1.
Three Keys to the Context Marketing Revolution
Think back to February 2016, and you might remember a change to your Google search results page. Google Ads (formerly called AdWords)—the list of ads that always lined the right-hand margin of your results—had disappeared. The ads began to appear instead at the top (and sometimes bottom) of our search lists, a far less prominent placement. The move was a strange one for a company that makes more than $100 billion each year from advertising sales. But the change sent a clear signal: our new world has no place for old ideas.
Google Ads is the apex of targeted marketing, the perfection of one-to-one, powered by algorithms that run on the mightiest supercomputers available. It accesses the world’s largest database of personal information and combines it with real-time search data that defines the user’s exact intent. Then it matches that specific data with what it believes is the correct ad for the moment.
So why did Google decide to make the change? The company’s stated reasons: decreased engagement rates on those right-hand ads and a wish to provide a more positive consumer experience. Soon after the shift in Google’s ad placement, WordStream (a software company that sells tools to brands that help them manage their Google Ads) did some digging. Looking at more than $1 billion ad spend over two years by customers on the WordStream platform, it found that, on average, Google’s ads drove consumer action only 1.98 percent of the time.1 In starker terms, it failed to drive any action 98.02 percent of the time. What’s more, only 15 percent of those consumer actions were prompted by the right-hand ads. So, despite Google’s ads being the perfect message at the perfect time, those right-hand ads drove action in only 0.3 percent of consumers.2
Clearly, when the world’s most powerful technology company, leveraging more data and computing power than anyone dreamed possible, can’t make the apex of marketing theory work, it’s time to come up with a new idea of what marketing is. This was inevitable, of course. Print got outplayed by the radio jingles of the 1930s, which got overrun by TV commercials in the 1950s. Banner ads of the 1990s matured into an array of digital ads in the 2000s, and now (sleight of hand!) posts promoted by influencers and other slices of social media are dominating the 2010s. The question marketers ask nearly every day is, where do we need to be? We’re constantly chasing new buzzwords and channels, and while the pace is fast, we are generally comfortable riding this trajectory. We don’t question what we do so much as which channel we use.
The problem is that we’ve become so comfortable in our individual marketing microcosms (PR, advertising, social media, digital), we failed to notice that the golden age of marketing, and all that made it golden, ended a good number of years ago. Yet we continue relying on long-standing ways of driving business that simply don’t perform as they once did, much to the frustration of organizations and leadership. Too many of us have blamed the fast pace of technology. We’ve all felt everyone else was creating better ads or targeting better or “getting” social media sooner. But in all our striving to be cutting edge, we didn’t understand one very important change: the consumer is done listening to us. The consumer is in charge and has been in charge since June 2009 when the infinite media era began. And in case anyone needed reminding, think about those six hundred million devices today using ad-blocking software.
This chapter examines the profound transition we’ve undergone since the limited media era and why we marketers continue to act as if nothing has changed—to our peril. I also detail the three elements of context marketing and how they can work to bridge the gap between the old and new eras.
But first, let me share with you how this book came into being and the startling research behind it.
Multiple Studies—One Big Discovery
From 2015 through 2019, I worked with a team of researchers at Salesforce to identify the key traits of high-performing marketing organizations around the world. Each year we deployed a blind global survey and examined many thousands of brands from all sectors. Over the four years, we surveyed more than eleven thousand businesses, and through those multiple studies we’ve been able to pinpoint how the high performers differed from everyone else. We found that both high and low performers used things like social media, content marketing, and inbound marketing. They all read the same books and followed the same people. Yet high-performing marketing organizations were more likely to outperform their direct competitors—significantly, by a factor of 96.3 times3—compared with the low performers.
What did they do differently? Across every industry, in every geography, all high performers had full executive support and buy-in to a revolutionary change: not new marketing ideas, but a new idea of marketing. The Salesforce studies also revealed that high-performing marketing organizations were centrally focused on customer experiences. Everything those companies did—their metrics, tactics, roles, and business goals—traced back to the experiences they created.
