When Jim Lecinski was at Google, he gave marketers a phrase they could put on conference room whiteboards: the Zero Moment of Truth. The idea, which described the research consumers do before they ever walk into a store, became one of those rare pieces of corporate thought leadership that people actually remembered.
Now Mr. Lecinski, who left Google and is a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, is revisiting his framework for an era when the consumer's research assistant might be an artificial intelligence that never sleeps and has no particular loyalty to any brand.
In a recent episode of the podcast "Brave Commerce," Mr. Lecinski spoke with the hosts Rachel Tipograph, the founder and chief executive of the e-commerce platform MikMak, and Sarah Hofstetter, a board director at Campbell's and Kenvue and co-founder of 37Arc, about what happens to the moment of truth when the consumer isn't the one doing the searching.
The conversation turned, as such conversations now inevitably do, to the question of what chief marketing officers should be paying attention to as discovery becomes — in the preferred euphemism of the moment — "fragmented." (That is to say: scattered across so many platforms and interfaces that the old funnel diagrams are starting to look like modern art.)
Mr. Lecinski, who has spent the years since Google teaching the next generation of marketers at Kellogg, suggested that the discipline's fundamentals remain intact even as the machinery around them changes. Whether the consumer is typing into a search bar or asking a chatbot for recommendations, someone still has to understand what that consumer wants and why.
It is the kind of observation that sounds almost too simple, which is usually a sign that it is correct.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Jim Lecinski on the New Zero Moment of Truth in the AI Era"