Understanding the full range of consumer experiences with a brand is a critical factor in building awareness, engagement, and advocacy — and in framing or evolving a value proposition that integrates and emphasizes features and benefits in believable and sustaining ways.

UXD is changing how brands approach strategic planning and how they develop customer insights. It promises to stitch together what consumers say they do with what they actually or habitually do. By using UXD, companies can find out how messages are framed and where messages are transmitted and received. The combination creates a measurable context to help us understand how consumers use brands and consume content.

In applying UXD principles to integrated marketing programs, consider these three key factors.

End-to-End Planning. It’s not just about the product or the transaction. People want to buy into brands, not just buy stuff. You need a longitudinal perspective on the process. Anticipate and plan for information needs, feelings, and functionalities at every step — from the first glimmer of an idea in your prospect’s mind through the completion of a successful interaction and onto the next one. Every customer takes a journey to identify and interact with your brand. Map it. Think about it and carefully decide when, where, and how you will have opportunities to shape the sequence, the messages, the offers, the incentives, the rewards, the confirmations, and the back-sell communications.

Frictionless Interactions. The holy grail of UXD is to make every interaction simple, easy, intuitive, and rewarding. It’s a very tall order that may require using all your resources to figure out where the likely hiccups might occur. Understand who your prospects are, what they are after, and how they go about getting it. Then design your engagement mechanisms.

UXD techniques such as ethnographic research, rapid prototyping, task-oriented testing, in situ observation, eye-mapping, and careful interviewing can deepen or supercharge a brand’s customer insights when they are used with focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research, and customer data. The more you get into your customers’ heads, the better. The more you understand their context, the better. The more you understand their workflow and coping devices. the better. The more you anticipate where and how customers may be hesitant, confused or doubtful, the better.

Create Visual Cues. Too many brand experiences are like driving in New Jersey; under-marked and confusing. Develop plenty of visual cues to orient and direct prospects and customers. You can never reinforce where they are and where they are heading too much. Think of the customer journey like driving the Interstate highway system. Anticipate where prospects will get antsy, where they need gentle reinforcement, where they need a big honking sign, and when they need confirmation that they’ve gone in the right direction or made the right choice.

By integrating UXD with traditional strategic planning, you can create a more accurate and powerful tool for brands to build deeper customer understanding, intimacy, and loyalty.

Back in the mid-90s, when I started my marketing career, just about everything I knew I learned through textbooks and classes taught by marketing professors who’d last seen the inside of a boardroom back when Bic pens came to market. Marketing itself was heavily based on case studies and focused on market share, with big budgets tied up in campaigns with a life cycle of six months or more. Unless you worked for a company with virtually unlimited budgets, there was no incentive to do quick tests and refine marketing approaches. Incremental progress was limited at best.

Moving to New York City a bit later to pursue a marketing career in the “Internet” seemed like a pretty safe career bet. I got to conceive and explore new business models; it was great fun. Unfortunately, many of those late-90s ideas were either before their time or required what (seemed back then to be) unfathomable amounts of capital to make work. Then came the bust.

What upstart Internet companies asked of old-guard companies was to embrace new business models and entirely different ways of distribution. Few businesses back in 2000 felt required to make any of those changes, so it’s small wonder why it took the digital industry another decade to get to where it is today. Today, it really is about the future.

As Wikipedia puts it, a futurist “[engages] in interdisciplinary and systems thinking to advise . . . organizations on such matters as diverse global trends, plausible scenarios, emerging market opportunities and risk management.” What do I do as a digital marketer? Figure out market opportunities, understand global trends, and develop scenarios that I hope will help products gain an audience. Basically, I’m a futurist.

The digital world of today is breathless, relentless; it’s evolution in overdrive. Take online advertising, the sub-industry I’m in. A huge expansion in business models and approaches to advertising is upon us. Instead of the old direct advertiser-agency-publisher continuum, we’re now in a business that includes hundreds of known companies that are working in 22 separate “buckets.” In order to keep their investors happy, most of these companies are focused on doing one thing well. That yields, say, 12 companies doing “creative optimization for display advertising”–there’s probably a long-term place for just two or three. Most of those other buckets have a similar glut. Take ad networks–do we really need 400 or more of them? Do ad exchanges that specialize in inventory subsets, such as just video or just mobile, help or confuse advertisers and agencies?

By all accounts, things are going to get more complex before there’s much consolidation. Figuring out where to spend my time is like trying to decide when to step on board a 200-mph bullet train. Among hundreds of companies and approaches, and unlimited predictions about where the marketplace is going, I need to figure out the digital products and strategies that the marketplace will embrace 9-12 months from now. If we time the marketplace wrong, it can be very costly. But if we wait to get it right, we have no chance at all.

My belief is that the only way to successfully choose a marketing approach is to focus on major digital trends. In this series, I want to identify the changes and ideas that can make digital marketers more engaged and more valuable to their employers. For instance: how can we make sense of the staggering amount of data we sit on today? How can marketers learn to think more like engineers, merging product design with the items that give customers the greatest benefit? How do I create and take part in relevant conversations rather than force people to listen to a canned presentation? What kind of skills should I focus on developing today so that I can bring the next Facebook to market? Some of this is only relevant to marketing, but much of such changes affect the way all of us live and work.

It would be easy to just tell marketers to bone up on their math skills, or learn how to utilize social media to listen better, but most of the classic marketing elements haven’t gone away–curiosity about the world around you and an ability to tell a great story will still take you a long way. It’s just that the way to research that world and tell those great stories is changing profoundly.