Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth We Need More Digital Warmth About this episode Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, Inc., Brian Solis, delves into the importance of infusing digital warmth into business strategies. By focusing on creating genuine connections in the digital realm, companies can enhance customer experiences and foster stronger relationships. Explore how incorporating digital warmth can revolutionize enterprise operations and elevate brand differentiation. Show NotesConnect With: Brian Solis: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss the future for marketers. Joining us is Brian Solis, who is the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, which develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows and enterprise operations. But Brian is also a futurist, a keynote speaker, and the author of Mind Shift: Transforming Leadership, Driving Innovation, and Reshaping the Future. He's a top voice on LinkedIn, and we're very excited to have him here on the Martech Podcast. And today, Brian and I are going to discuss what marketing leaders are missing. So I want to go into our next segment, which I call Crystal Ball.
1:59 Speaker 04 So let's have you look into your crystal ball and tell me, what is the impact that the combination of COVID and artificial intelligence? Seems like the world has changed in the last few years. The impact COVID and artificial intelligence have had on marketers that we haven't seen yet?
2:17 Speaker 05 So there's three levels of like this philosophical approach. And I have to share it with you, even though it might seem abstract because I want people to understand that the mindset that they're bringing, this is why I wrote the book. The mindset that most people are bringing to this moment right now is the experiences that they've had, the failures, the successes that they've had, the measures that they're confined by, the rules of engagement that they operate within. And that is, and this is a Donald Rumsfeld thing, what we know, we know, what we know, we don't know. And this becomes the guardrails or a comfort zone or source of decisioning that helps us look at what is happening today. And what ends up happening when you operate with these guardrails is your own subconscious cognitive biases prevent you from actually seeing what's changing.
3:02 Speaker 05 So for example, what I found in my research is that consumers changing in its deepest ways down to values, what people value, what people are looking for in brands, how people are spending their time and who they want to spend their time with. These things are absolutely ground shaking if you look at it with an open mind. If you look at it with, say, sunken cost bias, like we've already gotten this far, or if you see it as, no, this can't be true. This has got to be a limited time thing. It's not as big as our research is showing, then you're going to miss these other bigger opportunities. But when you start to see them play out, especially now, since we're several years past the onset of COVID-19, that is, we're seeing people delay the idea of marriage or delay whether or not people want to have kids, if at all.
3:47 Speaker 05 We're seeing home buying change. We're seeing significant purchases change. We're seeing long-term planning be pulled in. We're seeing the considerations for university and aspirations change. And so depending on what market you're in, these are all going to have varying impacts for you. But the crystal ball essentially says you have to be able to look through it with an open mind to appreciate it and see then what you don't know, you don't know. That's where the future lies.
4:15 Speaker 04 I mean, what you don't know, you don't know is the most futurist thing I've ever heard, which I'm glad that you're the one to say it. It feels credible. It also is one of those things where I'm like, of course, you don't know what you don't know. What I think we know, and really this is the center of the question is like, what's going to change that we haven't seen is consumer behaviors have changed. And in lots of ways, they're never going back. We assume that there was this departure from the office because we all had to build work from home stations. And eventually we would all just settle back in the office. And now it's like, I don't care how hard Amazon pushes. Everybody's not going back. They'll leave, they'll go find another job. Like people are more comfortable and the center of their universe is not as distributed.
4:58 Speaker 04 Right? Home is now home base for personal time, for work time. It's entertainment. The idea of the place that we live, being the place that we spend the most time, to me is the biggest change that has happened. And now there's more technology that allows you to sort of automate everything you're doing, the artificial intelligence component. And I think that that trend is going to stick around, that we are never going back. And it's not just that people aren't ever going back to the office, but the role that home plays to me is the biggest impact on consumers. And therefore something that marketers need to think about. Am I guessing here or is that something we know or something we know we know, or something that we don't know that we don't know?
5:43 Speaker 05 Well, yes, in every facet of that. My boss, he's our chief innovation officer. He'll always say like, once you start to unlock what you didn't know to know, the question is about not just the what, but how? How are you going to do something about this? And how you make it actionable? So for example, once you start to learn new things, you have to be able to be curious enough to explore potential solutions toward that. You have to be willing to experiment towards that and understand that these big campaigns that you do that start and stop and then get measured and then you move on to the next. You still have to do that. But what you're doing here is actually investing in not just the future,
6:27 Speaker 05 but longer term relevance. And that's the part that allows you to compete for the future while you're also competing for today. So marketers who are Already under-resourced and maybe even underappreciated in many regards, have an opportunity to be the growth engine for the organization by uncovering what hasn't been seen before and making end roads to that. That's the only way the future comes to life. Because if you are not doing those things, then the future happens to you. And once it happens to you, you have to react. And that's why there is so much disruption. So I'll give you an example, just from a business standpoint.
