“The customer is not a moron, she is your wife.” This less famous quote by David Ogilvy is about 70 years old, but has lost none of its relevance.

In fact, it is directly in line with Apple’s Tim Cook’s appeal at CPCD on January 29. Coverage of it has been very one-sided, focusing on Cook’s alleged criticism of Facebook. However, Cook gave a tour d’horizon of using technology for good, and the resulting corporate responsibility and positioning of Apple.

David Ogilvy couldn’t have known any of this 70 years ago, but he urged even then to take consumers seriously, to respect them as people who are intelligent enough to see through over-the-top advertising and who had better not be bored to death. “You cannot bore people into buying” in 2021 also means that you don’t buy the data of umpteen marketers together, in order to then track a consumer via targeting across the most diverse applications. In the 20s of this century, as in the 50s of the past, you need content: advertising that fascinates, that interests, that can generate resonance on its own.

But we no longer live in the time of Ogilvy or Bernbach. We live in the time of technology and data. If Ogilvy understood creativity as a measure of courtesy to consumers, modern marketers must face the challenge of how the demand for this courtesy plays out in their own strategy on data and technology. Or within Tim Cook’s logic, how to live up to one’s social responsibility as an advertising company—and thus as a service provider in this field. 

Not everything should go through the cycle of it emerging, being misused and consequently banned before we look at it critically and allow it to be possible with the right effect. The events surrounding elections in once democratic fortresses, or the division of societies through the spread of fake news should concern everyone who uses these media or uses them commercially for themselves. This is not solved with a one-time boycott as an advertising partner of Facebook, as effective as the #StopHateForProfit initiative was. 

But even then, criticism was mixed in with the applause, and questions were raised about financial or moral motives, about one-time restrictions or permanent consequences.

There was little discussion, however, about whether it was enough to point the finger at the social media giants or whether the company should reassess its own handling of customer data. In Germany in particular, the discussion about customer data usually only takes place in connection with legal initiatives, i.e. the DSVGO. What is allowed and what is not seems to be more important than what is right and what is not. The sudden abandonment of cookies is understood as an obstacle in the same way as the advent of adblockers five years ago.

However, in 2020, the year of COVID, two other major developments are significant that put the issue in a different light. One is the debate around purpose for brands. More and more marketing decision-makers believe their brand needs to communicate what role it wants to play in society, what it should stand for. One can argue whether candy bars need a socially relevant role or whether such a question should be decided in marketing and addressed in communication. But one can hardly argue whether brands that claim such a strategy for themselves also need to provide answers about their responsibility in handling and using data. This topic is causally located in marketing and is a direct question of communication. 

The second major issue in 2020/21 is that of direct customer access. D2C (direct to consumer) was one of the big winners at a time when many brands felt that the absence of a strategy in ecommerce; the dependence on a few platforms can make business very cumbersome, to put it nicely. The investment of a billion on the part of Dr. Oetker was not about a few leased delivery trucks, but about owning the last mile, bringing access to customers and the use of data for assortment and sales planning.

And while this deal was one of the big headlines in Germany during COVID, it’s important to note that most marketers have a purpose strategy in place rather than a data strategy. The Marketing Tech Monitor 2020 suggests that this strategy isn’t even in the drawer—no, it’s mostly not even in the planning stages.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to engage with customers because their media behavior has changed so massively. And even if many still carelessly release all cookies with every single website visit, marketing that continues to rely solely on the data policy of third parties will be too expensive in the long run. An idea about direct access to customers, about a first-party data strategy and on which technology this should be mapped, is becoming more and more essential. Technology for the benefit of people, as Tim Cook put it. And how do companies position themselves in this regard, what is their responsibility, who wants to be “a good corporate citizen in a tech world?” Marketing has to answer these questions, because the customer becomes pickier, but never becomes stupid. As David Ogilvy described it 70 years ago.

This article was originally published in German at Horizont. You can find follow-up coverage from Horizont here.

In the past couple of years, there’s been a big push for brands to become more purposeful. What may have seemed like a buzzworthy trend has evolved into a consumer expectation that shouldn’t be taken for granted; 57% of consumers will buy or boycott a brand based on its stance on a social issue. While about 76% of brands think their organizations have a defined purpose, only one in 10 have a purpose statement that they’ve put into action, according to ANA.

