Forget B2B & B2C: Embrace B2I

Before the winter holidays get into full swing, do yourself a favor and catch up on what everyone was talking about at CMSWire’s DX Summit. If you didn’t attend, you missed a good time and more importantly, some good insight.

Learning how digital experience is evolving and how these technologies can support so many components of a company's lifecycle was eye-opening (note to self — invite more people for next year’s Summit).

Holistic CX

If you were one of the people who saw Seth Earley's presentation on aligning marketing technology with the customer journey, you learned that information needs to come together to create a 360-degree view of the customer experience.

This totally makes sense. Information and technology need to be melded to reach the desired customer.

But when we say “customer” these days, are we talking one customer? A few key customers? A large swath of them? Does it matter how large or small a customer base we have?

I bring this up after listening to the other speakers and how they view the relationship between technology and information.

Seemingly everyone and their mother is talking about reaching the masses as a means of communicating their experiences. In the same breath, we talk about the world of experience being aimed at getting to know as many people as possible as if they were the only customer of your business.

So should we talk about masses or should we thinking individuals? As marketers, technologists and business owners, do we really know who are most important customers are? Better yet, can you identify your most important customer?

We’re one, but we’re not the same.

Ready for a Challenge?

I want to issue a challenge to the marketing gods (and if there is a good IP attorney reading this, reach out to me if you think I am on to something).

I want to introduce a new concept: B2I.

Barry Libert, an old friend and client of mine, wrote a great book called We Are Smarter Than Me. With all due respect, Barry, I would challenge that I is just as powerful in this day and age, if not more so. Why I?

As a person, shopper and consumer, I stand for something
If one looks at who a person, shopper and consumer are in the context of a purchase, I am an influencer (another good “I” word)
I am going to have an experience with a product or service in a physical and digital environment that will turn into some sort of desired action — I am measurable
Most importantly, I yield influence

(So glad I am coming up with all of these I words for my next Words with Friends game).

We all know B2B and B2C.

I could not find the origins of these terms, but they most certainly reflect what marketers knew back in the day when we were in an Industrial Revolution.

We had a general idea about what segmentation and classification was, and we had to think about how we were selling stuff — was it going to businesses to use or was it going to people and families to consume?

But here we are in this day and age where information and technology are colliding in real-time, and we are thinking of our marketing functions in a seemingly archaic fashion.

When we look at what DX and UX are truly about, we really need to think about the power of “I” as a means of contextualizing our end results.

We don’t need to segment by a broad class of people we don’t know. Ultimately, we need to segment by who is ultimately is in control of the purchasing decision.

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