7:06 Speaker 05 Everybody talks about Kodak and taught in business school about what happens when you don't compete for relevance. You just earn irrelevance. Another one that business schools talk about is the Blockbuster Netflix engagement. But I was actually talking to Mark Randolph just this week, who's the co-founder of Netflix. And one of the things that he talks about is how in 2000, him and his co-founder Reed Hastings took the company to Blockbuster to offer it for $50 million. And the way Mark tells the story is that they got laughed out of the room. And I asked Mark, I said, hey, let's just say history changed and they gave you 50 million bucks and you became part of Blockbuster. Would Netflix still be around today? And he said, I don't know. And I said, I'll tell you, I said, the answer, I think the answer is no.
7:51 Speaker 05 And the reason why it's no is because they're taking what was next and putting it into a box that's driven by yesterday. And that is where the leadership, where that mind shift, we're seeing what we don't know to know, exploring that area is what brings clarity in the unknown, what brings meaning to uncertainty. Because that's where we would start to experiment to keep earning relevance. And the consumer mind, once that mind changes, once that behavior changes, those two things add up to new norms. And once they become norms, you're talking about full-on market shifts. And yes, AI is pushing that and accelerating that.
8:28 Speaker 04 To me, the idea that we can understand the future is mind blowing. And I always think that you have to understand and look back to understand the future. And one of the things that I think matters the most is thinking about your consumers and what their experience has been. And if you can understand what the lifestyle change is for your consumers, you have a better chance at guessing what's going to happen. Now, we always have to be testing and validating and iterating to make sure that we're staying on trend and staying on market. But we do have to keep an eye on the past to understand the future. I want to move on to our next segment, which we're talking about this concept of needing more digital warmth.
9:10 Speaker 04 So Brian, as we talk about needing more digital warmth, I want you to explain it to me. Let's do a little gimmick here. I want you to explain to me what you mean by digital warmth, as if I was, let's do this, somebody that is near and dear to both of our hearts. There's a book behind me right here we both read. It was very impactful in my life. It was by Rick Rubin. Explain what digital warmth is to me, as if you were explaining it to Rick Rubin.
9:33 Speaker 05 Rick would get it right away. Digital warmth, picture the vinyl versus digital music analogy. Every vinyl purist will say that an album vinyl is warmer, it's richer. And if you look at the sound waves, it actually is. So the idea of digital warmth is that, I'm going to introduce a term here. It's called the ignite moment, and I'll explain it really quick. For years, I worked with Google around what we had called micro moments. And a micro moment is when you go to make a decision, what's the device that you always go to first? And it's this.
10:03 Speaker 04 I would have said I asked my wife, but yeah, the phone's good too.
10:06 Speaker 05 Well, that's a smarter path to get the decision in your favor for sure. But the idea of the ignite moment is just simply saying, look, we know you're going to use a digital device, whether it's a phone, whether it's a laptop, whether it's chat GPT. And what happens next is this ignite moment. So what does someone find? What does someone clicked on? What does someone do? And if you think about it, since the days of e-commerce, the days of web one dot O, we've just essentially created websites and transactional sites. And for the most part, they are Just not rich. They're very static. They're very stale. They're very impersonal. In many cases, they're very frustrating because user experience is not appreciated as an art and science.
10:50 Speaker 05 But it is probably the most important thing. So now this concept of digital warmth is, look, we know attention is fleeting. We know how difficult it is. So when I get your attention, what do I do with it? And it is about creating a next step and a next step that is warmer, that is richer, that is device intuitive, that it is attention intuitive. And it gives you a page or it gives you a video or it gives you some text that isn't for everyone. It's for you. And this digital warmth is about making a customer experience that matters. There are two moments a customer will remember in any given experience. It's moments that absolutely suck or moments that are absolutely wonderful. And anything in between is forgettable.
11:36 Speaker 05 So the laws of the love language of digital warmth is bending the golden rule, which is you can't treat people how you want to be treated. That's an assumption that marketers have always made. It is treating people the way that they want to be treated. So an example of that is what's your landing page? Or what's the page that we're sending someone to? Or what's the message that we're sending someone to? If you think that your consumer, for example, is a massive TikTok user, you can make certain assumptions that they're not going to read a bunch of texts or they're not going to watch a long video or they're not going to be content with a bunch of clicks because their brain moves so much faster than everybody else's.
