The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age

Engage Strategy
The engage strategy for business is to become a source of valued content 
for your customers. Businesses today face an increasingly challenging envi-
ronment in seeking to communicate with their customers. The profusion 
of media channels and forms (from YouTube, to gaming consoles, to news 
via mobile apps) has fragmented the audience for traditional media, where 
brands historically placed advertising. In this context, businesses must 
expand their approach beyond interruption advertisements—messages 
that customers see only because they piggyback on or interrupt content 
that customers are genuinely interested in. Businesses need to adopt a dif-
ferent mindset and learn to create their own content that is relevant enough 
for customers to seek it out, consume it, and even share it within their 
networks. At the same time, this content must add value to businesses by 
enhancing their customer relationships.
An engage strategy may take a variety approaches, including product 
demos, storytelling, utility, and brands as publishers.
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 Product demos: Content that demonstrates the value proposition 
of a business or product in a compelling and engaging way can be 
extremely effective. When L’Oréal was looking to raise the profile of a 
niche brand, the tattoo cover-up Dermablend, the company produced 
a long-form music video featuring Rick Genest (aka “Zombie Boy”), a 
Canadian artist and model whose entire body is covered in tattoos. The 
video starts with an apparently untattooed Genest, but as the Derm-
ablend covering his skin is gradually removed, viewers witness a star-
tling transformation. The video was placed on YouTube with virtually 
no media budget to promote it and became a sensation, with over 25 
million views. Like the famous “Will it blend?” videos that popularized 
premium blender brand Blendtec, the Zombie Boy video is effective 
because the drama is entirely about the product’s performance.

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 Storytelling: In other cases, brands can reach a broader audience by 
creating an emotionally compelling story that is less product-specific. 
Industrial glass manufacturer Corning used a six-minute video called 
“A Day Made of Glass” to depict its vision of a future full of interactive 
glass surfaces, touchscreens, and display technologies. The video was 
viewed more than 20 million times, and Corning launched a follow-up 
series of videos and content around its technologies.
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 Utility: Content isn’t always about stories and emotions, however. It 
can also be about utility. Brands can effectively engage customers by 
providing useful content at just the right time. Columbia Sportswear 
connects to consumers interested in an active, outdoor life by creat-
ing mobile apps that range from a handy guide to tying rope knots 
(with examples from sailors, fishermen, and mountaineers) to a GPS 
Portable Activity Log (designed to help customers rapidly journal their 
most memorable outdoor experiences using a mix of videos, geo-tags, 
notes, photos, and records of distance traveled, time, and elevation).
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 Brands as publishers: In some cases, brands move beyond individual 
pieces of content and engage customers by becoming publishers in 
their own right. Luxury department store Barneys New York has a web-
site for e-commerce, but it has also become publisher of The Window, 
an online magazine that tells the stories of designers, fashion models, 
and craftspeople and of the products themselves—offering the kind of 
interviews and style guides you’d expect in a fashion magazine, not a 
product catalog. The company evaluates its return on investment (ROI) 
for The Window by comparing the purchasing patterns of customers 
who spend time on it to those of its general customer population.
The key to an engage strategy is to think like a media company, focused 
every day on earning the attention of your audience. First, know your cus-
tomers and create content that is relevant, compelling, or useful to them; 
then strategize about how to use this engagement to strengthen your cus-
tomer relationship. Meanwhile, measure the impact on your business.