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If empirical evidence is anything to go by, once initial trepidation is erased, mankind does tend to embrace new developments and integrate them into their lifestyle. Every Indian household watches content, but content consumption habits have transcended from cinema to television to now handheld devices leading up to 89 percent of our country streaming their content on their mobile phones.

The Invisible Nudge

What got people to integrate this habit into their daily routine? The OTT and short format content platforms themselves. With the OTT Industry projected to grow to $13.34 billion in 2023. That’s just over a 49 percent jump from its $8.95 billion industry growth numbers in 2020. The impact of a successful ‘behaviourial nudge’ via platforms is all around us, with Instagram becoming the go-to for businesses and individuals alike. It’s the ‘platforms’ that compete with each other, to draw people in and scale the community, to make it an attractive playground for brands.

It’s not about When but How we’re going to get on to the Metaverse ?

Rise of Web 3.0 Platform Experiences

The competition amongst Web3.0 platforms over the past four months has been exciting to watch. With each platform upping the ante to attract community and brands into the metaverse. Sandbox did this successfully with the launch of rapper Snoop Dog’s metaverse ‘Snoopverse’. Fans get to explore a custom virtual world featuring all things Snoop Dogg including ‘Doggies’, an NFT collection of 10,000 Snoop Dogg avatars. He also released an album on the blockchain through a partnership with Gala Games, a blockchain gaming platform, which sold over $44 million worth of ‘Stash Box’ NFTs in just five days.

Back home in cricket-crazy India, the Gujarat Titans became the first Indian sports team to land on the XP&amp;Dland metaverse, which saw over 1 lakh visits from fans in their virtual fan dugout within just 24 hours, back in early March.

Statistics also indicate that platforms like Decentraland have seen their user base rise by 3,300 percent, achieving a peak market cap of $12 billion. Others like Somnium Space and The Sandbox have seen similar figures in terms of early growth, proving that the universe is expanding not just cosmically, but digitally too.

Community

The current generation of Millennials and Gen-Z has graduated from Web 2.0 to 3.0. The next generation, Gen-Alpha, will be native to the Web 3.0 universe and will have a very unique set of considerations. A pivotal point that will steer Gen-Alpha and Gen-Z towards the metaverse, is it being a community based platform, just like Facebook was two decades ago.

‘Digital Ownership’ are the new ‘Followers and Likes’

After the liberalization, privatization, and globalization of India, the big dream was to purchase a car, own a home and collect tangible assets. The core ideology of premium and private exclusivity extends to the metaverse as well. Except it’s the allure of ‘digital ownership’ where every individual takes pride in owning a virtual commodity that is exclusive to them, much akin to a cherished home, car or motorbike in the physical world.

"Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse," this quote by the great English philosopher Francis Bacon perfectly describes our relationship with fashion. The future of fashion will no longer just be about real life trends but virtual ones too. With the introduction of RWA NFTs, owning “haute couture” on the Metaverse need not be limited to the digital realm; one can flaunt a physical memento of their exquisite virtual acquisition.

Fashion and the Metaverse are a match made in couture heaven! Take Gucci’s collaboration with Roblox for example. An expansive online platform where one can access a plethora of games, Roblox saw Gucci enter its dominion as users could purchase digital Gucci memorabilia and dress their game avatars. The campaign was an instant success as gamers queued up to ‘Gucci-fy’ their online presence. Inside Roblox‘s virtual world, a digital-only Gucci bag sold for more money than the bag’s value in the real world. One user paid roughly $4,115, or INR 350,000, for a Gucci Roblox-only purse, almost $800 more than its price in physical stores.

Apart from these, many luxury fashion brands have independently launched their own NFTs which are finding a lot of fandom in the digital space. RTKFT, a virtual sneaker brand, had auctioned their limited edition virtual shoes which clocked in $3.1 million in revenue. Fabricant is the first Metaverse-only fashion company to create fashion for avatars created by avatar leader Ready Player Me.

Basics like Education and Healthcare on the Metaverse

From fashion to lifestyle to medicine, no space has gone untouched by the Metaverse mania. An institutionalized field like education too is finding new and advanced resources with Metaverse, with ed-tech companies like UnfoldU launching a blockchain powered platform that is expected to become a mega education metaversity.

