Brands should help customers take complexity out of choice making: Nicholas Kontopoulos
At the Pitch CMO Summit, Nicholas Kontopoulos, APAC Regional Head of Marketing, Adobe DX, noted that making the customer journey simple across all touch points is the way forward
Living in a post-pandemic world has changed the customers at a very deep level. The changes, which were to happen over the course of the next five-ten years, happened within just a few months -- pushing forward a digital society. And that has created a unique challenge in front of the brand: deciphering how to create value for their customers.
Answering this dilemma, Adobe DX Commercial Asia Pacific Regional Head of Marketing Nicholas Kontopoulos shared his thoughts on the subject of “Brand Utility: The Purpose of (Brand) Purpose” during the virtual Pitch CMO Summit.
Kontopoulos noted that brands need to identify their purpose and make the customer journeys simple across all touchpoints to thrive in the modern world. However, he insisted that brands need to understand that a brand’s purpose doesn’t mean it's an attempt to save the world.
He said, “I have seen this becoming quite a prevalent approach with many, but a brand’s purpose really shouldn’t be about saving the world. Whenever we talk of purpose now, they (brands) start anchoring it against some social issues out there. And that (supporting a social cause) really shouldn’t be about promoting a brand. Customers can see through inauthenticity.”
He insisted that brands should rather be embracing this idea of purpose from the lens of who they really are and what is their reason for being (in the market). The brands must be focussing on capturing the customers’ minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits for what they really have to offer.
For creating a great customer experience, Kontopoulos highlighted, the brands must be focussing on empathy towards their customers.
“Today’s customer is bombarded with information, inundated by messages across platforms. And at this point, they really want the complexity to be taken out of the process of making choices (between products). A brand should be helping them simplify this process of making this choice,” he pointed out.
Personalising the experience for each customer across every touch point to give a seamless experience is really the way forward, he added.
Kontopoulos concluded by mentioning that the brands really need great agility in harnessing data across all the different touch points that they're connecting with customers on and aggregating the data set in a way that enables them to simplify the experience for the customers.
