Connect

Introduction

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 ...