Emerging technologies are poised to personalize 

the consumer experience radically—in real time and 

almost everywhere. It’s not too early to prepare.

 The coming era of 

‘on-demand’ 

 marketing

Peter Dahlström and David Edelman

m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s p r a c t i c e

APRIL 2013

The problem

The accelerating pace of digital 

technologies will force companies 

to meet new and exacting consumer 

demands for marketing that’s 

always relevant. Executives must 

prepare now. 

Why it matters

In an on-demand world, consumers 

will judge brands by their ability 

to deliver heighted experiences—

interactions, literally anywhere, 

that offer high levels of value and 

are radically customized and easy 

to access—along the consumer 

decision journey.

What to do about it

Companies must excel on 

three levels: 

• engaging customers in manifold 

new ways by designing 

interactions that are grounded 

in use cases 

• assembling data offering new 

lenses on the behavior of 

consumers by pulling together and 

evaluating all their touch points 

with a brand

• developing new processes and 

skills across all functions (not 

just marketing) to transform the 

delivery of brand experiences
Digital marketing is about to enter more challenging territory. 

Building on the vast increase in consumer power brought on 

by the digital age, marketing is headed toward being on demand—

not just always “on,” but also always relevant, responsive to the 

consumer’s desire for marketing that cuts through the noise with 

pinpoint delivery. 

What’s fueling on-demand marketing is the continued, symbiotic 

evolution of technology and consumer expectations. Already, search 

technologies have made product information ubiquitous; social 

media encourages consumers to share, compare, and rate experiences; 

and mobile devices add a “wherever” dimension to the digital 

environment. Executives encounter this empowerment daily when, 

for example, cable customers push for video programming on 

any device at any time or travelers expect a few taps on a smartphone 

app to deliver a full complement of airline services. 
3

Remarkably, all this is starting to seem common and routine. 

Most leading marketers know how to think through customer-search 

needs, and optimizing search positioning has become one of the 

biggest media outlays. Companies have ramped up their publishing 

and monitoring activities on social channels, hoping to create 

positive media experiences customers will share. They are even 

“engineering” advocacy by creating easy, automatic ways for 

consumers to post favorable reviews or to describe their engagement 

with brands.

But we’re just getting started. The developments pushing marketing experiences even further include the growth of mobile connectivity, better-designed online spaces created with the powerful 

new HTML5 Web language, the activation of the Internet of Things 

in many devices through inexpensive communications tags and 

microtransmitters,1

 and advances in handling “big data.” Consumers 

may soon be able to search by image, voice, and gesture; automatically participate with others by taking pictures or making 

transactions; and discover new opportunities with devices 

that augment reality in their field of vision (think Google glasses). 

As these digital capabilities multiply, consumer demands will rise in 

four areas: 

1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time.

2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things as disparate kinds of 

information (from financial accounts to data on physical activity) 

are deployed more effectively in ways that create value for them.

3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be 

targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what 

they experience.

4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy.

This article seeks to paint a picture of this new world and its 

implications for leaders across the enterprise. One thing is clear: 

the consumer’s experiences with brands and categories are 

set to become even more intense and defining. That matters 

1 For more, see Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” 

mckinsey.com, March 2010.
4

2 See David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik, “The consumer 

decision journey,” mckinsey.com, June 2009. The research identified the ways individuals 

interact with a brand as they embark on consumer decision journeys across multiple touch 

points: considering, evaluating, purchasing, experiencing, sharing, and, ultimately, 

bonding with products after buying them. It also quantified the impact of those touch 

points on consumer decisions. 

3 See Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill, “We’re all marketers now,” 

mckinsey.com, July 2011.

profoundly because such experiences drive two-thirds of the 

decisions customers make, according to research by our colleagues; 

prices often drive the rest.2

It’s also apparent that each company as a whole must mobilize to 

deliver high-quality experiences across sales, service, product 

use, and marketing. Few companies can execute at this level today.3

As interactions multiply, companies will want to use techniques 

such as design thinking to shape consumer experiences. They also 

will need to be familiar with emerging tools for gathering the right 

data across the consumer decision journey. Finally, the marketing 

organization’s structure will need to be rethought as collaboration 

across functions and businesses becomes ever more essential. 

What to expect in 2020

Over the next several years, we’re likely to see the consumer experience 

radically integrated across the physical and virtual environment. 