Healthcare will see a radical change ushered by the Metaverse and more specifically, Blockchain. Just from a mental health perspective, approaching a therapist would be a much less intrusive and much more accessible task in the Metaverse.

Not just on the execution side, administrative and logistics can also benefit from the seamless operability. Efficient data management of patients, end to end process transparency, drug traceability and so much more can be achieved with the help of Blockchain. A life changing aspect of integrating this technology into medical services is the long term preservation of data and the unparalleled ability to identify small or significant errors in said data. It is this belief in the potential of virtual healthcare that saw the Yashoda Group of Hospitals, Hyderabad, acquire meta-space in Decentraland.

Interoperability

The metaverse is nothing but an extension to express our personality. It gives us freedom from the real world restrictions. This is where the brand’s like the ‘Petaverse’, the world's first metaverse for pets, will thrive (think of Tamagotchi’s of the early 2000s.) The Petaverse is a concept where one can create interoperable virtual pet companions that can accompany us across the metaverse landscape.

Pet parents may very well want to have a four legged buddy in their online residence too, and the few who can’t actually bring a pet home can witness the joys of having one in the Petaverse. ‘Interoperability’ is what will be the standout factor here, since this digital pet of ours can come along with us on any virtual adventure right from online shopping or attending a concert or any other place in the Metaverse.

A Whole New World Is Right Here

The Metaverse offers us an existence with far fewer restrictions and more opportunities, than what we could experience in the real world. That day isn’t too far off in the distant future, it’s happening right now.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | Metaverse - The Inevitable Reality

Parikshit Sharma, 19, is an avid Spotify user whose day starts and ends with listening to music, podcast and audio streams on the platform. Sharma is not a premium user and doesn’t mind consuming ads.

“I don’t mind the ads as long as I’m getting my daily dose of music and podcasts,” claims Sharma.

Sharma is a classic consumer case for a wide variety of brands, including categories such as smartphones, confectionery, dating apps to video streaming platforms that are tapping the Gen Z and millennial consumer base (18-35 years) on audio streaming platforms serving smart customised programmatic ads. To be sure, there’s enough data on how well programmatic advertising works on videos and display though audio is slowly yet steadily pacing up as well.

A joint report by EY FICCI on India’s M&amp;E sector published in March states that the share of programmatic advertising increased from 10 percent of total digital spends in 2017 to 42 percent in 2021.The increased prevalence of programmatic guaranteed amongst publishers, as they can guarantee both price and impressions to advertisers. The digital media segment grew 29 percent to reach Rs 303 billion in 2021 and it is expected to grow further at a CAGR of 20 percent over the next three years to touch Rs 537 billion.

“Programmatic advertising is now extending its remit to sectors like audio OTT, DOOH, etc., and we can expect to see several platforms come into being to serve even traditional platforms like radio and regional television in future,” the report notes.

Headroom for growth

The usage stats clearly indicate key trends as well. The EY FICCI report states that Indians spent 4.7 hours a day on their phones in 2021, aggregating 700 billion hours of consumption (second highest in the world). Around 197 million people streamed music online in 2021 on a monthly basis. However, India was ranked 20th in terms of consumer spend which in turn means enough headroom for advertisers and agencies to convince consumers for making purchase decisions.

Lalatendu Das, CEO, Performics India, Publicis India-owned performance marketing agency, highlights that while reach of audio advertising has grown to a sizeable number (approximately 200 million in India), the advertising spend on audio as a channel remains muted. “Based on our experience, audio gets less than 10 percent share of advertising spend for most of our clients,” he notes.

Das shares that currently there are two kinds of advertisers that are actively leveraging programmatic audio advertising

- Value seekers: CMP (cost per thousand impressions) on audio advertising remains quite attractive (40-50 percent lower than for video). Hence advertisers who have already attained good reach on traditional web, video, etc., are exploring audio as an alternate channel.

- The second category is when an advertisers wishes to promote niche product and placements – newer products – especially with a short shelf-life (such as an upcoming event, sale).

Variety of ad formats

Experts said that audio publishers and streaming platforms offer a variety of ad formats including display, short audio and video ads.