As I pointed out in the introduction, we all know that the importance of “the customer experience” isn’t a new insight. But our analysis showed that the high performers’ definition of customer experience differs from that of most businesses. It would have to be different, right? If customer experience is known to all business, yet these high performers were more likely beating their direct competition—by a magnitude of almost ten—there must be a difference in their concept of customer experience.
We found that difference to be their grasp of how the new media environment operates, or more specifically, for whom it operates. Recall the example with which I began this book—how I missed an important Forbes story even though I was on all of the company’s marketing and internal lists. It finally did get my attention, amid all the other noise I was dealing with that day, but only because my friend Cliff pinged me about it.
So why was an individual able to break through when a media powerhouse couldn’t? The answer is fairly simple in theory: in this new environment, the consumer reigns. We already understand this to some degree. As I mentioned, our research showed that both high and low performers use similar tactics and channels, such as social media, that all focus on individual needs. Yet the low performers aren’t breaking through. As my experience with Forbes illustrates, the current media environment effectively silenced the company’s marketing, despite all my connections with Forbes. So, the next piece of the puzzle I needed to understand was our environment.
During the same time as the Salesforce studies, I was conducting separate research into the future cost of marketing, and specifically how much it would cost to break through the noise. This required me to first trace media backward as far as we can reliably track it (1900) and project forward to 2030 using current trajectories. From there I was able to examine the three layers of our media environment: players, noise, and channels. Players are those creating and distributing noise. Noise is any piece of noticed media created and distributed by a player, whether that player is a business, an individual, or a device. By this definition, the thousands of posts that your social networks create (that never make it to your feed), the hundreds of billboards (that you drive by but never look at), and the endless consumer packaged goods you pass by every day are not accounted for in this study—because if you can’t see them or don’t take them in, they are unlikely to have any effect. Finally, the last environmental layer of channel is any medium where messages can be created, distributed, and consumed. This broad definition allowed me to account for modern aspects of our environment, such as notifications, texts, and messaging applications.
After analyzing a massive amount of data, I found that high performers weren’t just better at leveraging technology, quicker to adopt new channels, or more creative. Rather, they were playing a whole new game designed for a changed media environment. What those companies intrinsically knew, the data confirmed: one era of media had ended and another had begun—and June 24, 2009, when individuals began to dominate media creation, was the tipping point.
Limited Gives Way to the Infinite
During the limited media era (1900–1995), as the name implies, media creation and distribution were limited to those that had the required capital to participate—predominantly businesses—and channels distributed whatever messages that dominant group promoted. Those constraints meant the total volume of noise was relatively low. This era gave birth to the golden age of marketing (1955–1970), the rise of mega advertising agencies, and the huge emphasis on branding. Marketers delivered one message at a time, and it was the same for everyone.
When email first emerged in 1971, it was an underground network used by only a few hundred people. It didn’t really begin to reach larger adoption until the 1990s, when networked personal computers and mail clients opened the medium up to the masses.4 From there things began to change as more and more consumers got connected and started creating, tweeting, posting, and sharing media until, as described in the introduction, the scales tipped on one particular day in June 2009. On that day, the data clearly shows that private individuals overtook businesses to become the largest and most powerful creators of media. From that point forward, business was no longer master of the media environment, and all channels began to optimize for the individual media creators. The monopoly that brands and organizations had held for more than a century no longer held sway.
Significantly, the concept of marketing—the one the majority of us still use—was created and iterated many times throughout the limited media era. But it wasn’t until that June day in 2009 that the underlying foundation of our media environment shifted. Hints of the groundswell escaped the notice of most of us, such as how individuals on social media were creating massive global protests. Despite profound changes in how people were using social and mobile media, it didn’t occur to many of us that our long-standing ideas about marketing would so quickly become obsolete. It’s now clear that modern media hasn’t simply multiplied; it is a radically different environment on a macro scale, completely attuned to a new goal. Rather than delivering one message at a time—the same message—to everyone (billboard style), the infinite media era uses algorithms to connect the right people to the right content in real time.
