Excerpt from my conversation and tomorrow’s podcast with Robert Rose, author of Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing. Robert is the Strategist in Residence and brand advisor for the Content Marketing Institute, a featured writer, and guest blogger for iMedia Connection, CMSWire and Fierce Content Management.
How do you optimize it, though? Does it rely on your people being trained that well and offering that personal experience? Everybody wants the personal experience but can we deliver that one on one experience? -Joe
Robert Rose: Well, you don’t have to be I guess would be my argument. There’s a difference between personal and personalized. When I read a magazine that really delivers me value, it’s rarely personalized, but it’s usually quite personal; it hits me at a personal level and quite frankly, that’s the content I want to share. Nobody shares their personalized content. Everybody shares personal content because guess what, it inspires, educates, informs, entertains, whatever it is, and it’s personal to you. It resonates with you personally, but it’s not necessarily, Hi Joe, this is exactly what… Etcetera, etcetera.
So to your question how do you start to look at the skills that’s needed to do that, it’s really at the end of the day, what we find is that getting to the customer’s core value. Again, your audience will be very familiar; this is something that’s in the book, and your audience will be familiar with this – the 5 Why’s, going all the way back to Deming and the Toyota process, we start looking at the 5 Why’s as a great way to get to that core value of what the customer really needs and we start asking ourselves, why is this important to them? Why is this important to them? Why is this important to them? And if we start there, if we start with what’s important to them, and we align that with our capability to be able to deliver that experience and we do so in quite frankly a service design way, we can create something valuable.
I think, the people that are really into this methodology can become the new marketers and new content leaders in the organization because quite frankly, this looks much more like a product development methodology than it does a campaign development methodology. If we’re building something of value – a blog, a digital magazine, a community, a TV network or whatever it is that we’re delivering value through, it looks much more like a media product that we’re developing than an Ad campaign or anything that only lasts just for a temporary period of time.