12:17 Speaker 05 This is why, for example, you see massive shifts into podcast consumptions at 1.25 or 1.5 or 1.75X or video consumption at the same speeds. So digital warmth is about giving someone in that ignite moment when you have their attention, an experience that's going to matter for them. And the good news is technology, like we talked about at the beginning of this Benjamin, is that it'll allow you to create more dynamic experiences for the type of consumers that you're engaging that matter to them.
12:45 Speaker 04 It seems like personalization is right in line with digital warmth. And this idea that you have to deliver customers' communication in the format that they want makes a warmer, richer experience. So help me think about this. Let's do a little game here. Swipe right or swipe left? Should marketers embrace ephemeral content or lasting content? How do we build those experiences that are warm using our digital technologies? Quick flash in the pan and constant or something that has a lasting, important effect?
13:18 Speaker 05 I'd love to say something that's lasting and has an important effect, but sometimes you might need that ephemeral bit just to get someone enticed or interested in. So this is why the ignite moment has to be the answer to the question of when you have someone's attention, what do you want to do with it? And how do you want someone to remember it?
13:35 Speaker 04 I think the idea of ephemeral content, it sounds like the answer should be build something that's lasting, right? And let's talk through this a little bit. I'm thinking about a marketing campaign. Do I want constant streams of TikToks and LinkedIn's and YouTube's and just barraging people with interesting little bits of content? Micro yeses, micro wins? Or do I want something that's going to have a deep, meaningful impact and always remind them who I am and what I am? In theory, it'd be great to be able to do one campaign, the Apple moment, think different. That'd be wonderful. How many think different campaigns are there? How many good LinkedIn posts are there, right? And it's a question of, do you want to stack up little wins, which is easier?
14:19 Speaker 04 Or do you want to swing for the fences? So walk me through that idea of like making the decision with digital warmth. Do you want to make somebody a little warmer and a little warmer and a little warmer and a little warmer until they're hot? Or do you want to try to take them from the cold into a warm house?
14:35 Speaker 05 The question you're asking is like the very fabric of marketing. What is the role of marketing? I like to think about it as customer experience. The customer experience is what you're trying to influence and what it is you're trying to shape and nurture. So if you think about the playbook for marketing, it's like, I'm a big fan of storytelling. And if you You look at the traditional story arc, it builds and then it reaches its crescendo and then you have the end. And marketing flips that. It goes at the crescendo like, hey, look at me. And then we're done with the campaign. Off to the next one. Marketing should always be on. So the micro engagements, the influence, the content,
15:19 Speaker 05 the role that you want to play in your customers' community. I think these are things that have to be on and lasting and not just brand produced, but community based, community produced. And then also your big, meaningful think different moments. Then now have something more spectacular, a bigger open mind and heart to land on. That's what I believe. But marketing is also beyond just a campaign. Marketing can also influence customer service. Marketing can also influence spatial design. If you're, for example, in retail or if you're in healthcare. So marketing actually becomes all of these things so that you're constantly shaping and nurturing the customer's experience.
15:59 Speaker 04 The takeaway here for me, marketing should always be on and do always be on. You need a steady stream and you're constantly not just pushing out content, but building different ways to engage and get data and signals from your audience. It's a community building strategy. It's a content strategy. It's customer feedback. It's iteration. It's product changes. All of the different things that marketers have their hands on, and there's a lot these days. We need to take all of that data and constantly be building learnings and relationships to improve our products and services. And then, once you have that steady stream of knowledge, you can use that to understand the big way to start the fire.
16:44 Speaker 04 Right? The way to build your bonfire, your think different moment, your ignite moment, those don't just come out of thin air. They come from constant conversation with your customers, iteration, feedback, constant research, and an understanding, a deep, true understanding of what your market is. So you can figure out how to communicate with them effectively. Brian, I know you have a hard stop. So I just want to, before I let you go, say thank you for coming on to be my guest. It's been wonderful having a conversation with you. I hope this isn't the last time. That wraps up this episode of the MarTech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Brian Solis. He is the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. If you'd like to get in touch with Brian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn
17:29 Speaker 04 profile in our show notes. You can visit his company's website, servicenow.com. He's got a personal website, brian solis.com, B R I A N S O L I S dot com. That's where you can find a link to his book, Mind Shift. Just one more link I want to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head to martechpod.com. We've got summaries of our episodes. You can apply to be a guest speaker on the MarTech Podcast if you're interested. That's where we have the link to our weekly newsletter. You can also reach out to us on social media, martechpod, M A R T E C H P O D, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. My handle's Ben J. Shap, B E N J S H A P. And if you haven't subscribed yet, and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed,
18:13 Speaker 04 we publish episodes every day during the year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to focus on keeping your customers happy.
18:51 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the MarTech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand, then visit ihereverything.com.
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