8
Reaching Current and New Customers

Nobody has a bigger appetite for statistics and armchair quarterbacking than fans of American football’s NFL, the burrito supreme of live sports audience reach. So, let’s sit back, fasten our headsets, and crunch the yards, rushes, and passes. Which of the following was true about the 2016–2017 NFL season?

  1. Nielsen ratings for NFL games hit a 30‐year low, losing 8%, or more than one million viewers.
  2. NFL TV advertising revenues hit a record high, and TV distribution rights will earn the league a guaranteed $50 billion through the time they expire in 2022.
  3. Sling TV credited massive subscriber bulk‐up to NFL RedZone, an ad‐free channel offering “whip‐around” coverage of simultaneous games, sometimes using a split screen.
  4. NFL RedZone’s big season was linked to the 40 million Americans who played Fantasy Football, tuning in less to follow the fortunes of teams, and more to follow the stats of individual players.

If you answered that 1, 2, 3, and 4 were all true, you are beginning to understand the case for fragmentation, or what Atlantic magazine more aptly termed the “atomization” of entertainment media. The NFL, as the granddaddy of live sports broadcasting and defending champion of the most lucrative TV rights in the world, is Exhibit A. Year after year, it has been the superstar of audience draw. Upward of 90% of football fans have never attended a game, and so television rights sold to CBS, Fox, and ESPN, and by extension, ad revenues, have been the driver for the league. That makes the NFL more a media enterprise than a trade association, and until recently, the league remained one broadcast phenomenon too brawny, too unstoppable to fall victim to disruption.

With that winning streak now in jeopardy, the NFL illustrates how media interests must reconsider how they reach both new and existing audiences. In Chapter 7, we looked at segmenting customers. In this chapter, we will explore the following:

The Problem of Drift

In terms of segmenting, the NFL has maintained an enviable pass completion record to its intended receiver. We’ll call that target customer “Bill.” He’s 48, makes more than $50,000 a year, and consumes football mostly through broadcast, the familiar three‐and‐half‐hour Sunday afternoon ritual uniquely suited for advertising beer, pickup trucks, and pizza. The problem is, Bill is getting older. Distributing abundant content during the season, with multiple televised Sunday games, and the addition of Monday and Thursday nights, has only highlighted the NFL’s trouble in holding fans’ attention, reaching not just new viewers, but Bill as well.

American media companies love pro football nearly as much as they love profits, and analysts in the popular press were quick to dismiss the NFL’s ratings fumble as an anomaly, a mere rounding error in the grand scheme of almost 60 years of NFL TV earnings. Among the reasons cited for the 2016 ratings plunge: football viewership was competing with a ratings‐generating US presidential election, including two Sunday night debates. Viewers were frustrated with the NFL experience—the concussion controversy; player protests during the National Anthem; and a record number of interruptions of play for relatively minor penalties, including what umpires termed “excessive celebration” by players, antics that were essentially crowd‐pleasing. At the same time, fans complained that there were too many commercials. In 2016, the number of ads per NFL game reached an all‐time high of 70, according to Nielsen, up from 64 in 2008.

Still, if these were problems isolated to the NFL and to American audiences in the last quarter of 2016, why was TV viewership also falling off for the Olympics? And what about soccer, the “other” football? Premier League TV viewership fell 11% in 2016, according to Bloomberg, and this was despite fierce rivalries among the big six teams and two extra marquee games. Rather than a blip, this was the latest in a downward trend. Viewership had fallen by 22% since the 2010–2011 season, according to Bloomberg’s reading of UK Broadcasters' Audience Research Board data. Asked Bloomberg’s Gadfly: “When both ‘footballs’ are struggling for attention like this, you have to wonder whether the game is up.” But is it the game itself, or the channels by which the game attempts to reach Bill, and his English cousin, Benny? The hard truth is that media consumption habits are changing for his younger friends and family—maybe for Bill himself. As NFL media executive Brian Rolapp observed, the act of watching has changed because of the ad‐free experience of Netflix and its 15‐second load time, rendering the pace of NFL games glacial in comparison. If the sea change is in fact reaching the pinnacle of live sports broadcasting, it’s time to rethink the channels.