That is why marketing stopped working and why today’s high-performing marketing organizations seem to understand something that lower performers don’t. Specifically, the infinite media era reversed or replaced three foundational characteristics of the limited media era—the who, what, and how of motivating consumers.
Those three aspects also imply the way forward: the changes marketers must make in the context marketing revolution.
Three Keys to Context Marketing
First, the shift from the limited to the infinite era recasts who the actors (or players) are. Individuals replace businesses as the dominant creators of noise, so that today consumers make three times the noise of all businesses combined. And it’s not just more; it is a new type of noise that engages consumers for different, more compelling reasons, as described in the next shift.
Second, the shift to the infinite media era changes what we do (or to put it another way, it changes the kind of noise we make). Context replaces attention as marketing’s modus operandi. In the limited media era, marketing used attention-seeking methods to distract individuals away from the task at hand in order to sell messages; in the era of infinite media, context seeks to match a brand with the task at hand by creating an experience that fulfills each consumer’s desire in the moment, which brings us to the third shift.
Third, the infinite media era changes how (or the channel through which) messages are best conveyed. Static messages give way to dynamic experiences. The infinite era media environment is focused on individuals, and they value experiences. Marketers must shift from being the creators of messages to acting as the owners and sustainers of all brand experiences, which are served up only when and where individuals want them. This is what the high-performing marketing organizations from our study prove is radically more effective than trying to get people’s attention with messaging campaigns.
Let’s look at each of those three shifts more closely and what they imply about how to reach today’s consumers.
Noise Makers Aren’t Who They Used to Be
In 2018, more people on our planet had a mobile device (7.3 billion5) than had electricity (6.7 billion6). And the majority of those 7 billion devices allowed people to create, distribute, and access as much content as they desired.
Think about it: now is the first time in the history of the world that such a level of media exchange and consumption has been possible, and practically frictionless at that. Increasingly, our devices themselves are creating content: research by IHS Markit estimates that by 2025, there will be fifteen connected devices per person on the planet, each one capable of consuming, creating, and distributing media, without human aid.7 Thus, our current infinite media era is living up to its name, with no end in sight to the domination of individuals and their devices or the increasing amount of content they will create.
So it comes as no surprise that noise is more than one hundred times greater than it was when first measured in 1900, but that doesn’t account for the fact that noise is also much more complicated. If we call everything noise, we are lumping together very different kinds and assuming that they all function similarly. That’s not the case. In the limited era, media was dominated by noise from businesses, mostly advertisements and marketing messages; the infinite era introduced individual noise, such as texts, social posts, emails, and other device noise, such as app notifications. The sheer variety and volume of noise mean people must be more selective about what noise they let in.
All noise today, however, can generally be broken down into one of two categories: noise generated by businesses and noise generated by individuals (and their individual devices). When we view noise through those two lenses, we get a much clearer picture of why we need a revolution in our idea of marketing to break through it.
Business noise vs. individual noise, 1900–2030 (projected)
Let’s first consider business noise: print ads, radio commercials, TV ads, email campaigns, sponsored social posts, and the like. In figure 1-1, note the spike in the total volume of business-generated noise after the introduction of each new major channel: radio (1920), television (1940), and finally, the internet (1990) and social media (2000). Each spike is followed by a ceiling—a saturation point, if you will—beyond which business noise cannot grow until another media channel enters the environment. The important takeaway here is that business noise is a by-product of market opportunity, not of consumer desire.
In contrast, noise created by individuals and devices has a much different growth pattern, with no saturation points. That noise—tweets, posts, texts, notifications, and videos, to name just a few—begins with the mass consumer use of email in the 1990s and continues to climb at a relatively astounding rate. As the figure makes clear, in 2009 the volume of individual noise surpassed the volume of business noise and never turned back.
