“Creativity has the power to bend reality,” is the advice Burger King’s Global CMO, Fernando Machado, left with attendees of Contentsquare’s annual conference, CX Circle. Machado is an extremely decorated marketer with a proven track record of pushing creative boundaries and driving business growth, so it’s no surprise his keynote speech, “The King Just Wants to Have Fun,” shared how brands can build bold, courageous, and innovative experiences that engage customers and stand out from the crowd. 

Burger King’s secret sauce for success? According to Machado, it’s a combination of the brand’s self-deprecating personality, outside of the box thinking, and culture that doesn’t shy away from failure. “Our main goal is to bring smiles to people,” said Machado.

Like many other companies this year, Burger King has increased its investment in digital customer experience. With restaurants closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the home of the Whopper depended heavily on delivery and mobile app sales and pivoted to connect with consumers through social media and invest more heavily in perfecting their digital experience. 

That said, perfecting the digital customer journey has always been a top priority for Burger King and Machado. In his keynote address at CX Circle, Machado highlighted a few of his favorite campaigns and shared how brands can use creativity to connect with their audiences in new ways. Here’s what he had to share: 

1. Creativity Has The Power to Bend Reality

“When I see people from tech or digital backgrounds speak, I rarely hear them use the word ‘creativity,’” remarked Machado. “But I think that creativity is so centric to the work that we do and how successful we can be. I truly believe that creativity has the power to bend reality.” 

In one recent creative campaign, the BK team bent the reality of the physical and online world. They called it The Stevenage Challenge. 

The Stevenage Challenge was first born out of the realization that many BK customers love gaming. Additionally, because many games are live, gamers can’t pause them to go cook a meal, making delivery an enticing option for many players. 

Here’s where creativity comes into play. The Stevenage Football Club is a fourth-tier soccer team in England. Even though they’re a low-ranking team, they still appear in FIFA, a football simulation video game and one of the largest Playstation franchises. Burger King decided to sponsor Stevenage, thus prominently featuring their logo on the team’s jerseys and requiring FIFA to do the same!

Players from around the world could select Stevenage as their team and for every goal they shared on Twitter, Burger King sent them rewards. Over the course of the campaign, more than 24,000 goals were shared, Stevenage became the most used team in career mode, and the team’s shirts sold out for the first time in history. 

“It was an awesome example of how creativity can bridge the real world and the digital one,” exclaimed Machado.

2. If It Looks, Sounds, & Smells Like an Ad, It Isn’t a Good Ad

“There’s more to advertising than just rubbing your brand’s logo in your customer’s face,” urged Machado. Marketing campaigns are more than just advertising, reminds Machado. Great ads need to do more than just push your product or service, they must engage and connect with your consumers through their digital experience.

There’s more to advertising than just rubbing your brand’s logo in your customer’s face.

That was the idea behind the 2019 Whopper Detour campaign, which had the highest ROI for the brand of any digital campaign that year. While many other fast-food chains had mobile apps that let customers order and pay, Burger King wanted to give people a reason to talk about their app and boost app engagement. 

Chick-Fil-A, Wendy’s, and other fast-food chains all do the same thing to encourage customers to download and use their mobile app: they offer a free sandwich, drink, or nuggets to every customer who downloads their app. “The engagement levels are not high when you do that,” noted Machado. “We tested it out for ourselves. That’s why we had to come up with something different.” 

So how did Burger King use creativity as a source of competitive advantage? They asked customers to download the BK app, drive to their main competitor (McDonald’s) to order a $0.01 Whopper from the app, and then drive back to Burger King to pick it up.

“When I first heard that idea presented, my head exploded,” exclaimed Machado. “I thought the headline ‘You can now order a Whopper for a penny at McDonald’s’ would get a lot of people to talk about the idea, which was exactly what we were trying to achieve. The thing is, this idea breaks all the rules in terms of customer friction. It asks customers to drive to a McDonald’s and then drive to Burger King to pick up their sandwich, but we know our fans. They expect us to come up with stuff that’s a bit crazy and out there and then they engage.” And that’s just what happened.  

We know our fans. They expect us to come up with stuff that’s a bit crazy and out there and then they engage.

3. No Money, No Problem

Of course, a little cash doesn’t hurt, but remember that you don’t have to run with expensive, elaborate ideas to make waves. Instead of pouring all of your marketing and advertising budget into expensive TV ads, consider investing more in your digital brand experience and marketing strategies. With digital, you can segment and micro-target your audiences more, allowing you to create a movement and spark a conversation with your target audience, for a fraction of the cost of TV ads. Plus, having a smaller budget inspires you to get creative and scrappy with your ideas and execution. 

