How Important is Asset Management to your Customer Experience?

In a word: very.

We live in a world of multi-channel sales and marketing, where consumers interact with brands across a growing number of online and offline touchpoints. These customers, however, seek consistency. Consider this:

• 60% of consumers expect consistent experiences when dealing with brands online, in-store, or in person.¹
• 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience.²
• By 2020, a company’s customer experience will overtake price as its key brand differentiator.³

“Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where businesses are won or lost.” – Tom Knighton

Consistency matters to our customer experience.

In parallel, the volume of our business content grows year over year. By 2020 IDC predicts the amount of digital information will grow by a factor of 30, the number of files, by a factor of 60.⁴ With this growth, many companies are mired in complex issues of inefficient version control, bogged down by customization needs, threatened by off-brand materials, and stalled by countless one-off content requests.

While these cumbersome processes prevent growth and efficiency internally, more importantly, the lack of a consistent brand standard across touchpoints externally leads to confusion and mistrust among our customers, threatening sales and risking the loyalty of our buyers.

“Make every interaction count, even the small ones. They are all relevant.” – Shep Hyken

A brand is a promise.

When a brand presents materials, it does so under a brand promise. Each asset is a reflection of that promise. If your organization suffers from inconsistencies, that promise is essentially broken. Brand messaging can be completely misinterpreted when imagery and guidelines “go missing” causing someone on your distributed network (such as a franchisee or field sales rep) to go rogue and use their own content.

Beyond threats to the customer experience, there are standards that a brand must follow in certain markets with legal and regulatory governance, or risk fines and lawsuits.

According to research⁵, poor content management ranks as the number one reason that organizations struggle with multi-channel marketing communications and brand consistency. That, and a fragmented variety of disconnected asset repositories threaten our abilities to meet the needs of our ever-demanding customers.

The Impact of Marketing Asset Management

A marketing on demand solution allows corporate marketing to connect reps with approved marketing assets and vendors from anywhere, anytime. What’s more, without dealing with single marketing asset requests, marketing staff is able to spend their limited time and resources on more strategic, mission-critical responsibilities, like focusing on orchestrating the overall customer experience across the business.

Some firms believe that re-engineering the business around the customer experience is the “single most exciting digital opportuntiy” in the market today. We couldn’t agree more, and consider Marketing Asset Management to be a key component of this transformation.

“A brand is not a product. It’s the sum of all the experiences you have with a company.” – Amir Kassaei, Chief Creative Officer, DDB Global