Digital Brand Romance: How to Create Lasting Relationships in a Digital World

By Anna Harrison

In Digital Brand Romance, you will learn the proprietary six-step ADORE Process that has helped brands worldwide consistently achieve conversion rates above 20%.

Tomorrow arrived, and all great relationships now begin online – including the ones between your future customer and your brand.

Whether you are selling shoes, software or spaceship parts, the romance begins and evolves in a digital world. While over 80% of businesses think they provide excellent customer experiences – only 8% of customers agree. The reality is that the state of modern, digital brand relationships is quite dysfunctional: an average conversion rate of 3% means that 97% of engagements with your brand fail. Not only does this inefficiency chew up marketing budget, but it also taints future engagements with your brand.

In Digital Brand Romance, you will learn the proprietary six-step ADORE Process that has helped brands worldwide consistently achieve conversion rates above 20%. The ADORE Process is used by some of the most innovative scale-ups, fast growth exporters and leading brands to consistently sell more, more often. Each step of the ADORE Process aligns with one of the key moments of influence in the digital relationship with your brand. Understanding the forces that drive each moment will allow you to identify signs of relationship breakdown; common causes of issues and how to resolve them; and which metrics to track to measure progress. You will also learn how to apply the process to conduct regular digital relationship audits, removing your reliance on luck in the future success of your brand.

Digital Brand Romance is highly practical and offers tactical, helpful advice to apply in your business immediately.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637422243

Anna Harrison

Dr Anna Harrison is a top ranked Digital Technology Advisor, Product Expert and Author. Anna’s work has helped New Zealand’s best exporting and emerging brands create strategic and measurable plans to accelerate growth in new markets. Supported by successes across Europe, Asia and the USA, Anna’s work will help you remove your reliance on luck in the future success of your brand.

Book preview

PART I

Webonomics, or the Forces That DetermineHow We Buy

In 1996, Schwartz, a technology writer and former editor of Business-Week, coined the term Webonomics: the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, services, and ideas over the World Wide Web (Schwartz 1997). Back then, the Internet was astonishingly inhabited by tens of millions of users around the world, and we used charming phrases like World Wide Web when talking about the new revolution slowly emerging around us. From his prescient vantage point at the beginning of the Internet, Schwartz foretold nine principles that would be critical to business success in the new economic arena. Of the tenets he defined, his recognition that the resource of scarcity in the new economy would be the ability to command and sustain that attention was the most prophetic. That he never imagined more than tens of millions of users ever engaging in this economy makes his observation that much more visionary.

Fast forward to today: 4.66 billion active daily users; 100 percent penetration in the under 29-year-old category; even your grandmother has 4.6 social media accounts. The attention economy has its own Wikipedia page, and tens of millions of people have watched TED talks on this topic alone. The battle that is being fought every minute of every day in this digital arena is the desire to be seen and loved by the millions of eyeballs walking past each website on Internet Street (Lecinski 2011). And the consumers are winning the fight.

Consumers are in the driver’s seat, deciding at scale what the destiny of each brand will be. They are in the process of turning business to consumer (B2C) commerce into consumer to business (C2B). We simply have not noticed the full extent of it yet. Consumers have access to all the information inside their phones. They have adapted and become more sophisticated, easily thwarting sellers’ efforts with tabs closed and forgotten at impressive speeds. In the United States, the average citizen is exposed to upwards of 4,000 brands each day. Think about that—4,000 sellers vying for you to choose them from the moment you open your eyes.

Consumers have become experts at ignoring long-standing methods of being sold to. In 2020, 47 percent of consumers were using adblockers, costing U.S. businesses $12.12 billion in lost revenue. In 2021, Apple announced that they would turn off tracking cookies, small data files used to identify site visitors, at the operating system level. The significance of this decision is enormous, as cookies are one of the primary techniques that companies such as Facebook use to follow individuals’ online habits when they click around on the Web. Cookies are the reason you keep seeing ads for black turtlenecks, interior design tips and new jobs on every website you visit.

The data stored in the cookies helps advertisers target specific audiences, an activity they pay a premium for. Turning off cookies by default or giving users greater agency over whether they accept cookies or not, has the potential to wipe out significant advertising revenue for companies like Facebook—and significantly change the strategies that sellers can rely on to become seen.

Conning the customer won’t work. The whole language of branding dissolves in the new media. The logic behind brand differentiation disappears. The new generation of consumers are more sophisticated. Consumers see right through what advertisers are manipulating them into doing. Most people in advertising don’t understand that. Advertisers have been getting away with murder.

—Evan Schwartz, Webonomics (1997)

To succeed in business today, it is not enough to provide an outstanding experience. It is not enough to have a cracking marketing team that shepherds significant quantities of site visitors to your website on the promise of 2.35 percent conversion rates. It is not enough to provide efficient transactional encounters, even if you do know the customer’s name and basic demographics. To succeed today and well into tomorrow, you need to create conditions that will foster lasting relationships with your customers in a digital space. This book will show you exactly how to do that in Part II. In this section, we look at the building blocks of lasting buyer brand relationships—the timeless forces that influence how we buy, how we make decisions, and how we form relationships.

The Future Is Not Random

It’s easy to get confused when thinking about the future. It is a time that has not happened yet, and so, we mistakenly believe, is unpredictable. We forget that the future is a consequence of what is here today, and what is here today is known to us already. In The Imagination Challenge, Alexander Manu posits that we can make a reasonable prediction about tomorrow by examining the knowns of today (Manu 2007). The strategy described in the book, used by Manu to de-risk the future state for Fortune 500 companies like Disney, LEGO, and Motorola, is based on the idea of looking at signals. Some of these signals are fast-moving, such as emerging technologies, while other signals are slow-moving, such as human behaviors. If we understand the mechanics of the slow-moving signals, the ones that impact how we make buying decisions and form relationships, we can not only optimize the digital brand space for today but have confidence that foundational parts will continue to be relevant and effective into the future.

Brand Monogamy, Temporary Fling, or Polyamorous Free for All

Every generation has its own characteristics, shaped by its exposure to world events, trends, technologies, and even diseases. The way we experience life affects our core values, and with that, shapes our attitudes toward how we buy, what elements of the purchase we prioritize, and what or whom we are loyal to (Ordun 2015). Our grandparents were likely loyal to a brand for life: once you chose Tide, you stayed with Tide. You probably have a different set of criteria for choosing washing powder, and ultimately, all the brands you choose to spend your dollars