After years of increasing levels of individual noise, the average consumer in 2018 noticed 500 pieces of noise per day: 150 of those were created by businesses, which were dwarfed by 350 pieces from individuals. Two things stand out in this growth pattern. First, individual noise is not just steadily growing; it doesn’t seem to have a saturation point, and that’s for one profound reason: it is desired (permissioned) by the individual. Second, because permissioned noise is highly valued, it is very likely to persuade and motivate individuals, much more than the unwanted business noise ever could.
Noise, therefore, is very different from what it used to be. So how can a business (i.e., marketing) break through? It must act more like individual noise.
Noise Isn’t What It Once Was
The second shift that occurred between the limited media era and today’s era of infinite media was a dramatic change in the very nature of noise. Noise used to be anything that brands and businesses could put out there that would catch the consumer’s attention, no matter what he or she was in the middle of doing. The louder, shinier, brighter, and bigger—the better.
The infinite media era has changed all that: attention has been replaced by context. In other words, the algorithm of any given channel—be it a Google search, Amazon search, Apple News, email, Facebook news feed, or some other digital media—will select a media experience only when the channel determines that the experience offers enough context to drive an individual’s engagement. Further, that individual will engage only if and when the media experience meets his or her need within the immediate context of that moment.
Perhaps the best way to prove the significance of context—and the vast difference between the limited media era and our current infinite one—is to look at how many of our long-held basic truisms about marketing no longer work.
Four “Attention-Getting Rules” of a Bygone Era
Let’s start with the one that practically everyone knows: sex sells. It was the limited era’s ultimate attention-grabber. Skin, compromising positions, smoldering looks. According to Ad Age, in March 2017 the agency 72andSunny announced that its newest campaign for Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s was an express effort to be known for “food, not boobs,” and to move the brands past years of marketing that featured bikini babes.8 As Jason Norcross, executive creative director for Carl’s Jr., explained, “Those ads just weren’t driving business as they once did.”
It may have been pure luck that those ads ever worked at all. A study by the University of Illinois tracked eighty years of advertising data and found that “people remember ads with sexual appeal more than those without, but that effect doesn’t extend to the brands or products that are featured in the ads … [people] liking the ads doesn’t influence whether they’re going to make a purchase.” So yes, skin will still grab people’s attention, but it has little to no effect on their purchase behavior.9 In today’s era of infinite media, in which the number of brands has multiplied exponentially, people are unlikely to even look at ads, much less remember any particular name. Flashing skin has become a quaint idea whose time is over.
The second truism that’s no longer true? “There’s no such thing as bad press.” In the limited era, consumers were likely to read or hear something (bad or good) and remember key parts but not the full story. As the details faded, often all they recalled was a brand name, which they would likely notice again but not necessarily remember why they knew it. So even bad press had a significant long tail, able to help drive top-of-mind positioning. Today, modern media channels optimize for context, so when we do a Yelp, Yahoo, or Google search they’ll surface all stories, bad and good. Online ratings and reviews have been added to the mix, making bad press highly contextual to any conversation about your brand. There is no escaping it: bad press is now very bad.
Let’s look at a third marketing favorite: “right message, right person, right time.” This highly trusted idea asserts that to drive consumers to act, you just need to deliver a catchy message with the right timing and targeting. But the multiyear study by WordStream, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, proves that logic obsolete.10 Recall that the study looked at more than $1 billion of advertising spent across a two-year period on the Google Ads network by customers using the WordStream platform. With its ability to place tailor-made, dynamic content on the computer screen in front of the consumer at the exact right moment, Google Ads is undeniably the most powerful tool ever to put “right message, right person, right time” to the test. Yet its long-standing ads in the right-hand margins of search results failed consistently to drive consumer action 99.7 percent of the time.
