Simplify Your Approach to Consumer Centricity: How Spring EQ Designs For Today’s Consumer Expectations

“Getting a mortgage should be as easy as creating a playlist.” 

Is the above statement beyond the realm of possibility? Is it unrealistic? According to Haydn Sweterlitsch, it’s what consumers expect.

Haydn is SVP of Marketing at Spring EQ, a technology-based originator of home equity loan products that unlocks the goals of homeowners by providing visibility and access to their home’s equity at dramatically reduced time and cost. Haydn brings a wealth of experience to Spring EQ with over 20 years of experience creating omnichannel strategy, content and campaigns for global clients including Amazon, Microsoft, Volkswagen, and more.

Haydn took to the stage at V!A Philadelphia 2022 to show us how disruption has impacted the marketing industry, and why the focus on simplified experience and user design centering around the customer will be critical for companies to keep pace moving forward. Watch his full presentation here.

Customers are in control – and they demand simplicity

There is a natural gravitation toward product centricity in regulated markets that can’t be denied. Many outside influences and events can have an “outsized” influence on how we live. For any regulatory event or rate environment, product centricity makes sense where companies need the right product to ride any given wave. However, what we’re currently seeing across the marketing industry is a move toward customer centricity, as customers have more options than ever and more control throughout the buying journey.

You might be wondering: why do consumers have more control now? 

According to Haydn, disruption across other industries influences the marketing landscape. Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and others disrupt distribution methods, as well as consumer experiences and expectations every day.

Whether insurance, banking, healthcare or mortgages–customers expect even highly regulated, considered purchase categories to deliver as streamlined of an experience as a Google search, an Amazon Prime delivery or a playlist stream. Seamless interactions such as these (AKA the “Amazonification” of customer experience) are what marketers in every category now compete against, because customers have grown conditioned to expect—and demand—true simplicity, speed and flexibility.

Something that will never change is the need for marketers to engage with consumers where they are—through the consumer’s preferred channel with the right message at the right time. In your quest as marketers to simplify the customer experience, you seek that one metric to rule them all – that one metric to unlock the perfect consumer engagement with your brand throughout the entire consumer journey. While the perfect metric doesn’t exist, what does exist is behavioral data. Haydn believes that behavioral data is, and will continue to be, critical in designing simplified consumer experiences.

Better Together: Harnessing the Power of Behavior-Based Marketing

At Spring EQ, the design, development, deployment and optimization of customer interactions, platforms and pathways are informed by behavioral data. To get closer to that perfect metric, they leverage a unique view of their consumers’ shopping behavior—seeing the earliest signal of shopping activity, so they can engage customers right as they are coming into market. This enables them to leverage those early-stage behavioral signals and start higher up the sales funnel. Activate helps brands know when their customers and prospects first start researching their options – or if they’re exploring the competition.

No one can say exactly what opportunities will be available for marketers within IoT interactivity, or the birth of the Metaverse era — but one thing is for sure: behavioral data signal events will continue to rise in value for marketers.

Watch Haydn’s full presentation here, and unlock hours of exclusive content and marketing thought leadership from V!A Philadelphia 2022 here.