The instability in the market creates a reduction on marketing spends and results in a more tactical focus. As marketers, we need to rethink the overall strategy and get back to basics from one that is short-term campaign promotion-led to one that has more focus on the customer lifecycle – essentially to create the best customer experience.
We need to question ourselves on how we engage and retain customers. How do we have a more personalised approach that promotes customer advocacy whereby the renewed approach meets and exceeds the needs of our target audience?
When customers’ needs are the focus of strategy, advocacy becomes the natural by-product, resulting in relevant and important word-of-mouth endorsement. When the above is deployed successfully, we then change the way we measure from self-centred attribution models to a real, customer-centric relevance.

Focus on brand identity and customer loyalty

Therefore, for marketers in the region’s luxury sector, maintaining brand identity and customer loyalty has never been more important. At Infiniti, we put a great focus on staying loyal to our brand values and engaging our customers through creative and innovative campaigns.

What we did with our latest campaign for the launch of the Infiniti Q50S was to use the potential of technology to enable the magic of creativity. We challenged ourselves to prove that our campaign tagline “Unleash your potential” is actually supported by facts, which I’ll explain in detail later.

We identified and measured the level of human excitement unleashed when driving the Q50 Red Sport 400. The data was subsequently analysed by a group of scientists and turned into a song, produced by a DJ, that premiered in a world-first display, bringing to life the brain data of consumers in a unique display of light, sound and water projection based animation.

Using the potential of technology, we managed to engage with our customers in an innovative strategy, creating that excellent customer experience.

The changing business-customer relationship

Relationships between businesses and customers are undergoing a massive transformation right now. Sales, marketing, support and other areas are all shifting from channel-specific programmes to omnichannel efforts, in which customers engage with companies whenever, wherever and however they (the customers) choose.

Elaborating on what I mentioned earlier, some short-term tactics have more of a toxic effect on the customer lifecycle.

Brands need to be responsible about how they constantly test and improve themselves on a campaign-to-campaign basis, unlike a more reactive basis, where we often see brands mimicking the competition and thus losing direction on the true impact to customers.

As marketers find themselves pushed forward by organisational pressures and pulled in many directions by a proliferation of new channels and personalisation solutions, 2017 promises to outdo previous years in terms of the speed and intensity of digital transformation.

There are so many new formats emerging. Whilst the trend of budget spend is clearly moving towards the digital spectrum, TV is still dominant in our part of the world for our industry. What is important to note however is the transformation of this ‘Traditional TV’, where we now see the reassessment of its value proposition and adapting strategy to a more effective deployment.

The three targets

So too with ‘Accountable Marketing’ where ROI is constantly debated, this is impacting three clear areas:

– A closer examination of how success is measured: a good experience will always lead to positive advocacy – this is a no brainer. This is why we adopt such a strong focus on the experiential component of all that we do to ensure a positive customer journey – directing again to the point I made earlier about the customer lifecycle.

– A closer examination of digital measurement: this is more focused on how we measure data, combined with the credibility of the data. For example, viewability has to be combined with intelligent ways of engaging with consumers – Q50 being the best case in point. It wasn’t so much who would view the show at the Dubai Fountain, but more about the fact that we engaged with our customers and it was brought to life by their reactions and experience driving our vehicles.

– A closer examination of cost control, which can often lead to workplace pressures, resulting in a negative working environment. Expectations are to deliver the same results, but in a more efficient way. This is where the all-important human element becomes all the more important and relates to the Q50 again as an example.

Businesses that find ways to integrate their marketing activities with other customer-facing ones, and leverage big data to provide highly personalised customer journeys, will be the big winners in the coming year.