4. Stretch and Learn 

Many digital marketers kill a great idea when they don’t know how to execute it or think it’s too much effort. “But those are often the ideas that we are most passionate about because we will learn a lot from them,” declared Machado. The lessons and skills you learn from these stretch assignments can be applied to future campaigns and better prepare you for future challenges in creating your digital customer journey. “This mindset of stretching and learning, embracing uncertainty, and solving for something you didn’t know how to at first allows you to grow as a marketer and grow your brand,” said Machado.

This mindset of stretching and learning, embracing uncertainty, and solving for something you didn’t know how to at first allows you to grow as a marketer and grow your brand.

Machado’s recent “stretch and learn” project? The Traffic Jam Whopper. The Burger King team realized that Mexico City had lower delivery performance than over regions due to the fact that traffic in the city is so bad – sometimes traffic jams last up to 5 hours! When people get stuck in traffic, they get home so late that the restaurant is already closed or they’re too hungry to wait for delivery so they just grab something from the fridge. 

The Burger King team wanted to find a way to make delivery more accessible to their customers, even if they were stuck in traffic. That’s when the idea for the Traffic Jam Whopper was born. The team wanted to deliver to cars stuck in traffic. 

“At first, we asked a lot of questions. ‘How would we even do that?’ ‘How would we be able to find a customer?’, ‘What if after a customer orders the traffic jam breaks up?’ said Machado. “There were a lot of “what ifs,” but we thought we should at least try.”

So, how’d they do it? The team used a combination of dynamic physical-digital ads and the Waze app to promote the service to consumers in high congestion zones and leveraged GPS data and vehicle speed to pinpoint where to make the delivery. The campaign increased delivery orders by 63% and daily app download rate by 44 times, making the Burger King app the most downloaded fast food app in the country.

5. First or Nothing

Being the first to do something automatically helps your brand experience stand out. That said, being the leader also comes with its own set of challenges. We have to embrace uncertainty and overcome fear, but if you can do that, you can benefit immensely.

To help illustrate this idea, Machado shared the story of the artist Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain sculpture. The sculpture is a normal urinal, just placed on its back, but the artwork caused quite a controversy at the time of its debut and today is renowned as one of Duchamp’s most famous works and an icon of twentieth-century art. 

“If you are the first one to bring an upside-down urinal to a museum, you are an artist. If you are the second to do that, you are probably just a plumber,” explained Machado. “If I had to choose between being an artist or a plumber, I would pick being an artist.”

This article is an excerpt from Fernando Machado’s keynote address at CX Circle | Digital Happiness: The Return on Experience. To watch the session on-demand and relive the magic of the only event that explored how to build a digital customer journey that makes your consumers smile, click here. 

Over the next 12 months, we’ll be sharing advice on how to grow and strengthen your digital business with a holistic approach to customer intelligence. Join our healthy digital transformation club to stay in the know.

Customer proximity, engagement marketing, consumer-driven innovation… 2020 is the year to take your understanding of customers to the next level. And no one knows this better than the new crop of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) brands, who are challenging traditional digital commerce channels and reinventing the way businesses communicate, engage and connect with their customers. 

A slew of big-name start-ups of the past few years have set up shop as DTC businesses. Even legacy brands like Nike are making moves to reduce their reliance on third-party vendors like Amazon. So what is behind the direct to customer marketing appeal? 

In Praise of a Truer Connection With Your Customers 

The name says it all. Many of the D2C newcomers are leveraging this unmediated business model to build a stronger, closer — in short, more direct — connection with their audience. 

With a greater hold on consumer engagement through ownership of the whole customer journey, brands are at liberty to analyze the moments of connection to better adjust the CX to their customers’ needs and wants. 

Customers in 2020 value seamlessness, yes, but also authenticity, originality, added value, and a customer experience (CX) that ticks all these boxes. Some audiences will be responsive to a company’s sustainable supply chain; others want a beauty brand designed for real people. 

In the brave new D2C world, a brand’s core value proposition has to be defined (and delivered!), as it is a cornerstone of engagement marketing.

One of the benefits of all this customer closeness is that it breeds innovation. The D2C superstars, with their tight audience relationship, are leading through disruption; innovating new ways to engage customers and nurture loyalty over time. 

In fact, these success stories often transcend the product that launched them in the first place. For example, on its website, Away says it makes “everything you need away, and nothing you don’t.” GoPro’s About Us page mentions “celebrating moments” and “capturing life.” 

Achieving this level of connection implies a solid understanding of what matters to your target audience, which brings us to UX data.

Adobe Stock, Via Katia

Leveraging Behavioral Data For Greater Customer Proximity

Addressing your audience directly gives you privileged access to customer intelligence, and to the digital insights you need to optimize your CX. 

Owning the end-to-end user journey affords brands exhaustive insight into their visitors’ UX — from their customer journey, to their in-page behaviors, to their interactions with individual page elements such as images, form fields, etc.

This kind of in-depth reading of your customers’ behavior will reveal your biggest experience hits and misses, flag the changes that should be prioritized and convey where your greatest opportunities lie. 