What Are the Channels in Marketing?

As the NFL example suggests, media entrepreneurs must first assess their channels to reach current and new customers. Experts define a marketing channel as the path or route that goods or services travel from initial creation to reach the end consumer. In media, marketing distribution channels are either direct or indirect. A direct distribution channel is one for which the sale of a product or service goes directly from the originator or producer to the final customer with no middle entity involved. An example of direct distribution might be when a Carolina Panthers fan plunks down $80 for a pair of home game tickets in the nosebleed section at Bank of America Stadium. An indirect distribution channel is one for which the sale of a product or service goes through an intermediary to reach the final consumer, for example, when the NFL sells TV rights to ESPN, which then resells its coverage to cable providers such as Comcast and DirecTV, who then distribute that content to subscribers. In media, distribution channels generally comprise the following (although not all channels for all media companies are featured):

  • Direct distribution channels:
    • retail outlets owned by your company;
    • wholesale outlets of your own;
    • sales force compensated by salary, commission, or both;
    • website/web sales;
    • branded app (directly owned and operated by the company);
    • direct sales via your own catalog or flyers (e.g., “direct response”).
  • Indirect distribution channels:
    • retail outlets owned by an independent merchant or chain;
    • wholesale outlets of independent distributors or brokers;
    • online media aggregators/distributors/platforms.

Evaluating Customer Acquisition and Retention by Channel

Now that you understand what a channel is, it is time to start thinking about how media organizations can use them to shore up their customer base. In a 2007 article on customer relationships in Review of Marketing Research, Ruth Bolton and Crina Tarasi argue that a media organization should use an optimal mix of channels to acquire and retain customers, and should consider how to do so profitably. Most media organizations use the classical definitions of customer acquisition and retention, and report and track these as a percentage, over a time series as well as by channel. The Harvard Business Review defines a customer acquisition rate as the percentage of people targeted by a marketing effort who ultimately become customers. Customer retention rate is the duration of a customer’s relationship with the media organization. These are simple metrics of marketing performance and are widely used in media, especially since the advent of digital. That’s partly because these two metrics are easy for media organizations to understand and track and partly because they are accurate proxies of performance.

To apply this formula, let’s say that Acme Media Co. was interested in evaluating acquisition and retention rates in the fourth quarter for two channels: direct response and website. Acme can easily compute the percentage of customers it acquired through these channels and the number retained through the following calculation:

  1. Assume that the total (mixed channel) percentage of new customers acquired for the period was 7%, and the percentage retained was 88%.
  2. Upon separating out the two channels, Acme learns that direct response yielded 13% acquisition, versus 1% from the website. Meanwhile retention from direct response was 95%, versus 78% from the website.
  3. By one metric, Acme’s direct response was more successful than its website, but what about cost effectiveness? For the full picture, Acme must also evaluate the cost of each channel in acquiring and retaining customers, to find the average short‐term cost to acquire or retain.

As discussed in Chapter 7, it is also critical for media organizations to measure and track a customer’s lifetime value (CLTV), especially when evaluating channels. While the cost of acquiring a new customer may be higher in the short term in a certain channel, that customer’s long‐term value may exceed other lower‐cost channels. To help you think about how to evaluate the proper channel, consider that there are typically four outcomes of evaluating channel cost and CLTV retention, ranked by customer type:

  1. easy to acquire and easy to retain (low costs, high CLTV);
  2. difficult to acquire but easy to retain (high costs, high CLTV);
  3. easy to acquire but hard to retain (low costs, low CLTV);
  4. difficult to acquire and difficult to retain (high costs, low CLTV).

