Multiscreen Marketing: The Seven Things You Need to Know to Reach Your Customers across TVs, Computers, Tablets, and Mobile Phones

Chapter 3Know Your Customers’ Decision Journey

Use Screens to Facilitate Decision Making

In the writing world, whether in journalism or other storytelling disciplines, there’s a mantra invoked time and time again: know your audience. And, it’s pretty old news—something we’ve been honing since the very first hunter-gatherer learned to play to his audience over an open fire. And yet since digital came into our lives, it’s a mantra that seems to have disappeared—or at least, it’s been obfuscated with an obsession over the devices people use, rather than the actual living, breathing human beings that use them. It shouldn’t be about what Xbox can do, it’s about what consumers need Xbox to do.

Despite all the current hand-wringing about what will become of our short attention spans now that we’re constantly connected through technology, human DNA hasn’t changed just because pixels have come into our lives. Sure, our expectations for convenience, access to information, and utility have increased, but our essential needs, the same needs our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had before them, still run deep.

Seven in 10 people globally say their digital devices have brought them closer to brands.¹ So the opportunities to use screens to facilitate customer relationships are immense. But in order for businesses to use devices in ways that are both more functionally useful and emotionally resonant with consumers, we need to tap into two things: the foundational needs of our audience and ...