Future Research in Marketing Customer Experience

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Mugahed Mahyoub

DBA Student GSB UKM Malaysia

As a researcher, it is significant for us to know and understand the market research priorities and trends. This could give an insight into the future opportunities of the certain field that we are looking into; therefore, our research is relevant to the current situation and demand in the market. As such, three research priorities have been identified by the researcher in the marketing area which are, customer lifetime value, reinventing customer experience through digital innovation, and finally hyper-Personalization. 

1. Customer Lifetime Value

A study from Marketo An Adobe Company found that customer lifetime value and customer retention seat at the top two marketing priorities of their company in 2025. This study is based on a survey that was conducted on 700 senior executives and their responses were analyzed. Customer lifetime value could be defined as the present value of the future cash flows or the value of business recognized by the customer during his or her entire relationship with the company. By applying customer lifetime value, marketing managers can easily obtain the cash value connected with the long-term relationship with any customer. Ideally, lifetime value should be bigger than the cost of acquiring a new customer, which also known as the break-even point.

Once we know the CLTV, we could also compute how much the company could spend on paid advertising such as Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Google Adwords, etc, to acquire a new customer. Customer lifetime value is significant because the higher the lifetime value of a customer, the greater the profits. Once we know our customer lifetime value, then we could improve it.

2. Reinventing Customer Experience through Digital Innovation

In a study from the Pew Research Center (2014), experts project that by 2025 the Internet of Things will increase; they say this enormous network of devices, appliances, cars, clothes, and even sensor-laden elements of the environment will be connected and will exchange data. The user experience was before considered as everything digital and customer experience as everything physical. However, with the development of the Internet of Things, they have overlapped, and they are coming together as everything digital.

 Research by IBM Corporation (2018) also revealed that reinventing customer experience is one of the mandates to the future chief marketing officer that shows the importance of customer experience in future digital innovation.

Customer experience or also known as CX is the customers’ holistic perception of their experience with a certain business or brand. It is a result of every dealings a customer has with the business entity, starting from browsing the website to talking to customer service for purchase, receiving the product/service they bought from you until post product purchase. Everything a company does impact their customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not which leads to customer retention or detention.

However, with the development of digital and technology in the future, the customer experience also will start to change. It could either give a good or bad impact to the company depends on how the company handling it. Thus, the marketing department needs to find a way to ensure that CX is good.

3. Hyper-Personalization 

Based on Subramanyan (2014), defined hyper-personalization as utilizes big data for providing products, services, and information into the target segment that are more personalized and specialized. Based on customer requirements and with the assistant of hyper-personalization firms could create authentic customer experience online. Hyper-personalization works as a tool for marketers to provide personalized information about the customers. Hyper-personalization has three areas that are social listening, data analysis, and content. 

Nowadays we are living in the era of the evolved consumer where consumers are actively looking for information to make informed decisions instead of putting their trust in the brand. Personalization is integrating personal and transactional information such as name, title, and buying history. However, hyper-personalization uses behavioral and real-time data for creating highly communication which is suitable for the users. Hyper-personalization is considered the different aspects of maximizing chances into the contents of customers for targeting the right audience via the lifecycle of the customer. 

One typical example of personalization is that sending an email to a customer by mentioning their first name in the subject line. That consider good practice, but it is not sufficient to grab the customer’s fancy. However, hyper-personalization is more advanced than that. The technology of Hyper-personalization will allow the gap between the businesses’ needs providers and the desires of customers to be locked. As well as allowing customers to enjoy a range of products, whereas, the providers of services fight against the fragmentation of the retailing and media across multiple platforms and channels NEM SRIA (2025).

References

IBM Corporation (2018). The Modern Marketing Mandate: Insights from the Chief Marketing Officer study. Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/W7D6L9EL

Marketo an Adobe Company (2025). Marketing 2025 the future of skills in technology in marketing Across Australia and New Zealand. Retrieved from https://engage.marketo.com/rs/460-TDH-945/images/Marketo-Marketing2025-ResearchPaper.pdf.

NEM SRIA (2025). Community inputs gathered for a white paper on the strategic Research and Innovation Agenda in 2025 contributing to the design of the next FP9. Retrieved from https://nem-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/nem-sria-toward-fp9-final.pdf.

Pew Research Center (2014). Digital Life in 2025. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/wpcontent/uploads/sites/9/2014/05/PIP_Internet-of-things_0514142.pdf

Subramanyan, V. (2014). What is The Hype Around ‘Hyper-Personalization? Available at: www.business2community.com/marketing/whats-hype-around-hyper-personalization

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