The consequences of measuring acquisition and retention performance, cost, and CLTV by channel for media organizations are clear. If a certain channel only targets customers who are very difficult to acquire, the company may end up with a small number of new customers who may also be difficult to retain, which may depress CLTV. Therefore, it’s important not only to measure channels independently, but also to understand that with some channels, such as digital, it may be easier to acquire new customers but those customers offer lower overall CLTV. On the other hand, they may provide positive revenue growth due to the sheer number of potential customers that digital channels represent.

Changing Customer Behavior and Media Consumption

Next, let’s consider how media organizations can leverage changing consumer behavior and media usage to attract and retain customers through appropriate channel mix. Powerful, irrevocable forces are shaping the modern digital consumer, and media organizations stand at the center of these tectonic shifts, even as they work to create, aggregate, and deliver content. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mary Meeker, who tracks noteworthy Internet and tech developments, argues that four trends will shape media consumption through 2020:

  • time spent with technology;
  • user‐generated content (UGC);
  • digital innovation/disruption;
  • mobile phone use.

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these changing behaviors.

Time Spent with Technology

Despite forecasts in 2010 that consumers would spend less time with technology as Internet and mobile penetration increased and traditional media consumption decreased, the reverse occurred. Midway through this decade, consumers in fact were spending significantly more time with technology than they did five years earlier. Not surprisingly, the nearly one‐hour increase in time spent with technology was from digital, with the mobile (non‐voice) channel (37.2%) driving most of the increase, from 48 minutes per day in 2011 to nearly three hours by 2015. However, even this dramatic documented increase in time spent with technology does not represent all time spent with that medium, even without accounting for multiple‐screen viewing (or multiplexing). E‐readers, connected game consoles, smart TVs, and other connected devices also increased (7.8%) over the same five years, which demonstrates that consumers seek instant and constant access to digital media. As senior marketing analyst Paul Verna noted in an eMarketer report, “Without movies, TV shows, games, photos, books, magazines, newspapers, video clips and music, few would care to own a tablet, a connected console or an internet‐enabled TV.”

Additionally, while total time spent with technology is increasing, it should be noted that the fastest‐growing segment was digital video viewership, regardless of where it is watched. While consumers may be spending less time with TV, that doesn’t mean that they are watching less video. As time with TV decreases, time with online video goes up.

User‐Generated Content (UGC)

User‐generated content (UGC) is any variety of content, including discussion forums, blogs, wikis, posts, chats, tweets, podcasts, digital images, video, audio files, advertisements, and other forms of media created by users of an online system or service, frequently made available via social media websites. The growth of UGC is expected to continue to expand, fueled by the ubiquity of smartphones, Internet access, and social media. A recent article in the Journal of Marketing Management suggested that UGC is an emergent tool of engagement, influencing buying behavior. The scale is mind‐numbing: each minute, over 347,000 Twitter tweets are sent, according to Ishbel Macleod at The Drum, and each minute, 2.7 million YouTube videos are viewed and 300 hours of video are uploaded.

Even though UGC has been around since 2005, there are several recent categories that have significant implications for media organizations: video, sound, and written stories.

  • Video: The fastest growing area of UGC is the capture of consumer experiences at live events, such as Coachella (40 million views in three days) and the Olympics (30 million views in one day) through video storytelling. In 2014, the technology conglomerate Cisco forecast that video would account for 80% of all consumer web traffic over the next few years. The barriers to entry are extremely low and the tools needed to create and distribute the final video are easily accessible, turning amateurs into experienced videographers and YouTube into the largest video media company on earth.
  • Sound: It’s not just video that is attracting the talents of consumer creators. Bloomberg noted in 2015 that over 150 million consumer creators were registered on SoundCloud, with the majority of content coming from creators who do not have associations with professional rights holders. The number of SoundCloud creators increased 33% from the previous year and was expected to grow by double digits for the next five years.
  • Written stories: With all the growth in video and sound UGC, it may seem surprising that ordinary text is also experiencing growth in UGC. WattPad, a writing social community, where users post articles, stories, fan fiction, and poems, has over 40 million active authors who have created nearly 130 million stories. WattPad has a highly engaged community, with users spending 13 billion minutes per month on the site and an average of more than 30 minutes per session, with 90% of the site traffic coming through mobile.

