The Challenges of Branded Content in the All-Digital Era
Customer experience (CX) has taken on an increasingly important role in today’s digital commerce era. CoreMedia's VP Cloud Solutions, Uwe Fricke, provides insights into the current state of CX and branded content.
How has the relationship between the customer and the brand evolved since the start of the pandemic?
Many leading brands have managed the tightening and easing of restrictions better than other sectors. The success of these brands has relied on three essentials: consistently relying on customer experiences, investing in data-driven marketing and building flexible sourcing and delivery value chains.
What role did data and content play in this?
Companies want to establish sustainable business models that create benefits, solve customer problems and support profits. To do this, the customer and all their complexity must be understood.
No longer is there one customer, one situation, and one touchpoint to address every customer. To be relevant to their diverse customer groups, companies need to tell different stories by weaving product data with editorial content in an intelligent way.
This is CoreMedia’s core competency. CoreMedia Content Cloud_Features & Integrations Page empowers agile organizations with a composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that orchestrates and delivers fluid multi-experiences at global scale and across omnichannel customer journeys.
We arouse interest and send consistent messages regardless of where the customer is. One may start his customer journey in Paris, where he sees a billboard advertisement at a bus stop. Then he may see a TV commercial and later buys the product from a retailer or from a brand’s app. In comparison, a customer in Shanghai may first encounter a brand on an Asian Super Marketplace like Alibaba or on a WeChat social media group. They can learn more about the brand’s products and finally buy the product in a flagship store in Shanghai or visit the brand’s webshop to complete the purchase.
What both customer journeys share is the customer’s expectation of a consistent experience across every touchpoint that is linked to specific groups and individual needs - this is hyper-personalization. To achieve this, the brand – with the help of CoreMedia – can create memorable and outstanding customer experiences.
You mentioned personalization. In your opinion, what is the trend for this in the future?
Personalization goes hand in hand with data-driven marketing and the translation and localization of content. Companies will expand their market share, collect customer information, evaluate historical purchasing behavior, and dynamically integrate predictions on demand and convert into digital offers. To enable this, a content management system (CMS), like we have in CoreMedia Content Cloud, is required. This CMS can dynamically compile product and editorial content on the fly into an individual customer experience that is tailored to a single customer or customer segment.
To build on our examples above, Content Cloud can produce two different content sets for luxury goods, one for Paris and one for Shanghai. The customer in Paris sees a French version of the global brand story, a product image with a European model and prices in Euros. For the same DXP request, the customer in Shanghai sees Chinese product descriptions, an Asian model, local product availability, and prices in Renminbi. Content Cloud can also seamlessly create the same experiences for desktop, mobile, apps, and in-store channels without creating extra work.
For small teams who have a large area of responsibilities managing global content, CoreMedia Content Cloud is an ideal application to tear down technical, organizational, and procedural obstacles and gain operational excellence and independence.
Can you explain flexible sourcing and delivery value chains?
Many brands and retailers struggled to adjust their flow of goods in the first few weeks of the lockdown. While closed shops were still being supplied, digital channels encountered bottlenecks. When this happened, customers looked for alternatives, usually from competitors. Companies with flexible and agile processes performed very strongly here.
The pandemic has forced brick and mortar businesses to change. The physical store will no longer be just a point of sale. It will become a place of inspiration, interaction with the brand, full assortment presentation, and service center for click and collect, returns, in-store ordering, and delivering at home. This model requires flexible processes and product and marketing content in different formats – for this you need omnichannel capabilities for experiences across multiple devices.
As you can see, brands managing content in the digital era face new levels of complexity and nuance that didn’t exist with their physical stores. CoreMedia helps brands manage this complexity and provide their customers with the nuance they expect through interaction, efficiency and overall cost reductions.
Want to learn more? Contact us.
An edited version of this blog was published January 11, 2021 in Ecommercemag.fr
Some of the world’s largest brands trust CoreMedia. To read more about CoreMedia Content Cloud, check out:
Personal Digital Shopping Reimagined