CEOs need to become Chief Experience Officers if you believe Brian Solis. Experience as the future of selling. Brian Solis is the author of “Engage” and “The end of business as usual” (#WTF). In my view, he is one of the best in social media and marketing. #WTF is an extension of “Engage” and “The end of business as usual” and expands on the constant feedback loop or what he now calls the experience loop or Dynamic Customer Journey (DCJ).
THE experience
There is an unforgiving technology revolution, which is raising customer expectation to a new height. In the future, everything is experience. Not an experience, THE experience.
Total recall
The future is total recall. Your brand is the sum of the experiences. For an average purchase, 10 sources (mostly online) are checked. Customer feedback being the most prominent source. Every experience is logged, communicated, shared by Generation “C”, the connected generation, not as a demographic, but as a way of life. How are they talking about your business?
Generation C sharing everything
Generation C will share their experiences in a wide range of channels and media. So you will need to engage. Engage across all those channels and along the dynamic customer journey. Within that there are several what Solis calls “moments of truth”; not only when customers are buying but also when they decide that they are happy or not happy with the buy and during the period when they are using the product or service. In the future, the medium is not only the message, but the medium is also the experience.
Happy as a moving feast
Where happy is a moving feast. On an always-on moment of truth platform of loyalty, positive endorsement, advocacy, reviews and referrals. Which should be your new metrics.
Brand is everything
The always-on moment of truth platform is your brand. That is where the marketers need to focus. Which makes #WTF a marketing book, not a social media book and in some ways is very similar to “The old rules of marketing are dead”.
Marketing is back
We give marketers a lot of stick. A lot of them are useless. New marketers need to:
- •walk in the shoes of generation C and map out the experience loop across all technology, across all the communication channels, across all touch points (literally and figuratively)
- need to embrace the new metric,
- and they need to engage
Thus ensuring that the dynamic customer journey is consistent with the brand you want to project. And give marketing a new life.
CEO
If you will follow Solis’s advice you will still be the CEO, but now the Chief Experience Officer. If not, you might be the Chief Executive Officer of a dying business.