For media organizations, the surge in UGC, and especially the rise of video UGC, may increase the competition for an engaged audience. In 2016, media experts noted in the Columbia Journalism Review that even though many media organizations still consider UGC an unprofessional nuisance with questionable value that adds to media clutter, the last decade revealed that UGC can have an advantage over professional (media‐produced) content when it comes to speed and accessibility. These two advantages have led the BBC and others to create formal internal programs to solicit, source, verify, and distribute UGC in their programming when appropriate.

Digital Innovation/Disruption

Digital innovation (or disruption) has been happening since the creation of the Internet. Early innovators, such as eBay, Amazon, and Alibaba improved the customer shopping experience through attractive graphical interface, long‐tail product availability (usually not carried in inventory), excellent delivery systems, and value pricing—all conducted seamlessly from a consumer’s desktop. Essentially, the rise of e‐commerce, coupled with use of search engines, put competitive pressure on local retailers. The implication for media organizations was that a significant proportion of local and national retail advertisers began to cut traditional advertising budgets and consumers began to decrease spending in classified advertising in favor of Craigslist and other sites. While this “first‐generation” digital disruption was relegated to products and traditional shipping delivery, we are now in the midst of the second‐generation digital innovation disruption. This time, the revolution is in offering services such as Airbnb, Uber, and Thumbtack. Optimized for mobile and offering on‐demand local delivery, this generation will create additional competitive pressure for media organizations by continuing to decrease traditional print advertising dollars, decrease consumer use of classifieds, and, in some cases, decrease the need for specialized content and digital marketing services. This brings us to perhaps the most significant change—the smartphone in your hand.

Mobile Phones

In 2016, YouTube’s CEO trumpeted that the online platform reached more 18‐to‐49‐year‐olds than any other broadcast or cable TV network. And three guesses as to how they were watching: a 2015 Pew Research Center State of the News study reported that 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have received more web traffic from mobile devices than computers. For media organizations that generate revenues from a two‐sided platform (i.e., subscriptions and advertising revenue), this is sobering news. The increase in consumer time spent with technology in digital—especially mobile—has contributed to the precipitous decline in total revenues. The reason? Digital media advertising revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) is much lower than traditional print advertising RPM.

The encouraging news, in spite of the daunting math? An estimated $25 billion opportunity exists in the gap between time spent with mobile technology and mobile advertising. Therefore, savvy media entrepreneurs and marketers who understand the shift in consumer behavior and media consumption are finding new ways to create sustainable media business models that are not dependent on twentieth‐century economics. Many media and technology organizations are inventing new types of ad‐supported formats optimized for mobile. Notable examples:

  • Pinterest Cinematic Pin (the promoted video ad moves as the user scrolls);
  • Facebook Carousel Ad (user scrolls right to view multiple promoted images/ads);
  • Vessel 5‐second ad (super‐short form promoted video ads);
  • Google local inventory ad (user presented with product searched as available in store nearby).

Another innovation in ad‐supported formats optimized for mobile are the promoted ads with “Buy” buttons in social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Pinterest all have integrated “Buy” buttons to minimize user friction to purchase. Finally, with designers recognizing that few users will rotate their phones to view an ad in horizontal “landscape” mode (and even fewer view video landscape ads to completion), Snapchat popularized full‐screen vertical view ads in mobile, upping the view completion rate by a factor of nine, and both Instagram and Facebook followed suit.

Tools to Reach Your Customers

Now let’s explore tools to help media enterprises reach current and new customers. Consider the example just cited above. Reorienting video to vertical was a radical aesthetic change, and not a change that content producers made on a whim. In fact, many professional photographers resisted the portrait format, initially seeing it as amateurish, anti‐cinematic, and cumbersome to shoot. Why do it, then? Well, because users have migrated to mobile, smartphone screens are vertical, and switching to horizontal is hard to do with one hand. This is an example of putting the customer experience at the center, and two powerful tools help media entrepreneurs do just that: human‐centered design and customer journey mapping.

