The Art of Creating Attractive Consumer Experiences at the Right Time: Skills Marketers Will Need to Survive and Thrive

Abstract

New technologies have made today’s marketing faster, more mobile, more location-based, more digital, more virtual, and more automatized than ever. In this new world, marketers need to be “real-time relevant” – to gain awareness, to change perceptions and to spur action. They need to have their content in the right channel, format, time and context – from a consumer’s perspective. Only then do they at least have a chance of the consumer attending to the information and being influenced by it. In such an environment new skills and competences are required. The amount of available data has virtually exploded. To gain any perspective or apparent “control” in these environments, successful managers must embrace the complexity and learn to analyze, integrate and interpret all this data. A critical skill for marketers will be to identify the metrics that best reflect the desired outcomes of the organization and that sufficiently reflect specific indicators of critical processes. Furthermore, insights from other disciplines such as architecture, design, information-processing, biology or engineering will be important for creating customer experiences. The marketer of the future will need to be supremely curious and creative and to balance and integrate different worlds. It will all come down to delivering memorable and lasting experiences in a constantly and fast changing environment