While brands have embraced a sense of purpose, many miss the opportunity to fully integrate that promise throughout engagements with the consumer. Many digital-born challengers are cropping up, designed with a desire to enact some change. The idea for Dollar Shave Club, for example, came out of the founders’ frustration at the cost of razor blades.

“The purpose inherent in these brands is not just authentic; it is deeply personal,” writes VP, Principal Analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee in his Forrester report “How Direct Brands Are Transforming the Customer/Brand Relationship.” Facing increased pressure to differentiate on purpose, it’s crucial that organizations seek to successfully deliver their brand promise across the full customer experience.

Keep Your Brand Promise and Deliver

Conveying your brand promise effectively can be key to brand differentiation. In fact, your sense of purpose can extend to all branded experiences across customer journeys and the digital ecosystem. Consider the different channels your brand supports and how brand purpose can unify those experiences together. “Never approach a piece of content as a singular object,” says Jouke Vuurmans, Global Executive Creative Director at MediaMonks. Instead, each interaction should work in tandem with one another to achieve the brand promise.

With this in mind, it pays to recognize the different types of moments along the consumer journey at your disposal. At its broadest, there are the moments in which a consumer engages with a channel to fulfill some need or goal. For example, consider the end of the year when a customer might reflect back on the financial decisions they’ve made—like assessing how well their healthcare provider has served them.

This is an excellent moment for a brand to reinforce its promise to consumers. Oscar, the digital-native health insurance company, used its year in review as an opportunity to represent its unique and disruptive approach to healthcare, an industry that doesn’t always have the strongest reputation for consumer friendliness.

Oscar’s year-end review microsite—built in collaboration with MediaMonks—demonstrates key, tangible benefits it provides to its customers delivered in plain language, bright colors and whimsical animations. The overall visual style and human-centered copy were born from a desire to make a review different than the ones that other healthcare providers offer. This is where the brand promise shines through: Oscar strives to eliminate the stress and confusion that many patients feel in getting coverage or finding a medial practitioner near them by handling healthcare differently than everyone else. While the review was designed with customer retention in mind, it drove new signups as well.

Give Oscar’s Year in Review a thorough examination.

A key component to Oscar’s year in review is its series of interactive animations. Designed to be mobile-friendly, these interactions prompt readers to engage directly with what they see on the screen. Every moment is made up of micro-interactions, which are the little design elements that, together, enable a consumer to fulfill their goal or bring delight.  Micro-moments remind us that no engagement is too small or insignificant for the brand promise to manifest itself before the user; in fact, these elements when brought together define the brand’s identity and value.

Tell Your Story Through Experiences

When each interaction presents an opportunity to fulfill brand purpose, it becomes crucial that you recognize users’ goals within key moments and micro-moments, and consider how your brand meets those goals through its brand promise, much like the elements making up the Oscar year-end review as described above. Doing so shifts your focus away from UX-driven content, and instead toward content-driven UX.

This shift in thinking is important because content is crucial to defining a brand’s or product’s identity and value, particularly when it conveys the brand’s sense of purpose. Olga Osminkina-Jones, VP GM Premium Food & Beverages at PepsiCo, remarks in ANA’s Discovering Brand Purpose playbook: “I realize that people are not looking for another water brand. They are not sitting and waiting for us to launch another innovation. What they are looking for is meaning.”

There’s a fine line that brands walk between promoting themselves versus their industries—and when they do the latter, they risk advertising for their competition. Don’t center content around just the challenges faced on the consumer, but on your purpose for existing.

Blue Canyon Technologies, for example, is certainly an intriguing brand with its portfolio of spacecraft and space equipment. While you would expect its website to be dry, corporate and technical, it’s anything but. With spacecraft, planets and moons beautifully rendered by the Monks and integrated with WebGL, browsing the website takes users on a mesmerizing journey through the galaxy, examining spacecraft in their natural habitat from several angles. The experience emphasizes the vastness of the universe—an essential theme for the brand story and the resilience and versatility of Blue Canyon Technologies’ fleet of spacecraft, equipment and components.

Both of the website examples above demonstrate how visual and interactive elements can come together to fulfill your brand promise. Doing this successfully enables consumers to connect with the brand more easily through a shared sense of purpose and achieves a sense of emotional resonance that’s often missing from brands that struggle to differentiate.