Scaling Brand Purpose and Social Impact
through the Digital Customer Experience
Winning the digital customer experience has become the new frontier – and it’s incredibly profitable. Take Amazon. As well as pushing their workforce to more than 1.2 million people globally, they exceeded $100 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in Q4 2020.
But stitching together a frictionless digital customer experience is also a monumental challenge. Evolving consumer habits, in the face of COVID lockdowns, coupled with e-commerce acceleration have unbundled the customer experience into many different parts and pieces, making it feel increasingly disjointed and transactional. As one publication puts it, “How do you provide serendipity for customers in an e-commerce environment?”
‘Surprise and delight‘ has been replaced by convenience and utility, putting more pressure on brands and retailers to ensure their online shopfronts and physical warehouses are seamlessly integrated. Experiences are seen more as distractions and distractions cost money.
This has also impacted brand loyalty in a big way. Close to 1 in 2 shoppers have already changed something about the way the shop, switching brands and retailers, with budget-conscious consumers 37% more likely to have switched from their primary brand.
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79% of consumers are changing purchase preferences based on brands’ social responsibility, inclusiveness, or environmental impact
Capgemini, 2020
Re-designing a unified customer experience, grounded in brand purpose.
Today’s consumers, led by Gen Z, demand impact-oriented brands that represent who they are and what they believe in. “By choosing brands that align with their values, shoppers are voting with their wallets for the kinds of businesses they want in the world — and paving the way toward a more sustainable and just economy, says Bthechange.
Brands must therefore ensure a strong connection between those consumer values and their own purpose to win the purchase across multiple channels. They must engage with shoppers when and where they choose, in-store or online, with content that’s relevant, timely, and personalized to their specific needs and wants.
Now, re-imagine a frictionless customer journey that allows for discovery, surprise and delight, that connects disjointed touchpoints around moments that matter, rooted in what the shopper wants, what the world needs and removing barriers to purchase – while allowing customers to give back to the cause they care about or make a difference on the world.
Introducing the DxP Framework
Once ingrained in the DNA of the organization, brand purpose has the transformative power to scale impact ten-fold and generate growth of 20-30%.
The DxP framework is an end-to-end roadmap to create, refine, and deploy brand purpose at scale through digital commerce and marketing automation, increasing speed to market and improving your marketing effectiveness while scaling social impact exponentially.
Whether you’re working with an established technology infrastructure or building it all from the ground up, DxP unites process, people, digital tools, and technology platforms to embed brand purpose into your marketing technology stack so that you can accelerate sales and impact simultaneously.
How it works …
Start by exploring existing insights to get crystal clear on your brand purpose, using the BPP framework to articulate what you believe in the world, why you exist, and what you plan to do to make a difference.
Next, look at your existing customer data sources – are you collecting the right data to understand how consumers feel about relevant social and environmental issues? Is that data structured, segmented and integrated in a way that provides a holistic view of who your consumers are, what’s truly important to them, and how it influences their behavior? Does it correlate positively with your go to market strategy and key pursuits (i.e., your product, platform, and projected social impact)?
If so, then define distinct customer profiles and personas rooted in consumer values, mapping each profile’s omni-channel customer journeys and identifying the intent-to-action gaps along the way to find the moments that matter.
Based on those moments, create product-based experiences, content and compelling calls to action through agile design sprints that can be quickly A/B tested, validated and re-targeted in matter of days.
Tying it all together and tracking the right metrics will help attribute results to purpose-led action, measuring the positive impact of your actions and predicting consumer loyalty and advocacy as a result.
In summary
The DxP framework gives brands, retailers, nonprofits, and social enterprises the blueprint to accelerate their cause-led marketing plans, turning purpose into profit through the power of digital transformation. It amplifies community based marketing efforts with modern marketing techniques and agile methodologies, automating consumer insights generation, content creation, campaign management, and performance optimization across all channels and media platforms.
Get in touch to get started with a capabilities assessment, working with your marketing and IT teams to identify possible opportunities and gaps to address based on your specific marketing strategy and plans. We’ve listed some of our favorite solution providers below to get you started.