Marketing is dead. Long live marketing. Or why customer experience is the new currency.
Marketing is always facing new challenges. In digital marketing, the cookieless future will probably be the most discussed one. It's tempting to think of the problem simply in technological terms, but the more sustainable approach is to remove old thought patterns while revitalizing existing strengths.
I frequently have the impression that marketing is still stuck in the 1990s.Just as the rise of private TV stations led to a rapid increase in advertising hours in the mass medium of TV, the enormous growth in digital media, platforms, channels, etc., was followed by an increase in advertising opportunities and advertising pressure. The flood of stimuli and information dominates social media consumption. The logic behind it seems to be: we place more ads and send out more messages, just because we can. But as companies tend to offer identical products with similar costs, traditional marketing practices are ineffective.
?Personalized advertising is sneaking in between Instagram Stories, TikTok reels, and private emails. Trust in brands and companies is thus declining. Looking at political initiatives such as the GDPR or the recently introduced Digital Services Act Package, it is clear that regulation and new technical barriers in digital spaces will remain inevitable. For businesses, it means that dependencies on third-party providers in the design of direct and digital customer relationships are becoming increasingly risky. The cookieless future has become the elephant in the room.
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Data sovereignty challenges the old logic of marketing.
?But here is the thing: cookies do not stand for what customers want. User information collected and stored in the browser does not reveal what makes the relationship between brands and customers unique. Building trust requires deepening customer understanding from the moment of first contact and offering a seamless customer experience based on diverse and relevant customer data sources. From the acquisition and identification of customer touchpoints to data collection, insight generation, and segmentation, and finally activation, data sovereignty must reside within the company.
The new generation of marketing has a crucial role to play: creating a holistic customer experience across all touchpoints, regaining trust from customers and nurturing the relationship with them, bringing together new business models with an absolute dedication to customer centricity. With increasing digitization and a plethora of barely differentiable products, the entire buyer and customer experience is becoming the real currency. It takes a data-driven and holistic view of the customer, product, and perhaps even brand lifecycles and thus creates long-term added value.
?Customer experience is no rocket science. Marketing specialists operate in a new context where the IT systems of an organization are below, above, and around the marketing architecture. An increasingly regulated, direct digital connection to customers is hardly possible in any other way. Apart from questions of marketing technology architecture (MarTech), the marketing organization as a whole is forced to evolve. New competencies, such as legal or IT skills, must emerge from organizational silos and become more visible to marketers.?
The traditional approach to marketing, which relies on placing more ads and sending out more messages, is no longer effective in the digital age. The increasing regulation and technical barriers, along with the decline in trust in brands, make it essential for businesses to adopt a customer-centric approach that focuses on creating a holistic customer experience across all touchpoints. To achieve this, businesses must prioritize data sovereignty, deepen their understanding of customers, and nurture their relationship with them. Marketing organizations must evolve, and new competencies, such as legal and IT skills, must emerge from organizational silos. Ultimately, customer experience is becoming the new currency, and businesses that can deliver an exceptional customer experience will thrive in the cookieless future.
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