Brands are being sold the promise of omni-channel marketing. With a top-notch omni-channel platform/provider and minimal effort (self-service!), we are told that we will be able to converse with our target customer (let?s call her “Jane”) as she snaps a picture of our latest product on her phone, researches it online, goes to our website, is retargeted across the web (desktop and mobile), is linked with us on social media, and is ultimately moved down a sales funnel until the purchase is made. The digital promise finally realized! Or is it" While plausible in theory (and on a PowerPoint), in practice it isn?t so simple to accompany Jane on her journey.
A vision yet unrealized
The omni-channel ?vision? in which communications are relevant at every touch point is not yet realized for several reasons. First, customer-relationship-management data is not yet fully unified, and the teams mining the data are still channel focused. Second, while we believe we know Jane, she is really represented as a set of disparate IDs across our different interactions because of the device/channel/etc. where the interaction takes place. Jane is her email address in one context, her mobile number in another context, a hardware ID in another, a cookie value in yet another. This alignment/integration of multiple IDs into a single persona (identity management) is where a lot of today?s rising companies do their work and is the daunting challenge to omni-channel ubiquity.
Lastly, th...