Articles

How can direct mail be used to enable digital first brands to build, engage, and convert customers at a more personal level than ever before?

What does it mean to be a consumer goods brand today? Formerly reliant on brick-and-mortar stores before 2020, the industry pivoted heavily to online channels during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, it's navigating a middle ground in flux. John Stauffer, managing director of strategic planning at Merkle, looks at how brands can avoid being mere commodities in this environment.

Ad industry take heed: The market is sending disruptive intent signals for creative agencies.

Today’s internet (Web 2.0) eliminated the physical characteristics of multidimensional communications, information, and transactions. This gave way to social media, ecommerce, and knowledge platforms, allowing us to enjoy peer-to-peer interactions on a global scale, all achieved by proprietary third-party networks.

Today it’s not enough to simply have a great product or mission, great organizations must be intentional in creating a positive customer experience. Customer experience is how customers perceive their interactions with your organization, which greatly influences their loyalty and likelihood to recommend or evangelize the organization.

Any retail media network (RMN) looking to scale must establish capabilities in sales, audience strategy, media activation, and reporting and insights. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for doing that, leaving many RMN teams wondering when to build their own tools or tech, when to buy pre-existing capabilities, and when to work with a partner.

Understanding which type of customer experience (CX) resonates most effectively with B2B customers is important, but it’s only part of the equation. Once a business knows what type of experience it wants to deliver, it must address the practicality of how to bring that experience to life. Based on Merkle’s research, here’s where B2B organizations can start.

The most successful marketers stand out in their ability to continuously innovate the way they think, work, and approach challenges. But it’s not that simple. If it were, everyone would be doing it. So, how do you become one of those innovators that stand out?