No ! Experience is not a matter of content only.

Even if everybody’s talking about customer experience there’s no precise and shared definition of it and that allows service/tech providers to stay vague and sell anything to anyone. One day the party will stop but until then the idea is working quite well.

I recently came across a report entitled “2018 Digital trends”, issued by Econsultancy and Adobe, two serious industry players, sharing CMOs and CIOs priorities. As usual regarding studies and reports, looking at the name of the sponsor is enough to guess the conclusions without having to read the document. But it’s fair game.

But having a closer look at the propositions and answers helps to detect trends and  inconsistencies that tell a lot about a market’s maturity

Customer experience as a top priority in 2018. Amen.

Let’s start with the figures.

Then some thoughts in bulk :

Seeing experience ranked as a top priority is not a surprise but the contrary would be worrying. That said it’s impossible to know of it’s the result of years of marketing carpet bombing or of an increased maturity of the market. Having regards to the people surveyed I guess they mean customer experience, not employee experience.

But I wonder how experience and content management ended in the same answer, as if someone was trying to make people think that experience = content. Of course, considering Adobe’s portfolio the reason is obvious but the trick is too visible. But let’s go beyond the marketing magic trick (which is faire game) and dig a little further.

• It’s not only a marketing trick. Adobe sells a lot of things that are much more relevant than content to be associated with experience. It means that for many professionals the “content+experience” equation makes sense and even that “content=experience” shocks no one.

• So it’s a marketing-led vision of experience. Experience is what the brand tells and and how customers live it through content. Then the buying experience, conversion, etc…. does not matter while, in my opinion, the most important part of an experience is transactional. Here the focus is not on transactions but inspiration.

• Finally it seems that the surveyed people have to too nebulous and content-centric understanding of the matter. How to provide a good experience without data and personalization, which rank lower than content or omnichanel marketing ? And nothing on the customer journey  Maybe it’s a part  of “personalization” but it would deserve to be a specific item.

So everybody says that experience matters and that’s a good thing. I only hope that no one will use that to revamp the good old marketing with more appealing buzzwords but with no real change regarding the approach. That would be a pity since, today, vendors have products that can deliver much more/

Photo: contenus digitaux, by one photo via Shutterstock

 

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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