Why? First, consumers don’t like messages (remember Doc Searls’s statement about ad blocking being the world’s “largest boycott”). Second, buyers now have infinite alternatives to help them make their decisions. They trust organic content much more than they do ads, so with limitless content presented at the same time, why would they choose an ad? As WordStream CEO Larry Kim told me, customer engagement is no longer the result of ad copy, color, or anything about the message. Engagement is driven purely by how consumers experience your brand in their personal context. What brands recorded the highest engagement rates—four times the average? Those that either had a history with the consumer or offered better experiences for the individual, post-ad. For example, brands with sizzling offers in Google Ads may drive a click, but if the consumer has to fill out a long form to access the gated content, then the experience falters and the consumer leaves.
Finally, consumers’ access to infinite trusted content today—media of every kind that is instantly accessible—kills off a fourth long-standing marketing truism: the need for a brand to be “top of mind.” My question is, top of what mind? Consumers don’t remember anything in today’s world. Why should they? People offload everything to devices and ask Siri or Alexa to serve up information as needed. In the limited era, when information was much less readily available, being easily memorable was powerfully useful to consumers. But today consumers don’t need to remember brands or rack their brains to make decisions. Their devices will search limitless trusted sources and deliver what they want to know, literally into the palm of their hand.
Now that we understand what kind of noise gets noticed today (media within a relevant context, not media that relies simply on attracting attention), let’s break down what that means.
Noise (Media) That’s Contextual Is Media That’s Permissioned
In a study published by Pew Research in September 2018, 68 percent of US consumers reported that they get at least some of their news from social media (that rises to 78 percent for people under fifty, up only slightly from 2017).11 That means, in the infinite media era, the dominance of the individual has even begun redefining how a medium itself operates.
Facebook, one of the largest social media platforms in the world, epitomizes that progression. For more than a decade after founding the company, Mark Zuckerberg staunchly defended his famous statement, “We are not a media company.” But in 2016, in a public year-end review conducted with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg had to revise that statement. He said in the year-end review Facebook “is not a traditional media company,”12 particularly because it doesn’t write the news that appears on it. But he had to admit that the network “does a lot more than just distribute news, and we’re an important part of the public discourse.” What he’s really saying is that Facebook is a media company. It just doesn’t look like any other kind of media company, nor operate like any that came before it.
The power behind this reshaping of media stems partly from the “permissioned” nature of individual noise. Back in 1999, email became marketing’s newest best medium, and that’s when Seth Godin’s best-selling book, Permission Marketing, appeared. Godin describes how the power of permission drives higher consumer engagement because people more readily engage with things they have asked for over things they have not. In a recent conversation, Godin told me, “It goes back to the lesson we learned as kids. There is a big difference between telling someone a knock-knock joke, and just running up to them and screaming. The essence of human interactivity has always been consensual—it was just erased for 100 years of ‘interruption’ when media needed to pay for itself. But consumers never liked it.” Today permission has become the guiding principle of our entire media environment, not just email. Even noise is permissioned, which means that marketing must constantly be looking for opportunities to achieve permissioned status when creating its experiences.
Permission comes in many forms, such as liking, friending, following, and subscribing. Once individuals give a business permission, marketing can take place in their desired orbits. Consider LinkedIn. The professional network requires that users gain permission to communicate directly with another individual on the platform. But that’s only the beginning. Permissions are layered, which lets LinkedIn drive deeper engagement into a user’s personal world.
Say that a former colleague (whom you’ve permissioned into your network) got a new job. If you’ve enabled email notifications, LinkedIn will email you about the news, or if you have the LinkedIn app on your phone, it will display a badge (better known as the red dot of death, alerting you to one more thing to notice today). It may even go as far as “popping up” a notification on your mobile device’s home screen, which would bring the notification directly to your attention. These tactics entice you to visit LinkedIn, so that you can answer the burning question: what is new with your colleague? You know it’s not earth-shattering news, but curiosity gets the best of you. You want to keep up with your former colleague, so there you find yourself, on LinkedIn and engaged. This is the most impressive part about reaching consumers through permissioned media: you have the power to break through, motivate, and fulfill consumer desires in a way no other marketing concept ever has.
