Marketing in all organizations is at a crossroads. There is a big revolution happening right now in consumer and business buying behavior. Gone are the days when your marketing is seen as a trusted source. No longer can you dictate customer behavior or the customer buying process. Face it—customers are in control. As a marketer, you need to understand and adapt to these rapidly changing behaviors, if there is any hope to regain credibility and become meaningful again to today's connected customer. Let me tell you how this revolution impacted me personally and how my cell phone provider lost a lifetime customer.

My second daughter was born at 12:07 a.m. Luckily the birth went well, but, being in love with technology, I was also watching the clock as the new iPhone was released at 12:01 a.m. My daughter quickly fell asleep and I found a moment to use my smartphone to browse the web store of one of the biggest cell phone carriers. I spent the next 25 minutes ordering the new iPhone. It should have been an easy task, using a smartphone to shop for a smartphone. But the experience wasn't optimized for my smartphone, even though it was a smartphone that I was shopping for. In an age when Cyber Monday nets 17 percent of all online purchases on mobile devices,¹ this was inexcusable. But I was determined—I needed the newest member of the iPhone family, and I was willing to go through the extra-painful experience of zooming and shrinking to get the task done.

Finally, I got my iPhone, and about a month later I received a newsletter from the carrier, promoting “Lars, buy the new iPhone.” Surprised at how irrelevant this was to me because I had already bought the iPhone through the same vendor, I replied and asked if this was a mistake.

There was no mistake about the attitude I got back in the reply: “No, this is not a mistake; this is a mail we send to all our customers.”

Here's the problem with getting a reply like this and why this newsletter upset me in the first place: the vendor is demonstrating that they doesn't know me and certainly doesn't value me as a customer. This isn't how we want to be treated as people. The last thing I want is to be treated like just another number in a customer database being marketed to by the vendor. I don't want to be marketed to if it's not something I feel is relevant to my needs.

Organizations that are doing this have not only failed to adapt, but they are in danger of losing the last shred of credibility through their marketing. Rather than connecting with customers, they are disconnecting from their customers at a blistering pace.

As a professional, I'm a busy guy, so as a consumer I need and expect the brands I deal with to be able to offer me increasingly relevant information and offers. What I want is the same experience I get when I visit the local department store, where the clerk remembers me, asks about my experiences with my last purchase, and comes back with relevant recommendations based on our dialogue. That makes me feel a connection to the store, almost to the point where I feel guilty if I don't go there to make my purchases. It's that type of relevance that keeps me coming back, because it makes me feel that the store and its personnel value my business by looking out for me and wanting to help me. It makes me as a customer feel connected with them and I happily advise my friends to buy at the same store.

I had no problem switching to a new cell phone carrier, just as I have no problem changing brands for TVs, supermarkets, and the like. There's just no loyalty there. These things are commodities in my mind. But I would not change my insurance provider, who made it personal and connected, and whose people have managed to transcend the customer relationship beyond a commodity transaction by recognizing me when I call. They give me relevant information and they even send me birthday cards with savings on products they know I want and need. Yes, I know most of it is automated and done by using data, but it shows me they know who I am and our relationship has substance.

Stories like this are daily occurrences for all of us. Consumers are taking charge and expect more meaningful experiences from organizations and marketing. Customers expect their experiences to parallel the way they interact with other people, where they aren't assaulted by mindless robotic marketing, but rather engaged in a human way that is centered on everything that makes a customer feel connected to your brand. Experience marketing is helping organizations to better understand their customers and interact with them in that human, friendly way.

Organizations today are at one of the most significant crossroads ever: taking the “business as usual” road will mean the same old generic “one size fits all” content as usual at each customer touch point, delivering largely indifferent customer experiences. The other road, the road to rich customer relevance and humanized marketing, will not be an easy road—there will be many changes needed with new processes and new relationships between organizational units. It's not easy, but the payoff is huge: you win the hearts and minds of customers and build long-term relationships that endure having impact on retaining and creating vocal customers. So it could be hard work, but it will put your organization on the path to connecting with your customers and building relationships for life. Marketing is an important stakeholder in this process, but only one part—other parts that will contribute to the connected experience are sales, service, finance, and so on, all with a big impact on the total experience. In many cases this will start as a marketing revolution that over the longer term will transform marketing into being involved in measuring and improving every business function that touches customers.

This book helps you take the right road to lifetime customers. It gives you a staged approach on how to steer your organization on this path. Whether you are in business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), retail, nonprofit, government, or e-commerce work, this book is relevant for you.

Whether you are an executive or involved in day-to-day operations, this book serves as a guide, with recommendations, initiatives, work-arounds, and step-by-step processes on how you can move your team to a higher level of marketing excellence. The authors of this book have extensive experience, through our daily work in Sitecore's Business Optimization Services team, advising and consulting with many midsize, large, and global corporations. What we share in this book are the best practices we've learned through sheer hard work at countless customers around the world. This is the secret sauce in the recipe for marketing success in this rapidly evolving era of the connected customer.