Experience Matters

Meet Your New Consumer… The Wanderer

Previously published at iMedia Connection

“I went out there in search of experience to taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can…..”

Johnny Cash, The Wanderer

Do you know that song? If you do, you know its more easily digestible than the Old English Poem of the same name. The lyrics are emblematic of the character in the song, a man who searches for something, an experience that he can become intimate with, that he can “…taste, touch and feel”. Ladies and gentleman, meet The Wanderer. You better get to know him. He is your new consumer.

Our industry likes to say the consumer is changing. I like to say that they have already changed, and not in a way that is easy to digest. Read any article put out by eMarketer or any post by your favorite digital guru and you will see the same trends. It isn’t about how brands engage consumers, it’s about how consumers engage brands.

So what does that mean for brands? When you are used to being the bride, its kind of hard to become the bridesmaid, isn’t it? Programs and channels have to be re-evaluated and measured against this new consumer through one element– to what level does this program create an extraordinary experience?

The creation of an experience that engages the consumer is, to a large extent, the only thing that matters. If you believe The Wanderer is indeed the new consumer, than you believe they are in charge. This isn’t news. People have been blogging about how consumers are in charge for a long time. Some of the best insights on this are from Ben and Jackie at Church of the Customer. What has amplified the impact is simple – social media isn’t just something to be blogged about anymore. More on this in later posts, but for now, lets agree that in order to produce an extraordinary experience, you need two elements.

The first element of an extraordinary experience is that it is distributable. The Wanderer can’t be told to go to a website. They can’t be told to click on a banner. Why? The Wanderer, by definition, wanders. He doesn’t follow a linear click-path (as identified below) and he sure as hell doesn’t leave a place he chose to be in just because he can get free shipping. Brian Morrissey makes a case for more interruptive advertising driven mostly by experiences that embrace the environment rather than luring people outside of it.

The second element of an experience is that it is driven by content. People see content and experiences, in the digital space at least, as duplicative. Not true, says Wikipedia, the Walter Cronkite of the Web 3.0 generation. Content is defined as “….information or experiences that may provide value for an end user….delivered via any medium.” To make something experiential, it must be driven by content to create Digital Visibility. Digital visibility is created three different ways, two of which still allow some semblance of control.

1. Existing Content (already created so control over where it goes)

2. Digital Original Content (created specifically by brands so some control)

3. User Generated Content (no control)

Distributing this content allows us to show value to the consumer through an experience. The goal of any experience is to place it in the right place at the right time in front of the right person. There are three markers that allow us to do that represented here:

The key, therefore, is the marriage of content and distribution into extraordinary experiences. The only way it can be extraordinary, by the way, is to build it on marketing objectives (extraordinary for the brand) and core insights (extraordinary for the consumer). Critical Mass calls this Experience Distribution and believe it is the only way to be there when The Wanderer comes across your brand.