Consider your reaction to a Fitbit notification that gets you to walk one hundred more steps, or the power of a traffic notification from GoogleMaps that alters, en route, your daily drive to work. How about the notification you might receive on your phone while reading this book, letting you know you’ve got a meeting in ten minutes? The power of individual media to change consumer behavior and motivate a person to act is far greater than any other form of media ever to exist, and none of it is possible without permission.
How Will Marketers Succeed? Through Experiences—Not Messages
We’ve seen how the static messages of the limited media era don’t persuade consumers today to act. People find advertising annoying, so they just block it. How, then, can businesses break through to customers? By offering them experiences within their immediate context.
That is the third shift that came with the infinite media era. We’ve moved into a new world where products and services have become commoditized and experiences are the next evolution in business value. The video ads that automatically play before you can watch a news story on CNN, for example, could be considered an experience, although it’s not a desired one. In their book The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore suggest that the highest economic value businesses can create is an experience that helps individuals grow or expand their possibilities.13 These are not traditional notions of customer experience; we’re talking about experiences across the business, including pre- and postpurchase.
The example of IKEA in the introduction of this book recounted how the company leveraged its purchase of TaskRabbit to offer customers a more seamless and positive postpurchase experience. The strategy is working. TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot said in an interview that “… more customers now will buy things online through the IKEA web site—and buy more things—because the TaskRabbit service is available.”14 By providing a better experience (in this case, postpurchase), IKEA effectively drove not only more online sales but also more sales in general.
Pine and Gilmore’s point is that the highest value a business can produce changes according to the era, in line with the economics of the market. In the early years of commerce, we grew things and sold them. As more things were produced, businesses evolved and learned to process things; and those animals, vegetables, and minerals became commodities. Processing and selling things proved more profitable than just extracting them. Moving forward in time, more products were created, and businesses’ value evolved again. Customizing a product turns it into services, and today even those have become commoditized. The authors offer examples such as cellphone plans and dollar menus at fast-food restaurants, which are all sold on price, suggesting those services have become commoditized. Considering this same pattern of market saturation followed by customization, the authors find the customization of a service creates an experience, and they conclude that the customization of an experience to a higher value is an experience able to transform the individual.15
Pine and Gilmore’s book is twenty years behind us now, and today’s era of infinite media has ushered in a new way to create higher economic value (as the authors state in their 2011 updated version): transitioning products and services into experiences able to help individuals transform16—like how IKEA partnered with TaskRabbit to provide more than just a bookshelf, offering a seamless personal experience of shopping, delivery, and installation. Essentially, IKEA has transformed the customer from being a worker (delivering and assembling purchases) to being a manager (assigning others to do these tasks).
What does all this mean for marketers? In the infinite, experiential age, where every interaction is the experience, is the product itself, marketing moves from telling you about something to becoming part of the thing itself. Think about it: the former is undesirable and nonpermissioned; the latter is hugely desirable and highly permissioned, and consumers will pay for it. To succeed as marketers in this new era, we must focus on desired, permissioned (wherever possible) experiences within the consumer’s current context: contextual experiences.
Contextual experiences have three fundamental qualities: they are supported, seamless, and dynamic. First, to successfully execute contextual experiences, companies must decouple marketing from the product and support marketing’s function from every level of the company. Marketing therefore becomes a much more encompassing pathway to growth, beyond the limited view of merely increasing sales. The full range of customer experiences becomes the primary focus of not only marketing but also the business itself.