“Shorted audio ads up to 15 seconds on music streaming platforms like Gaana, Saavan, YT have worked for us in the past,” shares Performics India’s Das.

Swedish audio streaming platform Spotify, which entered India in February 2019, offers audio, video, display and proprietary tech which only shows ads when the user is using the screen.

“Our multi-format campaigns drive 40 percent more lift in various brand metrics as compared to just audio ads and that’s what we recommend to our advertiser partners,” says Arjun Kolady, head of sales – Spotify India.

Kolady clarifies that ads on Spotify are served to users based on their state and inputs. “…so if someone’s running using Spotify, they will only be served audio ads because they are not looking at the screen. We have upwards of 90 percent of completion rates across all our formats including audio and video. From the attention point of view, audio has the highest scale and has most moments that one can reach the consumer on but the visual formats drive more action,” he adds.

Mondelez India, for instance, has worked with Spotify. Anil Viswanathan, vice president – marketing, Mondelez India, states that within the company, audio has remained an integral part of the Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk campaigns with the product having a distinctive audio asset (its ad jingle) associated with it.

“In an effort to go where our consumers are present, for this year's Valentine's Day campaign, we zeroed in on music as a genre to leverage, and in association with Spotify, we created playlists that gave couples a chance to reveal secret messages. With personalisation transitioning from good-to-have to must-have, these audio platforms with their deep tech are able to provide personalisation that is very effective,” says Viswanathan.

Key challenges

Due to the abundance of free audio options, just three million people purchased music subscriptions in 2021, producing Rs 1.6 billion in revenue. FICCI report estimates that at best the paid subscription industry will reach 7 million paid users by 2024 at a maximum effective rate of Rs 1 per day, generating Rs 2.8 billion in subscription revenue. This means that audio streaming platforms will largely be advertising driven.

“Smartphone users in India will cross 500 mil shortly, and MAU (monthly active users) on some of the leading audio platforms are on the rise. However there are still challenges around tracking, effectiveness measurement and attribution when it comes to audio advertising. The space can unlock newer capabilities if the audio platform providers can innovate to solve these problems,” he concludes.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | Programmatic audio ads: Are advertisers and users listening?

When one steps in, the other one takes leave – that’s what the cycle of AdTech and MarTech is all about. Today, consumers have the option of interacting with brands through a surfeit of channels and they expect a seamless experience. It has become even more essential for brands to acquire the right set of customers at the minimal acquisition cost, engage with them, retain them, and maximize their lifetime value.

For businesses to be able to achieve this, traditional ways of approaching Month In Focus Int Logo voottechnology investments do not suffice. Companies need new technologies that can help navigate the complex customer journeys.

Shedding light on this convergence called MadTech, Neeraj Pratap Sangani, CEO, Hansa, Cequity says, “AdTech and MarTech projects are interdisciplinary and collaborative but very few organisations and senior leaders understand or act on this with any urgency. Today everyone talks about delivering a connected customer experience, but a customer experience is not only about AdTech, MarTech and automation. The piece that all organisations need to also focus on equally is about data - its availability, quality, architecture and much more.”

“Both AdTech and MarTech need to work in unison to deliver a superlative customer experience. I keep saying – it takes a lot of hard work to make your customer’s life easy. The fact is that technology has changed the business of marketing forever. Effective calibration of AdTech, MarTech and Data together is a potent combination to enable business impact,” he adds.

Marketing and advertising have been on a trajectory of convergence for a while now - they’ve moved from two sides of the same coin to being ever present in each other’s lives. Pooja Jauhari, Group CEO, VMLY&amp;R Network, India, and Sunder Madakshira, CEO, Rezolve India and ex-CMO, Adobe, cannot help stressing on MadTech being about hyper personalisation.

Jauhari says, “While what we’re termed marketing technologies were always focused on personalised and targeted efforts, broader ad tech was focused on broader data sets to communicate with. In its simplest form, the combination of the two, aka MadTech, is about personalisation at scale.”

Madakshira opines, “The constant search for one source of truth, building a unified profile across channels, a desire to have hyper personalisation and maintaining a strong brand essence are drivers for this.”

