who is your future customer? How far is it possible to look into the future and predict what consumers will want from brands, products and services? Are there any clues in behaviours today that can inform marketers of what customers will expect tomorrow? What marketers know already is that new technology will be a primary push and pull factor in any change. With it will come a shift in customer expectations of choice and availability, speed of connection and engagement, and increased convenience as they seek frictionless sales experiences. Channel proliferation is also producing a fragmentation of the customer journey, and marketers will need to track that journey end to end, responding to demands whenever required. What does this mean for brand loyalty? As the use of data throws up issues of transparency and trust, marketers will need to work hard to convince people that they have the customers best interests at heart. How can organisations respond? What does it mean for the role of marketing itself? Wetalked to five marketers to profile the fast-developing requirements of this changing world, and asked who is your future customer? InterviewS: Martin Bewick Martin Kelly, chief executive officer and co-founder, InfectiousMedia Infectious Media is an international programmatic advertising agency with offices in London andSingapore. Our future consumers will demand a better experience of online advertising and marketers will need to deliver it. How do we get there? A programmatic approach and good measurement will be at the heart of it. We have just completed a study of more than 200 decision-making marketers with programmatic remits in EMEA, APAC and North America, which backs up the changes that may be necessary to meet these new demands. The study found that almost 90 per cent of marketers would be able to justify more investment in programmatic advertising with better measurement. Itwas highlighted as the top digital challenge for marketers in the survey, with 66per cent of respondents finding accurately measuring campaigns extremely or very challenging. The survey also found that more than 92 per cent of advertisers believe offering measurement services is a key part of a media agencys role. However, we often hear from advertisers who are frustrated with the lack of transparency offered by their agency or technology partners, and our insights showed that marketers believe a lack of education and transparency is still making programmatic measurement difficult. One concern is that advertisers are continuing to judge the success of their campaigns on clicks. More than half of those we polled (56 per cent) described number of clicks as the most important metric, followed by cost per click (45 per cent) and click-through rate (43 per cent). This is despite the fact that click data is often distorted by fraud and has been proven to be an extremely flawed metric for predicting a sale. Advertisers are starting to wake up to the fact that the current measurement model is broken, and digital ad spend is being held back as a result. They are looking for agencies to show greater leadership on how the system can be improved. Unfortunately, most agencies have been content with spending advertisers money on cheap inventory that meets a given target on clicks, regardless ofthe risk of fraud or the limited ROI this delivers. Agencies have a responsibility to educate their clients on the more sophisticated approaches that are available, offering them metrics that challenge them to think beyond clicks. This will help give consumers the better ad experience that they require. John Compton, deputy head of UK media relations, PwC PwC is a global professional service firm, with headquarters in London. Compton is responsible for PwCs internal and external communications across the UK. Daniel Rowles, FCIM, chief executive officer, targetinternet.com Target Internet offers training to help organisations and individuals improve their digital marketing capability. Rowles is also a CIM course director. Consumers expectations are not carefully considered, planned or thought through. They are simply shaped by their environment, and the trends and changes that come with any particular market. What does this mean in practice? It means we can predict with reasonable accuracy what consumers will want and expect in the near future, based on trends and changes that are happening now. In the further future, market disruption and the ever-increasing pace of change make it near impossible to predict. For this reason, lets focus on the near future. The overwhelming forces at play in marketing today are those of noise and the need for less friction. Lets expand on those by starting with noise. Consumers are bombarded with more content via more channels than ever before, and this trend will continue as it always has. Marketers that dont understand their target consumers journey, and who dont use technology to deliver the right content via the right channel at the right time, will simply fail. Sloppy marketing will no longer get poor results, it wont get any. The need for less friction comes from greater expectations from consumers. Friction is simply making things harder to do. If I want to watch a film now, the idea of needing to travel to a video store to rent a film seems insane. Ill just go to Netflix. Consumers increasingly wont tolerate a poor or difficult experience, especially when new alternatives are already available. Marketers need to innovate in product development and service delivery to reduce friction at every stage of the consumer journey. Consumers dont consider their expectations carefully, but they do change these expectations more and more quickly. Successful marketers will be those that expect a growing pace of change. Tim Ruthven, MCIM, director of corporate marketing and communications, Imperial College Business School Part of Imperial College London, the Business School drives business advantage through the fusion of business and technology, and an entrepreneurial mindset. Customer experience can grow out of customer ser vice Future customers are growing up with a DIYattitude to discovery Tomorrows customer will expect to be able to dip in and out of contact with brands, and marketers will need to build communications that can manage this and offer value throughout the life-cycle, when customers need it. We already see it where I work, in lifelong learning. People might have 15 jobs during their career, which means they are likely to dip in and out of education. A brand needs to remain consistent over this period, but the products you offer may need to change to stay relevant to a particular person at a particular time. