Opt-Out Effect, The: Marketing Strategies that Empower Consumers and Win Customer-Driven Brand Loyalty

4. Customer-Managed Experience

“Customer experience is the most pressing mandate for marketers, the top area of marketing technology investment in 2014, and it will lead innovation spending for 2015. This last part, in particular, should cause you to sit up straight. Why? Because, as competition and buyer empowerment compounds, customer experience itself is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage,” said Jake Sorofman of Gartner. He reported on a “recent Gartner survey . . . on the role of marketing in customer experience [which] found that, by 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36% four years ago. According to the same Gartner research, fewer than half of companies see ...