After all, how can you build the ideal customer journey without a solid understanding of what your visitors are trying to achieve in the first place, or how they would prefer to go about it? The way customers move through your site and interact with it are all clues to decipher intent — itself a necessary signal for personalization and customer connection.

Aligning customer wants and a brand message via an engaging experience is something the leading D2C brands have mastered. And today, putting customer experience metrics in the hands of all those who have a stake in the CX has never been easier. 

Widening access to this data is key to achieving the level of agility and excellence that customers today expect. Customer preferences fluctuate fast and furiously, and your team’s ability to keep up with them needs to be just as swift.

Adobe Stick, Via Gudellaphoto

The DTC Approach: Putting Customers at the Heart of Things 

Whatever your business model, there is much to learn from D2C brands’ commitment to customer-centricity. Developing a unique brand narrative, defining a clear value proposition and leveraging your ownership of the customer journey to improve the digital experience for all visitors are just some of the ways you can increase customer engagement.

In the end, all roads lead back to customer experience analytics. Whether you want to control the creative concepts or the technical aspects of your UX, a surefire way to unlock actionable insights is through the use of metrics that capture the nuances of human digital behavior. Does your message resonate? Are you helping visitors achieve their goals? Is your digital experience (DX) frustrating or delightful? There’s much to discover on how your visitors are using your digital properties.

So go ahead, sow your wild oats via a DTC approach and stay informed on your experiences and customer behavior. After all, the ‘20s are here. Let’s make them roaring for your UX. 

Want to learn about how our DTC clients leveraged smart UX analytics to improve their content and ROI goals? Download our DTC report. 

If you ask any of my Contentsquare colleagues how many clients we have going into the new year, most of them will reply, without a second’s hesitation: 600.

And they’re right: we did wrap up 2019 (our most ambitious yet in terms of new business) with a portfolio of 600 leading global brands. 

But because we love numbers so much at Contentsquare — and because it’s almost Valentine’s day — let me share with you a much more exciting number: 12,000.

That’s the number of people behind those 600 logos who use our solution as part of the work they do every day. In other words, 12,000 individual relationships to nurture and sustain, or, if we’re being really ambitious (and we are), 12,000 reasons to keep the spark alive every day. Of course, these are business relationships, but they are still first and foremost human relationships. Some examples:

• We believe in investing in the right match. We only pursue prospects because we know we can provide value to their teams. 
• In 20% of cases, it is our clients who recommend us to others in their network. Who in this world hasn’t met some of their best friends through other friends? 
• “How likely are you to recommend us to your peers, on a scale of 0 to 10?” Ever heard those words before? It’s the famous Net Promoter Score survey question we’re always asking our users to answer, and we’re pleased to say ours hits best in class benchmarks. In other words; what you do matters. Doing what you say you will and becoming someone who can be counted on is what creates strong relationships.

I could keep going, but that is not the point. Let us focus instead on what really is at stake, here: how to create, improve, and renew meaningful engagement for these 12,000 users of our solution. If the answer seems obvious, that’s because it is. Yes, it’s true, for B2B as for B2C, the cornerstone of sustained customer engagement is (drumroll) a good experience — and ideally differentiated, experience.

One of the foundational pillars of a good experience is LISTENING to your customers. (which is an essential element of another one of our core values: Team Spirit). At Contentsquare we make listening to our customers a priority — we are constantly collecting feedback on our product and roadmap through individual or group sessions, we ask our clients what features they want us to prioritize, and we ask them to weigh in on our product positioning strategy. In fact, our clients are involved in every aspect of our growth; from the development of new functionalities to the strategic vision of the company. We believe alignment with our customers is crucial to our innovation agenda and future as a company.

The second pillar is CONNECTING our customers with their peer-based community. The most visible representation of this is our very active client community. Many of our clients will tell you they really enjoy and look forward to these recurring meet-ups and clubs, which are a chance for them to share use cases and best practices, or quiz their peers about the solutions that work for them and the challenges inherent to their industry. 

The last pillar, ENGAGING, is also how we measure the success of our customer experience. Our most engaged clients are true brand ambassadors and sponsors, and you’ll often find them speaking alongside our CX-perts at conferences. They’re very giving of their time, they recommend us to their peers… with enthusiasm.

The last thing I’ll say about customer engagement is that it starts with every team being engaged with customers and their mission to create better experiences for their customers. Whatever our department, country, office, or role, customer experience touches each and every one of us and we all need to be — if not obsessed — deeply committed to delivering excellence in this regard. 

Of course, no one is perfect and it’s important to remember: a good relationship is one that evolves, as each party changes and understands each other better. So yes, we will continue to challenge ourselves to keep listening, keep growing and keep improving to always be the best partner our clients need us to be, and in doing so, to keep the spark alive. 🙂

With love,

Sonia

RSVP at experience@contentsquare.com