How will we communicate, and maintain, brand trust in a world of intelligent and autonomous devices?

You have to admire the folks at Altimeter Research. They seem to like asking big questions and then getting the world to join them in narrowing in on answers (not a bad model for all of us).

This summer they raised a series of questions, one of which, regarding the nature of The Dynamic Customer Journey, I took on in a previous post.  Now I’d like to address the last question in the series, about the nature of living, and doing business, in an ever more Sentient World (to use their term for the unending expansion of intelligent devices).   Still with me?  Good, because it actually matters to the future of your brand marketing efforts.

Altimeter lays out their premise in fairly optimistic terms:   “As more and more inanimate objects start to develop data and intelligence as they connect to each other, a network of autonomous interactions will emerge. In the future, our devices will be able to manage, analyze, report, predict, forecast, and more — while humans experience their days more intelligently and efficiently.”

Can We Develop Trust Human-to-Machine?  Can We Market that Trust?
As they envision a technotopia in which untold benefits accrue to humans in a device-driven world, one question needs to be asked:  How will machines get us to trust them?  And how will marketers be able to communicate, and maintain, a trustworthy brand experience?

The Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies frames the issue this way:  “Complex social phenomena are strictly associated with trust, which is a key factor to understand how cooperation, economic exchanges and communications develop in society. But how about artificial objects? Can we still talk about trust? At ISTC the Trust, Theory and Technology Group (T3) has shown the answer is more complex than expected.”  More complex, indeed.  And while the ISTC is about the work of finding a way to measure the trustworthiness of machines “able to solve problems like and better than humans,” we can begin to look at how intelligent devices are received in the here and now to help guide our near-future efforts.

Selling Artificial IQ Requires A Higher Brand EQ
In Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) is in the process of substituting an intelligent in-home monitoring device for many duties previously borne by physicians, at great expense to the NHS.   Only 5000 users are currently in trial with the “telehealth” system, but so far the acceptance of the device has been promising, as have the results:  a 20% reduction of emergency admissions, 14% fewer days in the hospital – and users are 45% less likely to die than non-users.

Obviously, the NHS will do well to promote the statistical benefits of using telehealth – but they will also need to observe the emotions surrounding it, as begin to emerge in this Daily Mail article on the subject:

“June, from York, credits telehealth with restoring her independence. She is a widow and suffers from diabetes and a heart condition. Early last year, she began to suffer problems with water retention and was eventually admitted to hospital with heart failure. After returning home from hospital she was offered a telehealth system. ‘I kept getting a very fast heartbeat and was nervous about doing anything,’ she says. ‘But I took my blood pressure every time I wanted to leave the house as well as daily checks. If my oxygen levels went down they called me up immediately and checked I was OK. ‘After a couple of weeks I felt much more confident about going out. I learnt to manage the condition myself.’

Confidence.  Independence. And, as one other user noted, freedom from endless waits at NHS facilities.  By clarifying and communicating solid emotional benefits that proceed from the rationally understood product features, the NHS – or any of us in a similar situation – should be able to build the trust that pure technological performance may not.

Do you have any personal or professional experience with intelligent products and, if so, how did that experience impact your sense of trust in the “Sentient World?”

The Altimeter Group is embarking on an ambitious attempt to understand and define the evolution of the customer experience, what they have coined “The Dynamic Customer Journey.” As they summarize it:

“The customer journey has evolved, yet organizations have failed to recognize and adapt to the change. Today, the new customer is empowered to make faster, smarter, more-informed decisions using technology, for instance, by accessing real-time information on their mobile devices or connecting with trusted peers across open and closed social networks. To respond to a dynamic customer journey, organizations must transform their rigid sales, marketing, and customer service programs and adopt an intrinsically more flexible organizational, technological, and go-to-market approach”

The Dynamic Human Journey
Their observations focus on organization, technology and process – but I hope they will also include, and invite others to comment on, core issues of human communication that arise from the often-bewildering challenges listed above. In fact, I submit that customers may not always be so “empowered” as “challenged” to “make faster, smarter, more informed decisions.”