Human‐Centered Design (HCD)

Popularized by Stanford University, Human‐Centered Design (HCD) is an innovative research and design methodology that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective to create new products or systems. Timothy Brown, CEO of the global design firm IDEO, which pioneered this problem‐solving process, argued in 2008 that involving the human perspective means building a deep empathy with the target audience. Brown saw the process in three integrated phases:

  • Inspiration: this phase uses immersive observation techniques such as ethnography to observe and understand the target audience.
  • Ideation: learning from the inspiration phase informs brainstorm ideas and design concepts or prototypes.
  • Implementation: this phase formulates and executes plans and tactics to bring the solution to market.

Think of products that disrupt conventions, large and small, and you see the fruits of human‐centered design: Apple’s first mouse. Toothpaste tubes that stand on end. The Swiffer. Fred Dust, a partner at IDEO, encourages the use of human‐centered design to uncover insights that form the basis of innovation: “There’s value to spending real time with the people you’re designing for, in context. Don’t let your judgement or pre‐knowledge override the people you’re designing for…empathy [maps] gets to better solutions.”

Elements of human‐centered design should be used regularly to design products and services that will attract new and retain current customers, as well as determine the best channels for reaching them. Many media organizations have successfully used human‐centered design to help attract new and retain current customers through a new channel. Notable examples range from new concepts to solve old problems—for example, automatic cloud file syncing that allows users to access or update their documents anywhere—to new channels and platforms to solve new problems. For example, Kickstarter has become a powerful online fund‐raising tool for nonprofits and entrepreneurs hoping to attract investors to their products or services. By using Kickstarter, they bypass traditional channels, such as venture capital funding or small business loans. HCD also helps in the redesign of existing products with the customer in mind. Take, for instance, the Washington Post mobile app for iOS and Android: the sleek format allows users to “swipe up” through stories like a stack of cards and feels virtually ad‐free, apart from the subtle integration of sponsored content from the Post’s BrandStudio.

Customer Journey Mapping in Media

Customer journey mapping is an immersive discovery technique that is typically part of the inspiration phase of the HCD process. Paul Boag, author of The User Experience Revolution, has explained that customer journey mapping visualizes and represents in detail target users before, during, and after as they attempt to use the new product or service for the problem it is intended to solve. This helps designers identify which channels to use during which phase (before, during, or after) to complete the activity.

One of the most useful frameworks for mapping this process is the McKinsey Customer Journey Model, published in 2009. The two concentric circles that make up the McKinsey model (Figure 8.1) provide the general framework of a target customer’s journey from awareness through purchase and beyond. The channels illustrated on the outside of the McKinsey Customer Journey Model demonstrate that there are a myriad of channels that should be identified at each significant point in the target customer’s journey. To gather detailed information from a target customer to create the map, experts recommend observational research techniques, such as ethnographies and immersive interviewing, or discovery techniques such as depth interviews (discussed in Chapter 6) and digital diaries.

McKinsey customer journey map with dashed cycle arrows between circles labeled Initial consideration set, Trigger, and Moment of purchase. Arrows are labeled Loyalty loop, Postpurchase experience, etc.

Figure 8.1 McKinsey consumer journey map.

In creating a detailed customer journey map, many researchers separate the McKinsey figure into four broad phases of inquiry. Parsing out the phases as follows gives the investigator added efficiency and accuracy:

  • Formulation: In the early phase of the customer journey, a target customer may have become aware of and may have formed an opinion about a brand, product, or service. This phase also includes the transition from awareness into the target customer’s consideration set, which usually occurs after some trigger or event.
  • Pre‐commerce: This phase ensues once the target customer has a brand, product, or service in the consideration set. This is the phase where information gathering, active evaluation, interaction, and browsing/shopping, and in some cases, free trials occur.
  • Commerce: The shortest phase begins at the moment the target customer makes a purchase and ends when the customer perceives the end of the purchase.
  • Post‐commerce: After the purchase, and there are two paths. (1) Buyers can become customers with ongoing exposure to the brand without action, until some future trigger pulls them back into the journey; or (2) they can become loyal customers of the brand and transition to the inner circle of the loyalty loop, where they influence others (through identified channels) and repeat purchase(s).