When businesses shift their focus to creating experiences—and buy into a new idea of marketing to do it—their financial outcomes far exceed their peers’. That was a finding from a study by Watermark Consulting in 2016: over a seven-year period, the stock price of auto insurance companies that focused on customer experience outperformed the Dow Jones Property and Casualty Index by 129 points. These companies also outperformed customer experience laggards in their auto insurance vertical by three times. More compellingly, this finding held true for two hundred companies in more than a dozen sectors covered in the study.17
Second, contextual consumer experiences are not singular. They are a seamless series of highly connected events—audience experience, shopping experience, buying experience, user experience, support experience—the sum of which is much greater than the parts. For individuals, there is just one experience they associate with the business; and because it’s permissioned every time, it’s one they desire.
Consider IKEA’s efforts to craft a seamless experience focus on linking the online (digital) and offline (physical store) experiences across the customer journey—what CEO Jesper Brodin calls going “phygital.” To accomplish that, IKEA is opening fewer new stores and encouraging customers to use an app to browse the catalog, virtually experience the product in their homes, navigate through stores, manage their shopping cart, and then hire someone (through TaskRabbit) to deliver and install the item. Such a series of connected experiences helps consumers achieve the goal of each moment, spurring consumer motivation and fostering business growth.
Third, customer experiences must take place in the context of the individual and are therefore dynamic. For example, when Room & Board wanted to create a better experience across its owned channels, specifically email marketing and its website, it went directly to its customers to find out how. The company assumed that people came to the site looking for a specific piece of furniture, a table or a sofa, but that wasn’t true. People were looking for ways to make their rooms look or function better. They were looking to “complete a room.” When Room & Board understood this context, it set about fulfilling the desire of those visitors, individually.
Not surprisingly, Room & Board had to develop its website and emails technologically to be dynamically responsive to each person looking to complete a room design. The creation of every experience relied on a series of inputs: artificial intelligence, data from in-store purchases, and online behavior, as well as larger data sets about the behavior of consumers looking at similar products. Ultimately, working with Salesforce Room & Board used algorithms to analyze different customer interactions in real time and create a contextual experience on the fly for each person—consistently—whether that customer was on the website or receiving an email.
As a result, today when customers land on Room & Board’s website, they will see a room showcasing the specific look they are seeking. The image is not just a re-creation of their past visits, but a predicted vision of the room they are looking to complete at the moment. Within one month of implementing this highly contextual approach, Room & Board increased its online sales by 50 percent, bringing in an additional $700,000 in revenue. But the wins didn’t end there. Using the same algorithms that instructed the dynamics of the website, the company upended its email strategy, letting the new contextual algorithm decide what content to deliver and when, to ensure that its emails were created and sent at the exact moment they were desired, driving traffic not only to the website but, quite surprisingly, into stores. That’s right. Customers participating in the email strategy made 60 percent more in-store purchases than those not receiving emails. Room & Board also began to notice new consumer behavior from this group: after receiving the email, consumers would walk into the store, phone in hand, to show the image (algorithmically selected for them) to a store employee and ask for directions to directly view the product. That is motivation.
It might be easy to dismiss the Room & Board example as a technologically advanced but still highly tactical “right message, right time” execution. But that quick judgment would miss the larger significance. The company’s marketing impetus for making these changes to the website and email strategy wasn’t to reach a certain sales number; instead, it came out of a commitment to a better customer experience. The fact that this experience increased in-store sales by 60 percent and online sales by 50 percent was outstanding—but a secondary goal—and proof that the context marketing revolution is real.
Although many of us have been slow to acknowledge the change, our old ideas of what marketing was, how we executed it, and what its underlying truths were have all been uprooted, and the ground has been prepared for a new idea of marketing to take hold. All of this means that we need to call into question anything we once did to reach consumers during the limited media era. Those foundations no longer apply. In the infinite media era, both media channels and individuals alike value one thing above all else: the right experience in the right context.
All of which is to say that consumers now have a new decision-making process that transcends defined categories of demographics. This reshapes the way we grow brands and how we think about motivating consumers. Now that I’ve described the media environment, we will explore its effect on the individual and the new all-powerful consumer in the next chapter, where I will walk you through the decision-making experience of the customer today in real-time, context-based moments.