Are Your Customers Developing a Complexity Complex?
Altimeter may be nodding in this direction when they note in a heading “The Factors that Impact the Dynamic Customer Journey Multiply Complexity.” Of course, we face more than just the question of how to control, minimize and seamlessly integrate structural complexities – we face the challenge of how to ensure that the composite end result amounts to useful, usable, human relations and communications.

Not surprisingly, “useful” and “useable” correlate well with “simple.” Siegel+Gale has been tracking the need for, and benefits of, simplicity for some time, and their latest Simplicity Index points out the paradoxical blessing/curse of technology:

“On the one hand, the steady stream of innovation continues to make it easier for consumers to watch, listen, share and communicate. But many companies in acquisition mode have expanded their profiles and portfolios and incorporated such a sea of product models and technology types that many customers feel lost as they attempt to navigate their way to a simple purchase.”

Simply Put, Brands Need to Put it Simply
The upshot seems to be that brands must embrace a unifying and simplifying approach to technology and communications. Easier said than done? Perhaps. Nonetheless, I suggest, and invite comment on, two guiding principles:

1. Brands that take the complexity burden off of consumers will step to the fore.
2. Of those complexity-defying brands, the ones that learn to also communicate in
   the simplest, most communally human terms will be the long-term winners

Human-to-Human Communication vs. Brand to Prospect
Do you agree? Disagree? And do you believe that considering the dynamics of honest human communication – alongside organizational, technological and process-oriented factors – would enhance the Altimeter discussion?

Please leave a comment, and join in the Altimeter discourse.

OK, I’ve another bit of Altimeter research to recommend:  “The Rise of Digital Influence.”  As with many studies on social media, content marketing and other areas of the still developing digital world, this one raises as many important questions as it answers.  It does a good overview job of answering the question  “What is digital influence, and how can my brand take advantage of it?”  It completely begs the issue of “When will ‘sparking desired effects’ among the influential digerati slip over into anti-social, trust-damaging marketing manipulation?”

WHAT IS DIGITAL INFLUENCE, AND HOW CAN BRANDS LEVERAGE IT?

Let’s back up to the first half of that question.  The report helpfully tries to level up the notion of digital influence from one of mere electronic word of mouth – with influencers being those having the most “mouths” follow and repeat what they say – to a more nuanced understanding of digital influence, which the report alliterates as being comprised of

Reach:  Popularity, proximity and goodwill
Resonance:  Frequency, period, amplitude
Relevance:  Authority, trust, affinity

USING DIGITAL INFLUENCE VERSUS PEDDLING IT
The report goes on to talk about how “businesses can shape and steer positive conversations and… desired outcomes,” and offers case histories wherein companies offered often very expensive “incentives”  to influencers in exchange for tacit help engaging their followers to help achieve those “desired outcomes.”  It also mentions that “… the brand borrows the social capital of the individual to appear approachable and desirable to their followers.”

This brings me to the real issue at hand: the difference between “borrowing” social capital and buying it. When your approach is to attract digital influencers via free phones, expensive trips and the like, the balance tips in the direction of “buying.”

PAYING FOR INFLUENCE BUILDS NO MORE TRUST IN MARKETING THAN IT DOES IN POLITICS
So what’s the harm?  The potential harm is the same we see in the politics of pay-to-play states like the one I live in, or in the influence-peddling hallways of Congress:  once consumers, like voters, wise up, long-term damage is done to the trust required to make relationships, or even entire systems, work.

HOW TO BUILD SOCIAL TRUST
While the report evinces some of the subtle arrogance that typifies any hot trend and its new masters (sample section heading:  “The New Era of Consumer Influence: When Nobodies Become Somebodies), it also highlights (though not as much as I think it should) two keys to keeping consumer trust while paying to piggyback on the authority and relationships of others:

1.    Provide real value to develop honest support from digital influencers
It’s a central tenant of all social and content marketing that’s it’s not all about your brand. As the report puts it “Rather than ask connected consumers to share random or purely promotional updates related to your business, provide them with ideas, content, links, or editorial suggestions…”  In short, provide incentives that have a natural value to your target influencers (and their followers).