Most of the technologies needed to make this scenario happen are 

available now. One that’s gaining particular traction is near-field 

communication (NFC): embedded chips in phones exchange data on 

contact with objects that have NFC tags. The price of such tags is 

already as low as 15 cents, and new research could make them even 

cheaper, so more companies could build them into almost any 

device, generating a massive expansion of new interactive experiences. 

To understand that near future, please turn the page and follow 

a hypothetical, tech-enabled consumer, Diane, who purchases an 

audio headset.

Meet tomorrow’s consumer: Diane.
5

Diane’s phone prompts her to photograph 

her face and then displays how the headset 

would look on her in various colors. 

Scene 2

She’s then invited to send the photo to 

Facebook friends, who are asked to vote among 

a choice of colors that best suit Diane. 

Scene 3

Meanwhile, she receives a text alert from Spotify 

offering a free month’s subscription to its premium 

music service if she buys the headset (the 

manufacturer’s data show she isn’t a subscriber). 

Scene 4

5

Scenes from the future of 

on-demand marketing

Diane’s rising expectations will require companies to direct a variety 

of “scenes” in which technologies, messages, and choices engage her 

with products, services, and trusted communities. 

Scene 1

Curious about her friend’s headset, Diane 

taps it with her phone. Both have nearfield-communication (NFC) capabilities.

Scene 5

Friends like the headset in fuchsia, 

and Diane completes the purchase. 
6

Scene 6

When the headset is delivered the next day, 

a message asks if she would like to post a 

“wow” picture on Facebook of her wearing it, 

with a link for others to buy it as well. 

Scene 7

When she meets those friends in person, her cell 

phone reminds her of the NFC chip in the headset 

and offers her an additional free month of Spotify’s 

service for each friend who taps and buys a headset. 

Scene 9

While Diane listens to songs, Spotify reminds 

her that the headset manufacturer 

has brought her this listening experience. 

6

Scene 8

Every week, she gets a “club gig of the 

week” message offering discount access 

to a venue if she wears the headset 

when she walks in the door. A club video 

board welcomes her by name. 

Scene 10

At a gym a few weeks later, Diane gets 

an opportunity to buy and download an 

exercise program the gym offers. She 

can access the program by tapping her 

phone on a nearby display. 
7

Taken together, the scenes from Diane’s consumer journey illustrate 

the four emerging areas of consumer demands we touched on above. 

Now

Marketers have gotten a foretaste of the consumer’s desire for more 

urgency and ubiquity. Bank balances running low? Send the 

consumer an alert on her cell phone. A question about fees shows 

up on the bank’s Twitter handle? Post an immediate response. 

An executive of one major bank believes that the immediacy of smartphone apps has already made brick-and-mortar contact unnecessary for many young consumers, who use a range of mobile services 

to manage their accounts and rarely interact with the brand 

physically. Yet having an entire bank in your phone may be only a 

baseline for the experiences on the horizon. Consider one European 

beverage company’s beta test of beer coasters embedded with 

NFC technology. A club patron contemplating a new brew can tap a 

coaster with a cell phone and get a history of the beer, bars where 

it is served, upcoming promotions, and a list of friends who have 

given it a thumbs-up. 

In this environment, a marketer’s “publishing” extends to virtualized 

media such as the coaster or Diane’s headphones, which become 

touch points for considering and evaluating products and services. 

Digital information technologies, operating behind the scenes 

to integrate data on all interactions a consumer has across the decision journey, will provide insights into the best influence pathways for companies, while also triggering new personalized experiences for consumers. 

Can I

Most first-wave digital capabilities helped people access things they 

already did—shopping, banking, finding information. Consumers 

must often settle for compromises in their digital experiences. Yet 

robust programming, data-access, and interface possibilities 

now available could make every digital interaction an opportunity to 

deliver something exceptional. 

Consider Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s new smartphone app, 

which changes the house-hunting experience. A prospective 

home buyer begins by taking a picture of a house he or she likes. 
8

Using image-recognition software and location-based technologies, 

the app identifies the house and provides the list price, taxes, 

and other information. It then connects with the buyer’s personal 

financial data and (with further links to lender databases) 

determines whether the buyer can be preapproved for a mortgage 

(and, if so, in what amount). This nearly instantaneous series 

of interactions cuts through the hassle of searching real-estate agents’ 

sites for houses and then connecting with the agents or with 

mortgage brokers for financing, which might take a week. 

