Convenience has always been a core customer service principle, but it has recently taken center stage like never before! Brands like Tesla, Amazon, Netflix, Zappos, and Uber are prime examples of how convenience marketing is transforming the business landscape. If you think about it, what separates the successful companies and brands from the rest? Well, mostly, they are just easier to do business with. Convenience marketing isn’t just a competitive differentiator—it’s the entire business proposition! Convenience is the most compelling factor in customer conversion journeys. This morning, I paid more for petrol simply because the petrol pump was right there! It was the right product, at the right place, at the right time! Everybody wins! Now, think of it—I’m looking for a shirt online, and just when I’ve selected the perfect one, the right shade of trousers shows up next to it. High chance I’ll add them to my cart, right? Or say, I’m walking past a Raymond store at Shoppers Stop and get an offer to redeem my points—quite likely that I will, right? In today’s dynamic push-and-pull landscape, convenience marketing plays a vital role. By focusing on personalized, location-based, and contextual content, convenience will be one of the single biggest drivers of marketing efforts in 2024.

From monologue to dialogue, brands will need to engage in more meaningful conversations to drive customer experience and engagement. Call center executives are now routinely trained to have conversations instead of the staccato, scripted, and robotic replies they used to give in the past. Voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are already setting high expectations for customers from brands in the near future. Marketers need to use CRM as a digital toolbox for engaging in conversational marketing with customers. All conversational efforts must embody brand values, and in this context, some organizational preparation will be required. Mobile technologies like push notifications, in-app messages, chatbots, messaging on third-party platforms, and voice recognition are actively being used globally to enhance conversational marketing strategies.

Marketers will need to break down their elaborate customer journeys into ‘episodes’ or ‘micro-moments’. What is the best moment to pitch a sale? Provide assistance? Offer product recommendations? Or just have an involved discussion with an expert? Essentially, episodic marketing means delivering one-on-one messages with clarity, at high frequency, to multiple clusters/segments of customers. Marketers will need to leverage technologies like AI & ML to identify when and where the customer is ready to interact with the brand. In 2024, episodic marketing will play a pivotal role in driving customer acquisition and boosting sales.

The primary objective of marketing is to ‘connect’ the brand with the customer, enabling a sale. And no, connected marketing is not just another name for omni-channel marketing. We have all heard homilies like ‘customers engage with one brand/organization, not separate channels.” True that, but connected marketing is much more than having a seamless sales or after-sales experience. It is about being connected to the customer at his convenience, in the context in which he wants to engage, at the time and place of his choice. It is almost like ‘on-demand’ marketing, if you will. Organizations and brands will need to leverage all kinds of marketing technologies, automation tools, algorithms, data & analytics to create an agile enterprise marketing solution that can deliver connected marketing to customers.

Brand will have to collaborate with like-minded brands in different categories like never before through collaborative marketing. This will help them demonstrate to their customers that they understand them. It will not only help them lower their marketing spends but will also enhance customer experience. We do have a plethora of brands tying up for loyalty programs, but collaborative marketing will be much more than that. It will be about sharing cross-product experiences, digital assets – including data (I know this sounds implausible, but we will eventually get there). Today, competitive brands like Mercedes and BMW are beginning to share key manufacturing components. Tomorrow they will collaborate in marketing to address their niche customers. The biggest difference between the brands, let me state this rather brazenly, will be the unique customer experience they will provide to their customers. It sounds audacious right now, but what the heck! We have seen now more than ever before that audacity wins!