TMW #004 | Google's take on the customer journey, digital transformation anti-patterns, Microsoft and Tiktok

Throw away your customer journey maps, digital transformation anti-patterns, and Microsoft in talks to acquire Tiktok.

Every Friday I wrap up some of the most interesting news, ideas, and work.

This is called The Martech Weekly, I try to figure out what is happening in the technology and marketing industry and make sense of it.

Here's everything you've missed this week. 👇

👌Top #3

🗺 Throw away your customer journey map. Google is redefining what a customer journey should look like and it's not a linear set of stages that customers rigidly follow. By studying 3,000 participants and their online behaviors over five months Google recommends that no two journeys are alike as customers use multiple media, devices, and research approaches before making purchasing decisions. This, and the advent of many social channels offering eCommerce solutions now means that customers can really enter in any stage of a journey. AZK media have a great perspective suggesting rather that marketers should start thinking in loops when doing customer journey maps, as each phase in customer behavior (awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty) have their own behavioral loops with interlinked scenarios that brands can leverage over time. A customer journey map is really just a way to conceptualize your insights and plan for the future, however many brands create customer journeys that end up on a wall never to be looked at again. Would a shift to "loops" instead of "journeys" help with this problem? Maybe. Link.

🧭 Anti-patterns in digital transformation. McKinsey's Sven Blumberg has released a great piece on areas where brands are letting themselves down when it comes to digital transformation. It's easy to blame the consultants, engineering teams, and delivery professionals when transformation projects miss the mark. However, a lot of transformation work has to do with business alignment and ways of working - the tech is rarely the issue. A great point is that often these projects focus on outputs -  things that the tech is supposed to do rather than outcomes - ways in which the technology will deliver measurable business value. Both are important but they shouldn't be swapped, measures such as the velocity of delivery, defect rate, and quality of code are important output measures yet, these should ladder up into the overarching business objectives that the technology is there to solve in the first place. Lin

💸 Microsoft in talks with Tiktok. Microsoft in the United States and Australia are in talks with TikTok for the acquisition of the popular video-sharing platform. Maybe it's too late with Facebook quickly copying the main value proposition of Tiktok on Instagram this week, yet I think Tiktok has a distinct advantage. Tiktok has had a huge amount of growth and is very easily able to pivot their products so I don't this will be the same story as Snapchat. Interestingly, a Tiktok acquisition would mean that Microsoft will be edging themself further into teen consumer tech space (Xbox, Tiktok, and Minecraft target very different markets of the same teenage segment), which means a lot of data and a cradle-to-the-grave ecosystem (Minecraft - Tiktok - Linkedin - Excel - Death). Could this be Microsoft's first proper foray into consumer social media? Unfortunately, if Linkedin is anything to go by, advertising solutions won't be much of a show stopper. Link.

📈Chart Of The Week

The effectiveness of advertising globally is now in its 12th year of decline. Orland Wood in "Lemon" suggests that currently in the world of advertising there is a "crisis of creativity" where left-brain thinking is dominating a lot of creative output, which is focused more on achieving goals and is literal and factual. This is in contrast to the right side of the brain which is more metaphorical and based in connections and relationships. I see a lot of sameness in the industry when it comes to website design, digital advertising and email marketing, maybe there's an opportunity for brands to start using both sides of the brain and create experiences that are truly novel?

📚 Everything Else

Australia's first proper banking API in now live. Brought to you by Up Bank. It will be interesting to see how developers use this to power real-time data for consumer apps. Link

VWO is now using GPT-3 to scale copy experiments in their platform. This, and 5 more years and you won't even need someone to come up with a hypothesis for a test. Link

An outlook into CRO for the next 5 to 10 years. Link

I really hate zoom trivia, this option is much better. Link

The rise of the "customer journey expert" a new(ish) role in many enterprise brands, which looks to be an amalgam of product manager, CRM and lifecycle marketing manager. Link

Adobe is banning political ads on its trading platforms. It's going to take a decade to figure out how political advertising and media tech should work together. Link

CDPs are not only useful for marketing purposes, but for data security too. Link

The next big data thing - analysing and using your customer's returns data. Link

Soon, everyone and their dog will be able to design and launch an app. Code-free solutions are getting better, fast. Link

Until next week!

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