From a brand point of view, Arpanarghya Saha, chief digital officer, Nippon India Mutual Fund, says, “Well, we are in the business of money and that puts us in a space where we have to be very, very responsible. So, while brands in other categories are getting gung-ho about MadTech, our endeavor is to build SmarTech. We believe in creating lucid digital solutions and immersive experiences that have intelligence embedded at the core and those which empower our investors to take smarter and well-informed decisions related to their investments.”

With the antitrust lawsuit being filed against Google and Google being asked to segregate its ad business from its other businesses, what kind of a reality check or threat does it provide to other AdTech and MarTech platforms?

Sangani of Hansa Cequity likes to look at this issue differently. “I believe that it is a logical progression, and it brings to fore the monopolistic ecosystem that Google has created, curated, and meticulously cultivated over the years.”

Data went through many years of unregulated usage, and with both the Google lawsuit as well as the privacy measures that Apple has taken, the ability to use data freely has taken a major hit. “And while the focus on first party data by brands has negated this to a certain extent, the only way to move beyond this threat for AdTech and MarTech is to combine forces and focus as much on broader brand building as data driven personalisation. This will drive a growing focus on using brand connections with consumers without over reliance on cookies and will scale the growth of MadTech,” says Jauhari.

At the heart of the matter is a subject of great relevance – how does one reduce data domination of Google? How do we enable transparency in pricing? And, how do we ensure that privacy and personalisation co-exist?

This calls for a huge change in approach and mindset across the ecosystem. Sangani and Madakshira reiterate that brands and organisations will have to recalibrate some pieces of their data and tech strategy to meet their business objectives – customer privacy needs to be preserved, total transparency needs to be ensured in the way technology is deployed, data collected and protected and used to engage with the consumers.

Madakshira points out, “This means that some of the past paradigms and assumptions that platforms made will have to be changed. For instance, you need to follow the most stringent of the laws on the topics and make them global standards for the companies and not try and use different approaches by country that they operate in. This is the time to relook at the business models which served in the past but will simply not work in the future owing to the lack of societal trust in platforms anymore.”

“The lawsuit may come up for hearing in 2023 and nobody knows the outcome but it’s time that we work towards creating a more level playing field,” brings out Sangani.

With the exchange of digital and consumer data, and the blurring lines between AdTech and MarTech, privacy infringement is a major concern for most consumers. How do brands deal with this matter?

Brands believe that such concerns are rooted in the way the commercialization of consumer data has shaped up over the past years and how everyone in the ecosystem has tried to leverage available touchpoints to reach out to their customers.

“However, as can be seen today, the ecosystem is also evolving and appropriate checks and controls are being brought in and there is soon going to be a balance with the power finally resting with the consumers on how, when and where they want to be reached or not reached at all. Taking consent and abiding by it has been our fundamental construct with respect to our consumers. As a brand, our focus is to build our own capabilities which will help us assimilate, analyze, understand and utilize our proprietary data in such a way that we are able to serve our investors in the best way possible and make their investment journeys more fruitful,” says Saha of Nippon Mutual Fund.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | The Game of MadTech and Data

A state of flux. That is what the business of influencer marketing has been like since its inception in India. Expected to grow at a CAGR of about 25% in the next five years, it is certain that the only constant is a rapid and swift change. Neither brands nor agencies have the privilege of doing the ‘hygiene influencing’ campaign for broader awareness.

Today, many innovative startups are mushrooming each day, and they are observed to be investing heavily in social media marketing via influencers and content creators. Mostly driven by young minds, every marketing initiative means business to them.

Like startups, today, many leading brands also target direct business and revenue results via marketing. And rightly so! Living in a highly competitive world, why would one not focus on growing financially. After all, every company and brand needs sales for survival. Therefore, be it Instagram Shops or YouTube’s shoppable ads, social media today has truly emerged as a ‘shopping experience’ for consumers and ‘point of sales' for retail brands. From bait and click to influence and click; and cost per view to cost per click, the world of influencer marketing briskly changed over the last few years.

