Marketing communications planning has developed as an ‘art and science approach’ to reaching target audiences using marketing communication channels such as advertising, public relations, experiences or direct mail. It is concerned with deciding which audience to target, at what time, with a specific type of message. The subsequent growth of digital marketing has blurred this standardised approach, by over emphasising certain new digital marketing channels outside of the traditional marketing process. For example, as digital display marketing grew, audiences themselves started to become less relevant as the sheer availability of display inventory grew and price dropped in line with performance and measurement criteria. Search was another ‘anomaly’ marketing channel emerging around ‘explicit user demand’ rather than broadcast & engagement mechanic. As a result, these non-traditional marketing communications channels developed as acquisition channels within a performance marketing suite, often separated from the brand and traditional communications planning in the digital sphere.
Marketing Experience Design (MXD) is a new approach to reconnecting digital audiences back into the traditional communications planning model. With a heritage in experience design (XD) and the practice of designing products, processes, services and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience, MXD allows us to map these audience touch points with a discipline that draws from many other sectors including cognitive science, product design, interaction design, storytelling & heuristics. This approach focuses on why, as well as how we tell the story of a brand and, of more importance, how we can use marketing touch points to deliver personalised and relevant messages to new and existing consumer. It can also help establish new measurements that can fuse offline and online media experience to help fuse cross discipline metrics. To do this effectively we need three components; the meaningful relationship we are trying to establish and/or extend, the marketing touch point (be it through cinema, mobile display, programmatic media, content or social partnerships etc) and the data flow that measures and tracks the level of consumer engagement at both the brand and product level.
The measure of this engagement has traditionally been based on a pre-defined product or service purchase in the performance sense or brand engagement metrics in its broadest. As digital media becomes more complex and asynchronous, new quantitative and qualitative measures will emerge blurring the performance/brand distinction. Programmatic media, for example, has already started collapsing direct and brand digital marketing into a single cookie view platform, that will in time incorporate paid and non-paid partnerships to create a more efficient marketing model. Allied with media attribution and emerging digital econometric modelling built on consumer and house-holding insights, we will expect to see programmatic media hasten the movement towards a single XD marketing approach and the establishment of new measurement metrics to link brand awareness and engagement levels with online and offline purchase intent. This will enable us to extend the model offline and create fully integrated creative and content marketing experiences which can be harnessed and driven by the consumers. MXD is a useful, future proofed model for bringing these approaches together in a single discipline.
As an innovation-driven industry we are moving from being a consumer economy to an experience economy – i.e. brands need to form strong bonds with people – a relationship - and that if that’s to happen then all interactions from the first glimpse of a product to a piece of display to a pop-up - need to deliver meaningful connections. Interactions need to be designed towards how people behave, take into account that they have access to a vast amount of data now, have social (and social approval) baked in, be frictionless and seamless as people move between different channels and platforms – phone to PC to tablet and back again. They also need to be consistent and trustworthy too. If the relationship is to be ongoing then most of all they need to be driven by a deep understanding of what people want, why they do what they do – what drives or motivates them. For example, we can market a new product by looking a media consumption habits and presenting the product at key points during this consumption cycle. This would be view as the traditional media to audience mapping. However, if we look at the media consumption from a consumer perspective out we can see that different channels are used in very different ways. Dwell time on specific sites (such as social), might be not the right criteria for a broadcast approach as the consumer behaviour is not susceptible to the message. By focus on the consumer behaviour, mental state alongside the media touch point, we can ensure the context for the brand engagement is significantly more potent.
Our own Meaningful Brands research tells us that people don’t expect any single brand to deliver the utopian dream, but they are looking to brands and businesses for specific well-being benefits. Unfortunately there’s a huge gap between people’s expectations and what brands actually deliver and the only way to bridge that gap is to evolve communications planning to a multi-dimensional model that is much more about doing and being and less about just saying. The consumer experience is paramount to moving from a story telling to a story doing model where brands involve consumer in the purpose behind their product and service offering. Our understanding is that, as an innovation-driven industry we are moving from being a consumer economy to an experience economy – i.e. that brands need to form strong bonds with people through engaged relationships. For this to be achieved, all interactions, from the first glimpse of a product to a piece of display to a pop-up, need to deliver meaningful connections. Interactions need to be designed towards how people behave, take into account that they have access to a vast amount of data now, have social (and social approval) baked in, be frictionless and seamless as people move between different channels and platforms – phone to PC to tablet and back again. They also need to be consistent and trustworthy too. If the relationship is to be ongoing then most of all they need to be driven by a deep understanding of what people want, why they do what they do – what drives or motivates them.
Designing ‘from the user out’ means we can work in a way that is similar to design-based companies like IDEO – and draw together different disciplines, for example from Strategy, User Experience, Product and Service Design, Data and Analytics, Planning, Psychology and Research – to create an ecosystem of ‘meaning creation’ for partners and the end users. The most obvious examples of businesses that practice what I’d call Experience Design are Nike and Apple. Both these businesses design from the user and the product out, creating a compelling, trustworthy and inspiring ecosystem of meaning and a series of valuable exchanges between them and their consumers.
An experience design based approach can be adopted to activities as diverse as new business and pitching, existing business development, new product and service innovation, campaign creation, activation and optimisation. The planning process has four main phases: creating human understanding, designing the appropriate response, activating that response in the market, and then optimisation of that activation. Experience Design principles, tools and processes can be used to help ask better questions to get better answers and make the right decisions at each of those stages. So for example, when it comes to designing a new communications strategy you can use tools and insights taken from disciplines like User Experience Design, Data and Analytics and Behavioural Economics to discover why, what, where, who with, when, where and how often a user does what he or she does.
Social listening, surveys, research from providers like TGI and ComScore, qualitative research and new developed Persona Engine can be used to humanise the data so we can understand what users’ triggers are, what channels and platforms they prefer and so on. We can use our personas to map their stories and journeys, and from this extrapolate what Creative ideas for the campaign will or won’t work. We can also use the opportunity to identify where opportunities to innovate or to develop existing assets lie – how to use new ideas or improve existing collateral to attract and nudge users and create more connection. We can take an integrated or systems point of view, applying what are traditionally classic design principles to ask how all of the journeys add up – to inform our Data, Content, Technology, Channel and UX strategies work together to build what a user gets at every touch-point into a meaningful experience regardless of point of entry or status of engagement. By blending other discipline areas and approaches like Agile, you can work in a leaner way to develop campaign concepts, prototype and test them – this could be email content, a website, display, wearable technology – anything that ‘feels’ right from a user’s point of view – then refining them and optimising them once they’re released.
In summary, we hope that this approach through Experience Design Marketing will create clear benefits expressed as more meaningful and value-creating relationship with end users. It is also designed to deliver a lot back into a business, such as more collaborative working, better networking of skills and talent, improved stakeholder and client satisfaction. As clients move more core marketing functions in house, they will demand more consultative, technical, creative and production facilities from their agencies. As a partner to our clients, we are determined to bring innovation that lasts as well as new specialist creative, planning and buying skills to help future proof their business in a competitive and fast changing world. MXD is a powerful, data driven approach which we feel will help the continued growth and success of clients, and in turn, provide a model for future proofing our own industry and the inherent value of creative, technical and data professionals working together at scale across multiple clients.
By Darren Goldie, Chief Development Officer & Managing Partner, Havas Media
With contributions from Alex Barclay, XD Strategist, and David Graham, Content Strategist, Havas Media
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