Experiences: How to Stand Out in a New Age of Marketing

Are you looking for a competitive advantage?

Have you thought about creating experiences for your audience?

To learn how to create experiences and why they are essential to stand out in this noisy world, I interview Robert Rose.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Robert Rose, chief strategy officer at the Content Marketing Institute. He's co-author of Managing Content Marketing and co-host of the This Old Marketing podcast. His latest book is called Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing.

In this episode Robert will explore how creating experiences can help you stand out in a noisy world.

You'll discover businesses doing experiences right, as well as how to get started creating experiences for your audience.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Experiences
The book's premise

Robert says he and co-author Carla Johnson believe we're moving into a new era of marketing.

Marketing school textbooks (which stop around the mid-1990s) teach the five eras of marketing. All eras last about 20 years. According to Robert, we are now in the 6th era, which is relationship marketing. The Relationship Era was kicked off in the early 1990s with The One to One Future by Dr. Martha Rogers and Don Peppers, which gave birth to the CRM movement.

As we move into 2015, Robert explains, we are evolving into a new era. "Developing delightful, informative, useful experiences from marketing's lens is really the new way to formulate a marketing strategy going forward," he says.

Robert shares more about the evolution of the eras and how they inform this new one.

From the early 1990s and into the Internet era (the late 1990s and early 2000s) the goal was to figure out how to develop a database or a relationship with our consumer and deepen it through the use of data, as well as how to assemble richer data sets around the consumer to be able to deliver a better product or service to that consumer, using that relationship. This is what gave birth to the CRM movement as we know it today.

As this era progressed, and social media within it, relationship development between a brand and its consumers became more complex. These days, digital more broadly disrupts how we relate to consumers, since we now have to establish a relationship from that first meeting and beyond.

That expansion of marketing's responsibility for the full life cycle of the consumer, and the complexity brought on by all of the different channels, are creating a real evolution of marketing. We need to develop more compelling experiences to be able to delight those customers at various stages of their journey.

Listen to the show to discover more about the book.

What Robert means when he talks about experiences

When a business creates a website or something with a physical dimension, such as a conference or a print magazine, it's creating an experience for its audience. The hope is to deliver value that's separate and discrete from the company's product or service.

Robert shares a few examples.

Kraft makes macaroni and cheese, as well as other products. However, Kraft's Food & Family magazine and Kraft's online recipes are experiences. They are value delivered to a consumer that's separate from the company's products.

Another example would be a home cookware shop that teaches cooking classes as a means of providing a physical experience. The shop is trying to align its brand or a need or want, and is doing so by creating an experience for its customers.