The mortgage app shows how the digital environment is now 

integrating disparate sources of information, at low cost and at scale, 

for many new domains. The challenge for companies is to look 

beyond today’s interfaces and interactions and to see that moving 

past compromises will require a rethinking of aspects of packaging, pricing, delivery, and products. 

For me

Some online marketers already use features in devices such as 

cameras and touch screens to help consumers see what apparel and 

accessories may actually look like when worn. Web retailer 

Warby Parker, for example, offers hundreds of customized views of 

eyeglasses overlaid on a Webcam picture of the consumer.

In the future, demands for more personalized experiences will 

intensify. A phone tap, a click, or a stylus jot will instantly personalize 

offers, using information captured on “likes,” recent travel, 

income, what friends are doing or like, and much more. With each 

interaction, the consumer will be creating new data footprints 

and streams that complement existing digital portraits, sharpening 

their potential impact. Facebook will eventually be able to mine 

the world’s largest database of photographs, linking individual people 

to their activities. Smartphones have rich data on every place 

where you have traveled with one in your pocket. This is just a start, 

and the privacy, security, and general trust implications are 

staggering. Yet consumers consistently show a desire to provide more 

data when companies use captured information to provide truly 

helpful feedback (you’re over budget or you are doing well in your 

exercise program) or to offer recommendations, services, and 

customization tools rather than just push what might appear to be 

intrusive (and creepy) messaging. 
9

Simply

The quest for simplicity led Amazon to create a subscriber model 

for delivering bulky repeat-buy items (such as diapers) and Starbucks 

to adopt a tap-and-go approach to mobile payments. Yet many 

interactions remain complex and fragmented: to name just a few, 

finding, organizing, and redeeming online coupons; turning 

weekly meal plans into online delivery orders; tracking your monthly 

cash flow; and staying on top of your health-insurance bills 

and reimbursements. 

Evolving technologies and consumer behavior should make it easier 

to redesign many complex experiences. For example, companies 

offering inherently complicated products or services could overlay 

a game interface on certain Web pages, to let consumers play 

at trading off different options and prices. Visual-recognition technology could allow you to scan health-care bills, receipts, 

statements, and appointments into one integrated calendar and 

cash-management system. Already, start-ups in travel, expense, 

and sales-force management are experimenting with approaches 

that streamline processes and make interactions more inviting—

using touch and swipe to make changes, gestures to activate large 

displays, and data in phones to recognize consumers and 

automatically customize interfaces. 

Setting strategies and building capabilities

Consumers will soon make these demands of every interaction they 

have with companies. Although the marketing function may often be 

the best conduit to get customer input and to drive decisions about 

how to distinguish brands, coordinated efforts across the enterprise 

will be needed on three levels.

Designing interactions across the consumer 

decision journey

Today, many companies have successfully defined and addressed customer interactions across a few channels. What they need to be 

designing, however, is the entire story of how individuals encounter 

a brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and relate 

to it across the decision journey. Marketing or customer research can’t 

do this alone. At one apparel retailer, managers from multiple 
10

functions go together into the field to do deep ethnographic research—

watching how customers shop, going into their homes, and 

uncovering the triggers and motivations that drive behavior. These 

managers look for the compromises that people face as they 

try to get things done, probing for their higher aspirations. And the 

managers watch how customers react as they interact with brands. 

Among the findings, the managers identified seven key “use cases”—

customer situations that lead to satisfaction along different decision 

journeys. They found a wide range of trigger points for choosing an 

“outfit solution” for a social occasion, learning that shoppers became 

frustrated, especially online, when they couldn’t see how items 

would look together. Customers wanted to drag and drop items on 

an on-screen model or to see great combinations in advance. But 

that required different merchants to work collectively and the stores 

to bring items together on sales floors. 

Cross-functional teams also came together in workshops. With third 

parties such as fashion bloggers and thought leaders from onlinemedia companies, they mapped out new ways to influence the decision 

journeys of customers with different attitudes toward the retailer’s 

brand or different kinds of spending behavior. One of the most valuable 

outcomes was clarity on how the store’s brand positioning could 

guide the design of new experiences. The teams knew that their story 

would always be “better value than the shopper expected, delivered 

in a friendly way.” That meant warm visuals and messaging on 

the company’s Web site and across various media to reinforce the 

story of value to the customer. And the teams explored new ways 

social media could help customers show off the value they received. 

