At DigiCon 2018, it was all about the EXPERIENCE, ECONOMY, and FEELINGS!

Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I would have expected discussions such as emotions and feelings in the usual online summits I attend for yoga and wellness but here I was, sitting in DigiCon 2018, one of the largest conferences of the year, listening to speaker after speaker talk about feelings and emotions, to attendees who were largely professionals in the tech, advertising, and consumer industries.

Last year, I also covered DigiCon 2017 (which focused on building a culture of transformation). At that time, some speakers were already starting to talk about the “consumer experience” but this year, the Experience Economy has gone mainstream — stepping away from competition strategies based on products and services and zooming in on giving consumers the most memorable experience.

The Experience Economy was highlighted so aptly by the conference keynote speaker on the first day, Bozoma St. John, a marketing guru and one of the most prominent women in tech (YES! A woman!). While currently the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Endeavor, an entertainment conglomerate, she had held top-level marketing positions with the likes of Uber, Apple, Beats, and PepsiCo. In all these companies, here’s what she learned: “We are in the feelings business, not the data business.” Yes, feelings! Emotions! This is what drives people to buy!

Isn’t that so true? I thought about the many times I bought stuff on impulse. Most of the time, something just jumped out at me to catch my attention, get me to drool over the item, WANT to buy it, and I DO. And even when my purchase is a planned one, I may research its pros and cons and features but in the end, I would buy what both my mind (and heart!) tell me to get. Think about that for a minute. Would you buy anything that does not tug at you and make you feel like it is worth putting your money down on?

Over the three days of the conference, I attended several talks and all of them were talking about focusing on making the consumer experience a memorable one. Here are some of the main points I picked up on:

Storytelling creates emotions; emotions influence the consumer – Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories. Why are they so popular? It’s because they are able to evoke emotions. Brands are now jumping on the storytelling wagon because they see its impact on consumer buying habits. Just look at the top fast food chains who created ‘hugot’ (heart-tugging) ads. While storytelling in advertising began with them, it can now be seen in almost all industry sectors, including the financial industry.

Consider the internet connection experience – When designing apps, one must consider that Filipinos live in different regions with different internet experiences. Always consider latency by designing offline, loading, retry and success experiences. In other words, when a consumer experiences internet problems while using the app, there are other options (e.g., “your post will be uploaded once you have a good internet connection”). Other options like saving information offline and uploading them once online reduces frustration on the part of the consumer.

Frictionless experience – One speaker said “Consumer’s needs haven’t changed; their expectations have”. These expectations could be things like how long it takes your website to load, convenient locations, ease of ordering and paying, service levels, and so on. Consumers are looking for is what is called a “frictionless experience”. They want you to be there when and where they need you to be, to be relevant to their needs, and to be seamless from the time they hop onto your store to the time they purchase.

Consumers are well-researched before making their choices – A study showed that  77% of consumers research before making a purchase; 62% of offline buyers research online while in the store (that’s ME!). That meant it was important to make the purchasing experience

Brand loyalty is getting harder to capture; innovate before it’s too late – Brands are beginning to realize now that consumers are fickle. They have very little brand loyalty and will easily move to a competitor if they find the competitor’s product more to their liking. Samuel Burke of CNN mentioned two brands that suffered. One was Yahoo which lost its hold as one of the largest media conglomerates when it failed to innovate and had to sell out to Oath, a digital and mobile media company that was part of the Verizon group. Another brand was Blackberry which refused to recognize a keyboard-less phone and hung on to the notion that consumers would always love mobile phones with a physical keyboard.

Mobile is key – All stats shown during DigiCon confirmed that most consumers now do almost everything from their mobile phone – food ordering, bills payment, bank transactions, online purchases, movie ticket purchases, calling for transport service, flight and accommodation arrangements, watching movies, and much more. Attention spans are getting shorter too as internet connectivity improves. Successful brands will be those that are able to hold consumer attention and attend to their customers’ needs in the shortest time possible.

As a consumer of many products, listening to DigiCon assured me of better experiences down the road as brands compete to make my experience with their brand better and more memorable.