Books

choice is great, we can do much more to make the experience positive and productive. Some pioneers in the seeker-centric movement are deeply connected to the unhappiness that lies just beneath the surface of many internet interactions. StitchFix is a shopping service for people who are tired of how hard it is to shop. Uncommon Goods lets users match personality traits with unique gifts. Flyhomes helps prospective homeowners buy a house. What do these offerings have in common? They treat the customer as a seeker. This focuses them not just on the sale, but on the experience.

Across all these industries, we are seeing the move from customercentric to seeker-centric experiences. I saw the beginnings of this in the early days of founding Bloomreach. We started Bloomreach to enable the billions of people worldwide who were increasingly living their lives digitally to have the kind of magical experiences that get to the heart of what they are looking for. We fashioned our work as the flip side of the Google experience. When Google would give seven million responses to a query, our question was, “What’s the point of returning a ton of blue links if, when a user clicks through, they don’t find exactly what they are seeking?” More than 20 years after the founding of Google, search engines have trained us well. When we type in a query that doesn’t get us what we are looking for, we assume that we typed in the wrong thing and start modifying our queries. Google is culprit No. 1 in inundating us with choice rather than giving us what we seek. Search companies see that clearly and are evolving search from results to answers, the boxes of information where they aim to give seekers what they are looking for without needing to click to a website.

I see Bloomreach brands reimagining their digital experiences away from just serving the customer better to meeting the seekers where they are. They are rethinking with digital at the center by changing the fundamental questions of business. Instead of, “What do you want?” they are asking, “Why are you here?” They are shifting from a customer-centric thinking that pushed them primarily to improve the customer experience. Instead, they are digging for an underlying problem. At Bloomreach, we’ve extended our business to meet the demand for seeker-centric experiences. Search is still at the core of Bloomreach. But we have extended the capabilities of the platform to go beyond what we would have traditionally described as “search” to deeply understand who the user is and give them an experience that’s uniquely suited for them.

Becoming seeker-centric is not a simple transformation. When a business addresses a seeker, it may find what is sought goes far beyond what that business offers. Businesses may find they must look beyond a traditional roster of products and services and ask, “What could we possibly assemble, what could we possibly provide, that gets as close as possible to what the seeker is seeking so they have to do as little work as possible to achieve that goal?” It’s no small consideration.

That said, the advent of seeker centricity has opened a huge opportunity — one that startups and legacy companies alike can exploit. When we talk about who’s at the forefront now, it’s the new companies that have no baggage and no legacy. But in fact, the companies with existing assets are in a stronger position to pull this off. There may, indeed, be a bunch of companies in Silicon Valley building new insurance companies and new banks and even new grocery stores, but who better to pull off new banks, new insurance companies and new grocery stores than existing ones? Existing companies already have the customer, the supply chain and the brand credibility. In order to win, they need to stop asking, “What?” and start asking, “Why?”

This opportunity is not just for the new startups. It’s a chance for every business to reframe its outlook and serve the seeker. It’s a chance to make a painful, slogging, internet experience enjoyable again.

The Creative Brief Blueprint

As the world of marketing communications has become more tactically complex, the strategy behind the work has suffered. Most ads don’t achieve the results the company desires. The problem is, as technology has improved, people have become better at learning just how bad they are. As brands are able to test more efficiently, they are witnessing less effective and even ineffective advertising. As brands have become able to produce spots more effectively, they’re seeing more rounds of development that increase costs. And, as brands continue to recognize the value of clear marketing communications, the client-agency relationship has continued to deteriorate. A vicious cycle is upon us where brands are spending large sums of money to learn that the advertising was ineffective. Rather than fix the problems, they simply repeat; we are in our very own version of “Groundhog Day.”

The Creative Brief Blueprint: Crafting Strategy That Generates More Effective Advertising Kevin McTigue and Derek Rucker BookBaby 150 pages Available 8/18/2021 $19.99

Blend Out

You’re skilled, you’re smart and you know how much you can accomplish, so why aren’t prospects beating down your door? It’s because they don’t know who you are. Snappy Kraken CEO Robert Sofia dives into the marketing history of some of the world’s most successful companies, exploring the steps they took that left an unshakable impression with their target audiences and then applying those steps in such a way that any small business can recreate them. But this isn’t a book for financial advisors who are looking for a quick fix or marketing hack. As with every company that has gone on to lasting success, successful marketing and long-term customer retention takes concerted effort, persistent reinforcement, and an unrelenting desire to be better than you were the day before.

Blend Out: From Ordinary To Irresistible: How Advisors Can Market Like The Greatest Brands In The World

Robert Sofia

ForbesBooks 168 pages Available 8/31/2021 $29.99

Positioning for Advantage

Most of us have an intuitive sense of superior branding. We prefer to purchase brands we find distinctive — that deliver on some important, relevant dimension better than other brands. These brands have typically achieved positional advantage. Yet few professionals have had the formal training that goes beyond marketing theory to bridge the “theory-doing gap” — understanding the specific techniques and strategies that can be used to create brands that attain positional advantage in the marketplace. Kimberly A. Whitler identifies essential marketing strategy techniques and moves through the major stages of positioning a brand to achieve in-market advantage.

Positioning for Advantage: Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value Kimberly A. Whitler 264 pages Columbia Business School Publishing Available 9/7/2021 $29.95