The McKinsey model takes into consideration the experiences the target customer has with the brand, experiences that may impact long‐term loyalty after an initial purchase. Today, when nearly every media organization has many direct and indirect competitors, the loyalty loop is a more accurate picture of how the target audience may reevaluate the decision to purchase. In media, purchase can indicate either a hard purchase (such as a subscription or paywall transaction), or it can indicate a soft purchase (such as consuming content by reading an article or watching a video).

Many factors can affect the target audience’s decision to purchase from a media organization for the second, tenth, or fiftieth time. A competitor might be offering shorter curated content through the target audience Twitter feed. The content might be offered in video. The quality may vary. Customers’ experience with the media platform where the content resides might impress or frustrate them, and their continued exposure to your brand’s ad messages versus your competitors’ all factor into the decision whether or not to “purchase” media content. Customer journey mapping is used to uncover these reasons, and more.

To consider how customer journey mapping works, think back to the example of the NFL. The league has long focused on adding and retaining viewers through broadcast rights to intermediaries like CBS and ESPN. This distribution channel has been extremely successful for the NFL because it has been the most viable channel to reach the primary target audience as well as the most lucrative. Using customer journey mapping with the primary target audience, television broadcast is an excellent channel for retention of the target because the vast majority watches network television regularly and therefore most of the marketing to the target audience is concentrated on paid television media. Because the broadcast channel successfully reinforces existing target audience behavior, and the majority of the target audience repeats “purchasing” (i.e., viewing) behavior many times per season, the NFL’s reliance on broadcast as a channel has served existing customers through the loyalty loop of the McKinsey model. The rub is that broadcast may not be a viable channel to attract new customers to the NFL, as we saw earlier in this chapter.

When a media company has outgrown or saturated a channel, it will often pivot either its entire value proposition or it will use its existing value proposition and seek a new customer segment and channel. The most common approach is to use the existing value proposition and seek a new customer segment and channel, which can be identified by using HCD. That includes completing a customer journey map for the new customer segment in order to identify the most appropriate new channel(s).

Evaluating Effectiveness and Efficiency of Channels to Reach New and Current Customers

The selection of the marketing channel for a brand, product, or service, including the discovery work of HCD and customer journey mapping, takes longer than any other decision related to the elements of the marketing mix. But the benefits make it worthwhile. Speed of delivery, guaranteed supply, frictionless convenience, accessibility, and other factors may improve the relationship between buyers and sellers and enhance customer loyalty. That is why media organizations are beginning to focus more on channel management in order to deliver their content, brands, products, and/or services to the right audience at the right time in an effective, efficient way. This is win‐win. A successful channel strategy enables a media organization to create more perceived value to the target audience.

The challenge, of course, is dealing with the burgeoning number of channels media organizations face. The nearly constant barrage of requests to evaluate and consider incorporating more channels into the marketing mix can be overwhelming. That’s why knowing how to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of a channel before including it in the marketing mix will reduce costly mistakes and increase the likelihood of selecting channels wisely. A tool we use in this selection process is a channel brief created for each channel and each target segment. Typically, this means fashioning multiple channel briefs, each of which can be referenced and updated over time, rather than starting from scratch with each change of the mix. A channel brief succinctly summarizes a channel within the context of a target audience, and analyzes the channel’s potential to meet the media organization’s goals. As the name “brief” implies, this is typically a one‐page document, and it usually contains eight sections:

