IN PHOTO: Bozoma St. John (newly-minted CMO of Endeavor and keynote speaker at DigiCon 2018) with Samuel Burke (Business and Technology News Correspondent of CNN).
MANILA — “We’re in the feelings business, not in the data business,” said Bozoma St. John, Chief Marketing Officer of Endeavor during her keynote address at DigiCon 2018 held at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) last October 3, 2018.
During her keynote talk, Bozoma St. John has spoken candidly about her career path. St. John, who recently announced that she was leaving Uber as chief brand officer to become the marketing chief of talent agency Endeavor, noted that her past four jobs were all new roles created for her.
She left Pepsi for Beats Music and then Apple, where she made a splash at its massive developers conference, WWDC, in 2016. She has been broadly recognized for her work in the advertising industry, being named one of Ad Age’s 50 Most Creative People and Fortune’s Disruptors and 40 under 40, among other honors.
Now, the newly-minted CMO of Endeavor joins the company to focus on driving marketing efforts, including Endeavor Global Marketing clients and premium brands. St. John also works across Endeavor’s growing global network of companies including: WME, IMG, UFC, PBR, Miss Universe and Frieze.
“If you’re a marketer or a brand representative, or if you’re trying to build a business, you need to understand that we are talking about feelings most of the time,” she said. “And that’s what we in the 21st century modern world needs to figure out: how to connect to our consumers through feelings.”
This is where experiences come in. Leading companies now realize that a brand isn’t about how they present a product/company—it is the product/company. There’s no difference between the marketing promise and the brand experience because the promise is directly fulfilled in the experience. This is a huge shift and one that puts the marketing team right at the heart of the business: after all, if the brand is the experience, then marketing needs to help map out the customer journey and inform their company’s business models. In effect, marketing needs to become experience makers.
St. John talked about the experience economy, or the push for businesses to build relationships with their audience through meaningful experiences. As consumers, people’s interactions with brands are no different. They no longer simply make a purchase and walk away. Consumers seek—and often expect, whether they realize it or not—additional utility from the brands they patronize. They want to feel like they’re listening and they don’t just want the goods or services, but they want an experience to sweeten the deal.
“If there has been something that has happened to you that made you react, you should use that in your business plans [and] in the way that you are communicating to consumers, because that’s the emotion you need to get from them,” she said. “It’s not logic. It’s not based on the algorithm. It is based on how you feel.”
Perhaps the most important lesson people share is that to reinvent customer experiences successfully, one needs to be able to engage people with superbly designed content that’s personalized, consistent and integrated across every channel. A truly compelling experience is one that’s seamless and centered on customers as individuals.
“We should stop trying to make things so mass appealing,” said Saint John. “Make them (the customers) connect to someone in a way that if they were your friend, they would understand.”
This level of customer focus and integrated content delivery can only be achieved by coordinating elements such as experience design, customer intelligence and cross-channel delivery. Every part of a business holds a piece of the customer experience puzzle–the secret to success is putting all these pieces together to achieve finish the puzzle and achieve a complete view of the customer. From there, marketers can bring together exceptional content with robust data and analytics to deliver amazing, impactful customer experiences.