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a greater part of the picture, customers are also likely to have a closer relationship with machines. Marketers will need to understand which part of their service is best achieved by those machines, and which part is best done by a human. A humancentred offering means getting this balance right. Empathy and creativity those softer skills may take on greater importance. Next, customers will want deeper, broader and more immersive experiences of brands. In my sector, that means business schools thinking about how they will produce more experiential learning opportunities for people who want to study. For example, there are more ways to learn than having one professor talk to a class of 30 students, and I think that discovery and learning through experimentation even if that means learning through failure will become symptomatic of the future customer. Well see more of a start-up, hacker mindset among consumers in general generations of future customers are now growing up with a DIY attitude, learning about all kinds of things through online discovery YouTube videos, for example. This perhaps signals how the future customer will have fewer personto-person interactions, but also be digitally hyper-connected. Its a case of being alone together. Face-to-face experience may become something for which customers will pay a premium. Through all of this, marketing needs to show its value by identifying where future revenue streams are. It also needs to understand how strategic marketing can bring all the elements of a business together, and to understand that leadership is about change management. Finally, human-centric design must be at the heart of everything marketers do, if those future needs are to be met. Human- centric design must be at the hear t of what we do Future consumers wont tolerate a poor or difficult experience Were living in a high-tech, high-octane world, where todays consumers are at the cutting edge of tomorrows technology. But its also a cut-throat commercial world where new technologies become old news almost as soon as they hit the online marketplace. However, some things dont change, and for business, the traditional challenges of generating sales, boosting productivity, improving margins and managing cash are just as important for the new entrepreneurs of Generation Z as they were for their babyboomer grandparents. The difference is that, for baby boomers, change was progressive, nuanced and evolutionary. For Generation Z, on the other hand, change is disruptive, overnight and transformative impacting marketing strategies, roles and remits, blurring reliable information on the size of the marketing profession and the value of the sector to the UK economy as a whole. Add Brexit into the mix and an already turbulent marketing industry has an increasingly challenging but no less vital role in supporting UK businesses in identifying and capitalising on overseas commercial opportunities. PwCs latest research, in collaboration with CIM, has surveyed more than 300 UK businesses to understand the challenges and opportunities that organisations are facing when exporting, and the role that marketing plays in ensuringinternational success. The report reveals that attitudes to exporting are positive, but there are challenges ahead in a post-Brexit world, with tough international markets demanding clear marketing direction. Connecting people with products and services, however, has always beena key pillar of marketing. Many will see the coming years as a great opportunity to demonstrate how the profession can drive business advantage. Marketing will play a vital role in building the export potential of businesses and ensuring success in key international markets which will become increasingly crucial for the globally minded consumers of tomorrow. Click data is often distorted by fraud For babyboomers change was progressive nuanced and evolutionary Measurement is key if online ads are to deliver for consumers Catalyst asks The big question Kate Gardhouse, associate director of customer experience and operations, CIM CIM is a leading international professional marketing body that works with marketers and organisations to improve their marketing capability, in a world of increasing competition, transparency and change, where finding a valued business advantage has never been aschallenging. The future customer wont expect things to stay the same in the same way that previous generations did. For example, we no longer expect to have a job for life. Peoples overall attitudes are changing. Increasingly, they are untroubled by change and expect to enjoy the huge amount of choice of goods and services available to them. Change and choice have an impact on loyalty, however, which can be challenging for marketing. More than ever, customers are in control and own the customer journey. We should remember that customers have been told they are king, and that has raised their expectations. The voice of the customer is becoming more relevant, and consumers now care less about what brands say about products and more about what other consumers say. Customers can also now make contact with organisations in many more ways. In the past, if they had a question, or something to say to you, customers would have to pick up the phone or send an email. Now that contact might come via social media or webchat. In response, marketers need to focus on their core proposition. You cant please all the people all the time, but to stay in tune with your customers needs you need to stay in constant touch and realise that nothing is set in stone. Fortunately, we can now monitor and learn from consumers at a much faster rate social media is instant, and you dont, for example, have to wait a year to see if someone has renewed a subscription. Contact with the customer needs to be fast, personal and delivered on the channel of their choosing you dont want to have to make them swap channels to talk to you. Of course, no-one wakes up in the morning wanting to speak to a customer service agent, and the job of a customer experience team is also to remove reasons for customers to have to contact them. Being able to reduce these points of contact cuts down your overheads and creates time for marketers to concentrate on what customers really want. Most importantly, this ultimately benefits the customer. The divide between marketing and customer service is shrinking. Customer service and customer experience teams need to make sure that what customers are saying is fed back into the organisation to influence what it does. Marketers should be speaking to their contact centres regularly. Inthis way customer experience can grow out of customer service. It is there to react directly to the customer, and theexperience team can then apply those findings across the whole lifetime journey. So, listen to your customer service team and trust their instincts about what the customers are saying. They often know much more than other parts of the organisation about what customers are feeling, and how the organisation could respond. Its understandable that marketers will want to conduct big customer research projects, but these take time and cost a lot of money, and marketers should remember that in fact they can get insight and learn about the customer every day. cim.co.uk/exchange The divide between marketing and customer service is shrinking Got any suggestions for topics for Catalyst Asks features? If so, or you are interested in contributing, email editorial@cim.co.uk