Kimberly Kriss’s six rules for marketing success
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Know and listen to your customer now: we have the luxury of social media outlets, your virtual boardroom should never be empty – especially with millennials taking such a heavy hand in everything we’re doing. They want to be heard, they want to have relevancy in your decisions. You need to listen to them.
Building relationships based on giving versus taking: companies want to take so much data from people that they forget to give, to simply tell the customer why. [They should be saying] ‘We’re building out a whole custom-made tailoring department that’s going to be colour-focused, to allow us to develop clothes for you based on your favourite colours.’
That’s really important, but we never tell consumers why we’re asking for information. Millennials are really savvy about this and they’re not giving us their information.
Transparency, relevancy, consistency: these hold true whether you’re building an advertising strategy, a communications strategy, or your brand proposition. Especially now, when we talk about omni-channel marketing versus multichannel marketing, these three things are pillars of success.
Take your customer with you on your Journey: not just your customers, but also your team and your employees. So often, marketing is siloed and it’s such a mistake. This is why marketing departments and marketers get such a bad reputation. They’re seen as a siloed part of the organisation – they don’t seem to take a holistic view of the business. Explain to people what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
Sphere of influence: be true to what your brand strategy stands for, focus on what’s most important, on who you’re trying to reach and ultimately, that will have a knock on effect. Marketers have so many things they want to start doing. So many visions have such long-term results that companies don’t see immediate impact. They might say: ‘what are you doing in marketing? I’m not understanding what your role is.’
Stay curious: I have spent my entire career in this cycle of testing, learning, analysing and redefining. That holds true for millennials today too. They’re in a constant process of transition. They’re comfortable with the speed of change, more than any other generation. As marketers, we have to be even more comfortable with that. Just because we’ve done something [one way] for a long time, doesn’t mean it’s right.