When Influencer Marketing met AdTech

he best things happen when the emotional intelligence of a human and tech-enabled experiences meet. While AR and VR are the leading testament of this in the broader world, shoppable ads and live-commerce are trending examples in the world of influencer marketing. While content creators bring in the emotional appeal, the social media platforms upscale their technology to provide the best experiences for the brands, consumers, and creators.

Shoppable ads come with an opportunity for brands to add a shopping link and provide a complete 360 shopping experience: grab the attention – influence – click – buy. However, while the creator’s role is only to influence ‘clicks’ it is the brand’s UI and UX that ensures the purchase. Hence, to convert an audience to a lead, and a lead to a customer via influencer marketing, it requires – a great story/narrative, a unique purchase link, and immersive UI and UX.

Live shopping is one of the latest disruptions in the world of e-commerce. This concept was first widely practised and accepted in east Asian countries. It started with fashion and beauty creators conducting YouTube and Instagram live sessions to influence and sell a product. Such activity garnered immense response amongst audiences and pushed them for ‘instant buys’ during the live stream. Brands, influencers, and the platform have largely capitalized on the ‘FOMO culture’.

Will Influencer Marketing meet programmatic ads?

Programmatic ads emerged as the most preferred accelerator for brands to get quick and scalable results. Alongside, influencer marketing has thus far helped many brands to build their brand value and awareness. What would happen when two legacy mediums meet? With many startups now creating AI-driven influencer marketing platforms, integration of ‘programmatic influencer marketing’ service will only help in bringing the much-needed disruption. Programmatic branded influencer marketing content will reduce manual labour, scale the brand’s reach and sales, and speed up the entire process.

Challenges we must fight

With the introduction of tech in influencer marketing, creators will have constant pressure to ‘persuade to click’. Hence, the brands will have to be rational with their ask and a common ground of views and clicks will have to be made before each campaign. Brands must understand that influencers aren’t their sales associates and expecting direct conversion from them is unrealistic. Moreover, brands today lay very stringent content guidelines with limited room for creativity. Therefore, pushing creators to create direct selling and TVC-like content will help no one. As it is the content that will lead to clicks, getting room for some creative content creation will be the biggest challenge.

In a nutshell

While social media platforms are constantly evolving to provide direct sales opportunities; influencers, marketing managers, and brands must understand and embrace the correlation between the content, clicks, and conversions. Irrespective of how advanced the adtech gets, the ultimate push factor will be the ‘persuasive content’.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | Influencer marketing meets ad tech

Just a few weeks back, one of the leading social media platforms agreed to pay $150 million over the misuse of consumer-consented data. Since the GDPR took effect in May 2018, we’ve seen over 900 fines issued across the European Economic Area (EEA). If we carefully analyze the nature of the fines and how it could have been avoided, it broadly falls across two areas:

Get Data: Ensure that when you can accept consent in one click, you should enable refusal in one click as well; not once but session-based, with real-time control.

Use Data: Commit to protect it well, clarify the purpose of usage and be transparent about it; above all, never process sensitive information on health, religious belief, etc.

While data owners and processors are making significant investments towards technologies that help them get data, very little is being done by them today that mitigates risks while using it. Not just social media platforms, many brands have failed to uphold their consumers’ privacy while using them.

Getting data is just the start. A good start, that is. It is the usage that needs to be safe, secure, and transparent. It is important to note that most of the fines awarded by GDPR and FTC in the recent past are towards misusing the data and not while getting the data.

Platforms need consumer data for one and only purpose. Gain better insights so that they can nurture and grow their user base. And while doing so, grow the economic value of the relationship through offering personalized experiences.

How can we personalize content to our consumers without using their data? All things being equal, it is the personalization of the user experience that differentiates one platform from the other. How can we incentivize them to come to our platform again and again? Will they pay for our content? Should we look for sponsors (read advertisers) to manage this value exchange till we reach a critical mass? What can we offer our sponsors in return for their support? And so began the invisible contract between brands, platforms, and consumers in exchanging value with each other.

- Give me quality content for discounted prices or for free in return for using my data

- Give me quality reach for my brands in return for sponsoring this value exchange

- Give me quality yield per consumer in return to produce good content

This three-way relationship between brands, platforms and consumers is the most critical part to understand in digital marketing today. Personalization that upholds privacy compliance needs to recognize this three-way relationship, and constantly update the purpose of using the consumer data and be transparent about it.