  • Buyer or target audience persona: Different target audiences interact differently with specific channels, and so each one‐page brief is built around one clear target audience. The persona should provide not only a functional and demographic description of the target audience, but also include and illustrate the audience’s life stage, emotions, motivations, and aspirations.
  • Channel: Indicate the specific channel the brief covers. (See the list of direct and indirect channels suggested at the beginning of this chapter.)
  • Channel frequency and customer journey map: Summarize the frequency of contact with the channel for each of the customer journey phases. No need for the target to interact with the channel for all four of the customer journey phases, which each have a different purpose (e.g., awareness or education.) Commonly, different channels are prominent in different phases.
  • Channel goal: Clearly define the channel’s desired results for your content, brand, product, or service. If the channel is prominent in more than one phase of the map, there can be multiple goals. These can include lead generation, reach, brand awareness, click‐throughs, unique visitors, downloads, etc. To help guide these expectations, syndicated data services sell licenses to media organizations. The licenses allow access to industry channel data, enabling media organizations to set competitive but realistic goals.
  • Channel performance: Based on the goals being set, report the current channel performance. This should be reported and evaluated as a time series (current/versus previous/versus trended) to identify issues of efficiency and effectiveness. A recommended practice, in addition, is to compare channel performance to industry and competitive benchmarks.
  • Value of channel to organization: Indicate at least one tangible or intangible benefit the channel provides that the organization can’t access otherwise.
  • Value of channel to target audience: Identify the tangible/intangible benefit to the audience.
  • Budget: Identify costs associated with the channel, including hard and soft costs.

How Customer Experience Affects Loyalty and Brand Attachment

In media, the trend has been to go beyond the basic functional elements of content or price to creating engaging, lasting customer experiences that set a product or service apart. This was not emphasized in the past, when marketers primarily focused on core product attributes. In the 1980s, the differentiator was quality; in the 1990s, it was brand; in the early 2000s, it was service. Currently, customer experience is at the forefront, and these emotional and value aspects are often embedded within the distribution channel, for example, with interactive participation platforms that extend the content experience digitally.

A good media brand experience provides engaging, memorable, “lived” moments, and these are highly personalized. The customer tends to cherish these experiences before, during, and long after engaging with the content. This creates what we call a “ladder of customer loyalty” from the lowest to the highest customer expectations being fulfilled. At the lowest rung of that “ladder,” the customer is satisfied and predisposed to purchase (or consume) again. The ladder continues upward in a sequence of customer satisfaction until reaching the highest rung, which is the emotional connection between the customer and the brand, often called brand attachment. Customers at this level have a positive, emotionally bonded experience, consider the brand indispensable (also called brand prominence), and even consider the brand part of who they are (brand‐self connection). They are often willing to pay a premium price. Hence, exceptional customer experiences that reach this top rung will have a sustainable competitive advantage over competing brands/products.

Media organizations that neglect the influence and impact of the customer experience do so at their own peril. They risk creating a transactional or quasi‐loyal relationship that may be forgotten as quickly as a more compelling offer appears.

This is why the principles of Total Customer Experience (TCE) within the selected channels are so important. Brands able to transcend loyalty to build brand attachment and emotional connection have more digital interactions and higher purchase intention than loyalty alone. Put simply, TCE is the augmented experience that media organizations create to connect emotionally with target audiences. While content in one sense is a tangible and impersonal category of goods, media organizations understand that involvement and experiences are inherently intangible and personal to customers. This gives media organizations the ability to connect people emotionally with a media brand, product, or service.

Summary

In short, media organizations must perpetually evaluate how to keep and reach new customers, and in this chapter, we’ve offered strategies and tools for doing so. We learned how to identify channels for acquiring and retaining customers, and how to use tools like human‐centered design and customer journey mapping to think about effectiveness and efficiency in our content distribution. In seeking to engage customers, we’ve kept in mind the macro trends that are disrupting how people consume media: time spent with technology, user‐generated content, digital innovation/disruption, and above all, mobile access.

To successfully navigate these shifting winds, media entrepreneurs must understand how these channels change over time as media consumption shifts. Adjusting to strike the right channel mix is especially important for organizations that generate revenues from a two‐sided platform. This is the counterintuitive part. The increase in consumer time spent with technology has contributed to a decline in total revenues.