Out of the work came not only a shared, company-wide sense of the 

decision journeys of consumers but also immediate buy-in to a wide 

range of initiatives that could boost market share. These initiatives 

are on track to provide an 8 percent sales lift above what the existing 

plan envisioned and were implemented more quickly because of the 

management team’s shared sense of engagement. 

Making data and discovery a nonstop cycle 

To win over on-demand customers, you must know them, what they 

expect, and what works with them, and then have the ability to 

reach them with the right kind of interaction. Data lie at the heart of 
11

efforts to build that understanding—data to define and contextualize 

trends, data to measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the consumer decision journey, and data to 

understand how and why individuals move along those journeys. 

To realize that potential, companies need three distinct data lenses. 

Telescope. A clear view of the broad trends in your market, category, 

and brand is essential. Digital sources that track what people 

are looking for (search), what people are saying (social monitoring), 

and what people are doing (tracking online, mobile, and in-store 

activities) represent rivers of input providing constant warning signs 

of trouble or signals of latent opportunity. Many companies are 

drowning in reports from vendors providing these types of information tools, yet few have much clarity on which things they 

need to look for and who needs to know what. 

One packaged-goods company got a jump on competitors when it 

saw a spike in online conversations about the lack of natural 

ingredients in shampoos and then recognized a corresponding rise 

in search inquiries on the subject. A new line of natural haircare products, launched at record-breaking speed, has become a successful early mover in a growing segment. A telecommunications 

company has become similarly plugged in: it now has a war room to 

track every online comment anywhere. Besides being better able 

to address—in an open, friendly, and fast way—problems that could 

escalate, it now has a great frontline source of line-outage signals 

that trigger repair crews and increases in call-center capacity. 

Binoculars. Against this backdrop of market activity, few companies have a complete, integrated picture of where they spend their 

money, which interactions actually happen, and what their outcomes are. Most direct-sales companies (retailers, banks, travel 

services) measure the performance of their spending through 

isolated last-attribution analyses that look narrowly at what consumers do after confronting a search link, an e-mail, or an 

advertisement. Branded-goods companies try to throw all of their 

media spending together into an econometric model assessing 

the effects of their media mix. In the world of on-demand marketing, 

where multiple interactions take place along multiple journeys, 

last-action attribution explains only part of the impact of media 

spending, and media-mix models fail to account for touches 
12

and costs outside of paid channels.

What’s next? Deploying tools that rapidly assemble databases of 

every customer contact with a brand, companies will need to 

push every customer-facing function to work together and form an 

integrated view of consumer decision journeys. With longitudinal 

pictures of customers’ touches and their outcomes, companies can 

model total costs per action, find the most effective decisionjourney patterns, and spot points of leakage. As more contacts become 

digitized—and they will—the data will gradually get easier to 

create. Getting a head start can help companies build ongoing test 

labs where they tune the ability to create and analyze the right 

data and immediately learn where to add investments. One bank has 

already realized millions of dollars in added value from the knowledge that weak points in the customer on-boarding process were 

undermining major marketing programs. Only when branches, 

call centers, and marketing worked together could the bank find the 

right fixes, improve customer satisfaction, and raise marketing’s 

return on investment. 

Microscope. Trust is essential, and personalization can show customers they matter. They expect a brand to be a good steward 

and user of data about them and, increasingly, have high expectations 

for what a brand should know. In the example described earlier, 

data about Diane powers the brand’s ability to make it easy for her to 

share photographs, to buy a headset, to set up and manage 

a free Spotify subscription, to receive information about a local 

event, to be recognized at it, and to get additional special offers. 

Information about Diane is the thread that keeps all of her brand 

interactions immediate (now), valuable (can I), relevant (for me), 

and easy (simply).

Yet given the laser focus on getting programs into the market to 

improve performance, few marketers (or even line executives) have 

stepped back and pulled their teams together to work through 

the scenarios and customer-data models they will now need to build. 

Even fewer have a strong sense of what the current plans of the 

company’s IT department will deliver in which time frame. One company that addressed these issues has identified over 20 types 

of consumer decision journeys as archetypes of experiences it must 

support over the next three years. From those decision journeys, 
13

it has derived a core set of information capabilities it will need 

to build and is well down a tight road map of development that has 

already enabled it to launch products in breakthrough ways. 

