People don’t buy the products you create, they buy the stories you tell

“If you want to fail, just assume your consumers are interested in you,” Richa Goswami, head of digital at Johnson & Johnson APAC, said at a recent Customer Experience conference. Hence, creative is still key in bringing across the right brand messages to connect with consumers and get them interested.“People don't buy the products you create, they buy the stories you tell. And the stories that you tell come alive in the way you do the creative,” Goswami said. Hence, creative in today’s context needs to be “fit for purpose, and fit for platform”.Looking at the traditional shopper journey, such as how consumers respond prior to the shopping experience, during the shopping and post the experience, is no longer enough. This is especially because consumers do not think about their life and brand interactions in this linear fashion."They speak very differently from the way brands think of selling to them," Goswami added. As such, looking at the objective of a piece of creative work is important.“Consumers are thinking about a micro-moment," she said. They usually are in phases such as: ‘I want to learn’, ‘I can't be bothered’, ‘I need to find this’ and ‘I want to know more’.While it is easy to fall into the trap that everyone cares as deeply as marketers do, about their brands, that is not always the case, Goswami said. As such, marketers need to ensure their teams try and build an experience which matters to their consumers, and not simply outsource it. This can be done by putting themselves in their consumer’s shoes and think about how their consumer would want to be treated. Brands then need to think about how to create these experiences for them.“No longer as a brand can you have an experience which lives in just one silo. You have to think about the consumer journey as customers go across different touch points with the brand,” she said.Changing mediums and pressure on agenciesComparing it to brands in the past, Goswami explained that if a brand had great products, gave good pricing and its products were available in every store - it would be enough. But that no longer works in today's economy.“The consumer would believe whatever you said because all they could see, was your brand on TV. In the past, there was no way for them to read a review. There was no way for them to tell you how bad you are. It was a very uni-dimensional consumer journey that consumers had,” Goswami explained.As marketers start to zoom in on what the consumer behaviors and patterns are, they should turn insight into creative assets.“This is important because most of the agencies can come up with a huge laundry list of assets such as Facebook, Google, to name a few. But we marketers have limited budgets," she said. She added that despite the long list of must-haves created by the agencies, consumers are not likely to connect across all of these platforms.Marketers, as such, need to respond and decide which customer moments truly matter and push their agencies to tell them why some particular assets may be more suitable than others.Start having those conversations with your agencies. So you can get your media agency to start giving you ROIs behind the creative assets used.Read also: How to play to your competitors shortcomings