• by Agathe Blanchon-Ehrsam , August 8, 2013

Thirty-one-year-old accountant Mike is “always on.” Mornings start at the gym, where he runs while watching a sports channel and slows down occasionally to tweet about a snippet of sports news. Throughout the day, Mike finds "pockets of time" by multi-tasking. While on a conference call, he daydreams about a vacation and discreetly searches for flights and queries his friends via a Facebook poll on destinations. He uses his online interactions to serve simultaneous needs. In the evening, Mike cooks dinner from a recipe on a cooking app downloaded to his iPad while his wife shows him real estate listings on her phone. Mike is a typical Always-On Consumer, consuming and exchanging information from multiple sources throughout the day. 

Recent research shows that Mike is not alone and that this is not a minor trend. One-third of the U.S. adult population owns and uses three connected devices, accesses the Internet at least three times a day, and goes online from at least three physical locations. These Always-On Consumers are using digital and social technology to go about their daily lives in ways never envisioned before – and with the younger half of the world’s population not yet 30 years old, this behavior will continue to expand as technology becomes more accessible to tech-savvy cohorts.

So what does this mean for marketers? With Always-On Consumers increasingly trusting consumer to consumer conversations and splintering their digital behaviors across many devices, we have found that marketers face a number of challenges when building relationships and managing their brands.

Entry-points into consumer relationships have multiplied. Brands need to be present, reactive, and pitching Mike at the many moments when he’s open to interact and expecting brands to be “on.” With consumers spending every waking hour with some form of Internet access, every touch-point becomes a conversion opportunity – which other marketers are eager to fill if brands are not present and engaged.

Consumers expect each interaction to be relevant to their personal context. Whereas marketers used to manage rigid, one-way communication channels, today’s brands need to use every interaction to better understand their customers’ needs and deepen the brand-consumer relationship with their understanding of individual contexts.

The race for relevancy puts huge pressure on content creation. Participating in conversations and answering questions about their brand is no longer sufficient to engage customers that are bombarded by information. Marketers need to create consistent, multichannel experiences that tell the brand’s story while offering value and timely news to a demanding audience.

With millions of conversations happening every day, marketers have a diminishing amount of influence. Content created and broadcast is rapidly lost in the sea of conversations in the social web. Marketers can no longer singlehandedly control brand perceptions and so need to reinvent themselves from story-tellers to caretakers – steering the conversation wherever possible, building up topics of most relevance, promoting favorable interactions.

The overwhelming amount of data requires structure. In order to address any of these challenges, marketers must gather, structure, and manage the data generated everyday by millions of people around the world. Finding the insight hidden in all this data becomes a daunting task. And, even then, marketers still need to understand and react to the information provided.

Companies are adapting to various degrees by re-training their marketing teams, adopting new social media listening/activation tools and re-vamping their digital/interactive touchpoints. But the entire approach to brand management needs to be re-thought to adjust to today’s constraints. To be successful, brand management needs to evolve so that every activity becomes about embracing the core customers, connecting with them in every possible way in order to simultaneously better understand them and engage with them through content that they will make theirs and share widely. Consumer Reports is a good example of a company that went from pushing a Sears-like catalogue of periodic dishwasher and toaster comparisons to offering a purchase-oriented version of Martha Stewart Home, where valuable information is continuously shared and updated as products are released. In addition, marketing results will need to be measured relentlessly at every stage of the brand management process in order to adapt in real-time and choreograph with spontaneous activities that will support the long-term strategy. 

We are living in a new world that’s digital, hyper-real, and constantly connected. As the Always-On consumer gains ground among the overall population, companies will need to fundamentally evolve their marketing operating model in order stay on top of changing consumer behavior and channel proliferation. Five initiatives to get started:

Getting your team started now will put you on the path to achieving marketing success.