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

Chapter 9Meet Your Customer in Her Moment

If we were to cut to the chase and lay out the one primary theme in this book, it would be pretty simple: keep your customer central to your multi-screen marketing strategy. And while that high-level insight might seem intuitive, as marketers, most of us are still pressured to take a line-item approach to marketing—mobile, social, display, traditional—rather than starting with our customer’s needs and using them as the foundation for a multi-screen strategy. Putting yourself in the shoes of your customer is a good start; but, now, we also have to surround ourselves with her devices, too. Would you want to be inundated with mobile advertising when you’re running late to pick up your kids and trying to find the address of a play date in your phone? Probably not.

In the first chapter, we described a typical day with Stacy, a busy professional mom, and Jen, a small boutique clothing owner. Let’s revisit both, but this time, let’s work within an ideal multi-screen scenario.

Stacy needs a few items for the fall season. She’s been to Jen’s boutique before, but it may not be top of mind for her, so like many retailers, Jen sends Stacy a special fall deal to get her in the store. While this is not revolutionary in and of itself, Jen knows that if Stacy is like many of her customers, her mobile phone is how she keeps it all together—her assistant, alarm clock, mapping system, camera, and life enabler—so rather than sending the offer via mail, ...