The return of touch - why marketers need to embrace physical experiences again

At the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference back in October, the Harris Poll surveyed marketers to understand the key issues they face today. The results of those polls were compared to consumer data research to see where marketer perception is (or isn’t) meeting public reality.

Four key takeaways were shared, but the one that caught my attention was the return of touch (RoT).

People crave human touch. Whioe it feels like everything is digital today, and much of that is automated and artificial, there’s something to be said for getting back to physical touchpoints as part of a marketing strategy. Marketers were asked what kind of physical touchpoints they should invest in (if at all), and 70% said community-hosted brand events were top of the list, followed by experiential retail (66%), and pop-up stores (56%).

From a B2C consumer context, 73% of millennials and Generation Z (Gen Z ...