Brand as Experience
First off, thank you 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾for being part of my first newsletter. I am so grateful for you, and I’m looking forward to using this channel not just to share insights and inspiration, but to drive dialogue on how we can harness the power of brand to make our jobs, our lives, and the world just a little bit better.
On to the focus of this issue. We see it, we feel it, we know it. We’re in the Experience Era. Sure, we need our products, and we value our services. But it’s experiences to which we give our time, our attention, and our dollars. The best Marketing Leaders and Brand Builders know they are actually Chief Experience Officers, charged with the opportunity and obligation of designing and delivering what’s new and what’s next. In this inaugural issue of the newsletter, I offer a detailed reflection on the CMO as CXO, share my recent far-ranging interview with creative icon Scott Belsky, and serve up a few can’t-miss instances of Brand as Experience that recently made an impression on me. Enjoy!
A Thought
“Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just marketing or sales or service. Every process should be optimized for what is best for the customer — not your organization.”
A Conversation
I recently sat down with executive, author, entrepreneur, and investor Scott Belsky on the Breakthrough Builders podcast. Scott is the author of two incredible books on creativity, the founder of Behance, and the Chief Product Officer at Adobe.
Scott and I had a wide-ranging conversation that spanned his views on the advancement of creative meritocracy, how to empower people to do the best work of their lives, Adobe’s brand portfolio and product culture, the future of NFTs, and a range of other wildly cool and relevant stuff. Check out the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the web. And please subscribe to the show if you haven’t already.
A Reflection
In an era when brand relevance and business growth are functions of Experience, my perspective is that the modern CMO must in fact be a Chief Experience Officer – a leader who not only builds brand relevance and generates sales pipeline, but who sustains and grows an enterprise based on deep customer empathy. I contend that CMOs must execute well on five focus areas:
Modernizing Martech to Develop a Single View of the Customer
Driving Sustained Cross-Channel Growth
Developing and Scaling Remarkable Personalized Experiences
Creating Connection and Community
Building Brand Intelligence
Read about how I’m thinking about these five areas in the context of Experience Transformation. Full essay here.
A Collection
Chapman Way and Maclain Way are co-creators and executive producers who tell the story-behind-the-story on Untold, a new sports documentary film on Netflix. As a Detroit sports fan, I was simultaneously appreciative of and embarrassed about the dark truths that were told in the story of Malice at the Palace. 😬
Delta Airlines is the first (and only, as of now!) US airline to automatically extend the status of its most frequent flyers through January of 2023. This is an absolutely incredible move that signals how deeply committed Delta is to its customers, their families, and their lives. 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
Sometimes the conversation on equity and inclusion focuses more on gender, race, and background, and less on differential abilities. Bose has taken its audio innovation one huge step forward for those with hearing impairments with its SoundControl hearing aids, developed off the back of research revealing that millions of Americans avoided getting treatment for hearing problems because of the sheer complexity of the experience. 👊🏾
Dropbox, which recently announced a “virtual-first” approach to work, has completely reimagined and redesigned its office spaces as collaborative spaces called Dropbox Studios.
I knew that Capital One wondered what was in my wallet, but I hadn’t realized what was in their data centers: nothing. That’s right - the bank holding company famous for its incredible customer experience has gone 100% to the cloud on AWS. (Amazon’s take is here.) ☁️