This means, not just the platform, the brand that is exchanging value with the platform needs to jointly work together in managing consent and permissions. Systems of engagement need to re-architect their technologies to be able to do this. While data encryption is already becoming table stakes, advertising technologies will quickly need to ensure that the efforts towards personalization do not explicitly trace it back to the consumer during the engagement.

There are very many approaches towards the same, but the jury is still out on which one succeeds.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | Privacy Compliant Personalisation

There is a huge difference between value and worth, and customer experience (CX) is one such element that can make a significant difference. Today with a wide range of available options for any type of product or service, it is CX that makes a brand shine or fade amidst stiff competition.

With customer behaviour and priorities changing rapidly, there is a need to rethink ways in which CX is delivered. Not only do customers want connected journeys and seamless transitions across channels, but they also expect experiences to be tailored to their circumstances. A delightful CX is key to shoring up long-term relationships and creating sustained value and the faith that the C-suite has in this notion is increasingly getting stronger.

Moreover, customers today rely on the reviews and ratings given by fellow consumers. These ratings, as we know, influence purchase decisions to a far greater extent today than advertising campaigns or promotions do. Be it a restaurant, a TV show, a resort, a cab service, a smartphone, or any other product or service, people will be curious or willing to try it out if it is rated more than 4 on a scale of 5, or more than 8 on a scale of 10. This is because ratings are perceived to be a reasonable reflection of CX over a large number of reviews. And then, of course, reviews also sometimes highlight specific details of what works and what doesn’t. To consistently earn high ratings from users, brands must examine what drives CX in its entirety.

The key to loyalty and differentiation

A joint study we recently conducted with EQUiTOR Value Advisory provides further evidence that customer experience is a key factor in determining customer acquisition, loyalty and retention. The findings revealed that 52 percent of purchase decisions are based on the experience that consumers expect from brands, not so much the reputation of the brand. Surprisingly, it emerged that almost all leading brands fall short of meeting this expectation by a margin of more than 30 per cent.

Almost 63 percent of respondents in the study said they were willing to pay a premium for a superior experience, irrespective of the value of the purchase, if the brand understood their needs, made them feel valued, and provided what they wanted when they wanted it. Around 45 percent of the respondents who were extremely satisfied with their experience of a brand said they were highly likely to continue using the same brand.

These findings prove, yet again, that CX can help strengthen customer loyalty and help brands differentiate themselves from competitors. In the study, brands in segments such as personal care, e-commerce, online delivery, and grocery exceeded the average satisfaction levels of customer experience and, consequently, succeeded in gaining greater loyalty as compared to brands in other sectors.

Great customer experiences beget brand recall and advocacy

Every brand would love to enjoy instant recall among its target audiences. By delivering customer experiences that meet and exceed expectations, companies can greatly enhance the probability that buyers will notice, recognize, and consider their brand while making a purchase decision. Our study revealed that companies which scored moderately high on fulfilling customer experience expectations, enjoyed a high share-of-mind, with more than 65 percent of respondents recalling the brands almost instantly.

If a brand succeeds in consistently delivering great experiences, its customers could well automatically become its ambassadors. The aforesaid study revealed that, brands that scored highest in fulfilling customer experience expectations, also carried high advocacy scores, with more than 90 percent of users likely to recommend these brands to others.

Delivering great customer experiences is not a siloed responsibility

CX today is about what you promise, and how you fare on that promise. It would be a mistake to think of it as the exclusive responsibility of the marketing or the service teams. Furthermore, the CX should be measured periodically to evaluate whether the promise is still relevant and being delivered on. The entire organisation, across business functions and across ranks, must be defined by and aligned to a singular promise. An enterprise that aligns every critical process, function and relationship around CX has a higher chance of emerging a winner.

Going forward, CX will be neither binary nor transactional. It will have to be relational and available across multiple channels. It will be imperative for companies to focus on making the offline and online experiences user-friendly, engaging and easy to transact on. If the customer is king, the CX should make them feel like one. In the end, companies that build their critical processes, functions, and relationships with CX at the core are more likely than others to emerge winners.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

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