Delivering with new skills and processes

To deliver these new experiences, executive teams must rethink 

the role and structure of the marketing organization and how 

it engages with other functions. The changes are likely to cut deeply, 

transforming the way companies manage campaigns and communities, measure performance, provide customer support, and 

interact with outside agencies. It’s still early days, but consider 

the breadth of recent efforts.

Raising a consumer-packaged-goods company’s digital game. A 

European CPG company started by creating a digital-analytics 

group with worldwide operations. Rather than sprinkle digital experts 

across the globe, the company developed a unified structure with 

common standards for roles, common training, and digital career 

tracks to build an arsenal of future talent. The analytics team 

is part of a broader digital center of excellence that provides service 

support to the business units and drives major upgrades in IT 

capabilities. Defined commitments from managers in finance, legal, 

and HR help the center deal with challenges that arise as it seeks 

to offer customers a richer digital experience. 

The company also reviewed all of its e-commerce trade accounts and 

decided that it needed a much more granular approach to serving 

customers. Says one executive, “It is not just an issue of managing 

our relationship with pure-play e-commerce sellers versus our 

traditional channels; it also is an issue of managing the online versus 

brick-and-mortar sides of the same traditional partner.” A new 

e-commerce trade team with added digital-analytic support is helping 

both to enhance the online-merchandising mix and to improve 

the placement of the company’s products in the search engines of 

e-commerce providers. 

Finally, marketing leaders established a novel customer-relationshipmanagement (CRM) team because they realized that the growth 

of the company’s mobile services, coupon programs, sampling, and 

social communities was finally enabling it to gather huge amounts 

of direct data about how people interacted with its brands. (That infor-
14

mation had previously been available only to retailers.) These 

structural and talent changes led the company to realize that it needed 

to reshuffle its agency relationships, replacing a single brandand-ad agency with two agencies—one for brand programs, the other 

for digital and CRM direct marketing. The company also brought 

more media and digital analytics in-house. 

Reorienting a bank. At one institution, a new understanding 

of emerging brand challenges led to a radical change in the status of 

the CMO. Marketing had earlier ranked low in this sales-driven 

organization, where the function’s leaders focused mostly on corporate 

communications and brand campaigns. Now, a new CMO, much 

closer to her peers on the executive board, has been charged with 

directing the full consumer experience. 

Each month, the bank’s business-unit leaders gather to talk about 

their progress in improving different consumer decision journeys. 

As new products and campaigns are launched, these executives place 

a laminated card of such a journey at the center of a conferenceroom table. They discuss assumptions across the whole flow of the 

journey for different consumer segments and how various groups 

across functions should contribute to the campaign. Where should 

customer data be captured and reused later? How will the campaign 

flow from mass media to social media and to the bank’s Web site? 

What is the follow-up experience once a customer sets up an account? 

The bank has created a corporate center of excellence for digital marketing to give the strategy a forward tilt and to plan for needed 

capabilities. It has also appointed a new team of full-time executives 

who focus on mobile and social technologies—executives who 

have become evangelists, helping business units to raise their digital 

game along a range of consumer interactions. The first wave 

of fixes and new programs has already generated tens of millions of 

dollars in the first six months, and the bank expects these efforts 

to add more than $100 million to its annual margins. 

The forces enabling consumers to expect fulfillment on demand are 

unstoppable. Across the entire consumer decision journey, every 

touch is a brand experience, and those touches just keep multiplying 
15

in number. To mobilize for the on-demand challenges ahead, 

companies must:

 • bring managers together from across the business to understand 

consumers’ decision journeys, to speculate about where they 

may lead, and to design experiences that will meet the consumer’s 

demands (Now, Can I, For me, and Simply)

 • align the executive team around an explicit end-to-end data 

strategy across trends, performance, and people

 • challenge the delivery processes behind every touch point—are the 

processes making the best use of your data and interaction 

opportunities and are they appropriately tailored to the speed 

required and to expectations about your brand? 

Executive recruiters tell us that corporate boards are looking for 

more people who can challenge and improve a company’s approach 

to social media, big data, and the customer experience. Staying 

ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand 

customers is much more than a marketing issue—it will be a 

crucial basis for future competitive advantage.

Peter Dahlström is a director in McKinsey’s London office, and David Edelman

is a principal in the Boston office. 

Copyright © 2013 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved. 

We welcome your comments on this article. Please send them to 

quarterly_comments@mckinsey.com.