. Values shine

When Yo-Yo Ma was on stage playing his cello, an exec from Singapore asked me, "Isn't this a tech conference?" – we do conferences a little bit differently! 

But Yo-Yo Ma’s story really tied in with everything we were discussing – caring about the things that really matter, living in a connected world, not being disconnected.

And this continued to resonate throughout Connections, as we discussed values and being a values-driven organisation. All the customer Trailblazers who we listened to are not just improving profit margins or revenue; they’re making change. 

State Farm is a membership organisation that started with farmers; e.l.f. Cosmetics is about making beauty accessible to the masses – flipping the exclusionary concept of beauty on its head. 

Again, these Trailblazers are delivering what customers want. I was really interested to see that of the top four takeaways of the State of the Connected Customer report, two are about the importance of trust and corporate values. 

Almost nine in 10 customers are more loyal to companies they trust, 73% say trust in companies matters more than it did a year ago. Sixty-five per cent have stopped buying from companies that did something they consider distrustful and 73% say a company’s ethics matter more than they did a year ago.

What does it mean for us marketers?

So many brands have genuinely been built on values, and have stories to tell around their values. But I think as marketers, we can forget about the ‘heart’ part of the brand and push the ‘sales’ part of the product or the service too much.

So many of the great brands are now going back to their roots to be relevant to the customer. They’re sharing where they come from, their history and the values behind why they started – State Farm’s marketing now says, “Hey, we started for and with farmers”.

And that connection and trust built on shared values sells, but there’s also a real interplay between values, trust and data – consumers will give trusted brands more control of their data in exchange for a better experience. And because so many brands aren't holding true to trust and to values, those that do are standing out a lot more.

Here in Singapore, we’re seeing powerful values-based marketing from UOB and StarHub.

UOB’s TVCs are straightforward and all about timeless values: ‘we've all always been who people bank with and we’ve always had your trust’. 

StarHub is having fun with values and trust, projecting negative feedback onto the city, not just seeing the writing on the wall – ‘people hate telcos’ – but literally putting the writing on the wall themselves. 

“There’s something beautiful about the truth,” the ad says. And that’s the ability to rebuild based on values – in this case freedom.

So, I’ll leave you with a challenge – what are your brand’s values? If you already know them, are you building every message, every interaction around them? 

That State of the Connected Customer research is available here, and it’s packed with insights from more than 8000 consumers and business buyers.