Billee Howard

The old rules of business were ruled by what GE dubbed TQM or Total Quality Management. Winning companies would win or lose based on their ability to deliver a quality product, seamlessly and consistently. In their view, TQM would sustain customer loyalty and assure a category or market leadership position. For the past decade, we have rapidly left that notion behind in lieu of the age of TEM - Total Experience Management.

As mass commodification has impacted all industries, it’s become harder and harder for a brand to stand out. Consequently, storytelling and the authentic content experiences it creates, has become one of the leading ways brands can engage with customers to drive distinction and competitive advantage.  

The big news out of 64th International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, was that the current approach to content development, where storytelling is still pushed to the end of the supply chain, is missing authenticity – a brand voice.  This explains why many customers are moving from big brands to smaller ones as they tell better stories, infused with purpose and authenticity, to create winning experiences. Simply put, if you want to compete in today’s marketplace you need to embrace TEM through a lens of purpose.

The bright and shiny objects no longer win, unless they are married with insights that make experiences go from good to great through personalized, emotionally engaging moments that set you apart from the pack. Emotional engagement is based upon the stimulation of the heart. In today’s experience economy, emotional engagement is proving to be a critical factor in achieving winning results throughout every customer journey, and effective, data-driven storytelling is at the heart of this movement.

With all this in mind, thinking about how to gain competitive advantage in the marketing realm today – inside and outside of the organization – marketers must capture key insights and then apply the principles of needs-based, experience design, combined with an understanding of the levers that impact each experience differently, in order to bring the brand to life for each customer. No longer can a CMO do this from pure instinct, or in a silo. They must listen, analyze and interpret data across all customer touchpoints, online and offline, and then use these insights to inform experience development.

The formula for success in today’s CMO is simple:

Brand Purpose + Data Driven Storytelling = Optimized Customer Experiences

Marketing has emerged as among the most vital departments inside leading brands, migrating from a vehicle used largely just to drive awareness, to a critical driver of business strategy.

As this paradigm shift ensues, today's CMOS are increasingly being looked to to transform marketing into a lever of enterprise wide measurable engagement and profitability. With these new added pressures, leading marketers are being bounced from the top spots, with a burn rate of approximately 18 months.

Those who are succeeding understand three critical things: 

1. Why creativity must be married with technology to achieve desired business outcomes 
2. Why the CMO must learn to collaborate seamlessly with the CTO or CIO to deliver optimal performance
3. How creativity can be married with technology to help the CMO meet new and emerging challenges they are being tasked with i.e. human capital issues

Speaker Overview Billee is Founder + Chief Engagement Officer of Brandthropologie, a cutting-edge consultancy specializing in harnessing creativity to solve business problems. The firm works to identify the most powerful collision point of culture and commerce for each client to create captivating stories that are consumed, shared and drive meaningful and measurable engagement. Billee has a strategic vision for how brands can differentiate themselves from their competition through the lens of purpose and by harnessing storytelling as a business competency. Billee has worked with CMOs for the last twenty years in the realm of corporate storytelling and meaningful engagement and can tell audiences that there has never been a more challenging environment for marketers, or one that demands the highest levels of collaboration as responsibilities in the marketing department continue to grow.

As a member of IBM’s Futurist team, she has spoken on behalf of the company at Amplify 2017, a conference dedicated to the future of AI and MarTech, a conference dedicated to examining how technology will continue to impact the marketing function at organizations around the world and why storytelling needs to be viewed as a business competency.

Topics for discussion include: • How to use AI to power predictive storytelling that fuels commerce • How to create content solutions that drive commerce and use AI to executive produce your brand • The many issues and trends emerging around building the best-in-class marketing stacks of the future. • Figuring out how to create the best customer journeys possible with an eye on defining distinction and competitive advantage in the marketplace. • Why a seamless partnership between today’s CMO and CTO, and the arrival of tomorrow’s Chief Marketing Technology Officer is critical to future success. • Why w collaboration must move from mere activity to critical driver of day-to-day business strategy