2.     Be aggressively honest and open – transparency begets trust
It’s not enough to simply comply with the FTC Endorsement disclosure guidelines for blogs, social media, etcetera. Marketers would be wise to follow the lead of Virgin America, who, as mentioned in one of the Altimeter report case histories, assertively encouraged an honest, no-holds-barred response from the digital recruitees by announcing, “We do not want to ‘buy’ your tweets.  You are receiving the product because you are influential and have authority on topics related to the product… You are welcome to tell the world you love the product, you hate the product, or say nothing at all.”

What are you doing to create relationships with digital influencers – and how are you doing it?

There’s an interesting bit of content marketing research out of The Altimeter Group that’s worth a read – but that also, I think, could follow its own findings a little farther to reach an even more transformative conclusion about content as a – and perhaps the – key to marketing going forward.

HOW TO MAKE CONTENT MARKETING WORK:  WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS
The Altimeter study “Content: The New Marketing Equation,” makes a good case for why, in their terms, marketers need to rebalance both their thinking and their resources to leverage the opportunities in and demand for content, arguing that marketers and their agencies must become storytellers rather than mere product sellers (easier said than done). And it offers up an infographic-style “state of the business” report delineating Altimeter’s view of the five stages of “Content Marketing Maturity, (above).

Allow me to paraphrase what the report refers to as the four fundamental steps toward “Content Marketing Maturity”

1.    Accept the fact that content marketing isn’t free… or even inexpensive        I have to agree with them here… too many clients still think that content is a  magical marketing freebie (the same clients who think that social media is free and easy).  Part of the problem is driven by the outdated content-as-quantity approach, particularly within blogging and article writing, that has given rise to an enormous, ridiculously cheap and almost useless offshore industry of keyword stuffers, er “content writers” It takes considerable time, thought and talent to create, execute and actively manage a decent content marketing program – just as it does  for any professional-grade marketing effort.

 2.    Content marketing requires a shift in your corporate thinking        Moving from a mindset of push to pull, from that of product sellers to content providers, demands a shift, from the C-Suite down, in both attitude and allocations of resources. That is, it ain’t just about the marketing department anymore.

3.    Content marketing shouldn’t replace advertising, it should leverage it      Marketing directors can be forgiven for thinking that content marketing Is the next stand-alone silver bullet for all of their marketing problems. After all, those other content marketers, formerly known as the media, love to go on and on about how each successive innovation or trend, whether social media, mobile, content or whatever, is going to be the death of advertising.  The truth is that all of the above, and especially content, should not only integrate with advertising but, in fact, transform it (more on that below).

4.    Focus on quality content, avoid technological and tactical gimmicks      Developing content strategies pegged to the highest value interests and needs of your audiences, and then investing the time and money to satisfy  those needs with quality, creative content, is much more important than jumping on every content platform and technology. In other words, as Altimeter puts it,  try to avoid the distraction of “bright, shiny objects.”

HOW TO MAKE CONTENT TRANSFORM ALL OF YOUR MARKETING
There’s much more to discuss in the Altimeter report, but I’d like to return to point three above – the idea that content should integrate with advertising.  Partly this is an obvious statement – with the modern mega-multiplicity of possible touchpoints, mostly determined by consumer choice, marketers have no realistic option but to pursue integrated efforts via multiple channels and modalities.  But to say that content should integrate undershoots the mark.  A creative approach to content should infiltrate, infuse, inform and incite every corner of our marketing efforts. Here’s how to start in three not-so-easy steps:

1.   Change your concept of content.      Content isn’t just words – as in blogs, white papers, or the talking heads of a million cheap YouTube video interviews. Content  is substance.  In whatever form it takes, content needs to deliver real value.   Let me repeat:  Content is substanc

2.    Change your concept of advertising.    If content marketing is substance, then it must automatically be at odds with advertising and its worship of style, no?  No. Advertising in any of its paid media form cans be harnessed to the delivery of content – and can even be conceived so that it offers valuable “substance” along with its vaunted style.

3.     Change your resources.    One of the oldest tropes in content marketing is “learn to think like  a publisher.”   I’d extend that to “learn to think like a reporter… and novelist, playwright, artist, songwriter, historian, social scientist, talk show host.”  In short, get creative with content, and look to unconventional resources to provide unexpected creativity. Don’t just be marketers –  be the new Medicis.