Only 22% of consumers trust emails from companies or brands.

Just 13% trust ads on websites, and no more than 32% trust ads in any channel.

For marketers, it’s time to wake up to a new reality: Your customers are done with traditional, campaign-based marketing. More often than not, customers interact with a brand outside a targeted campaign, and it is marketing’s job to identify the context of those interactions and build upon them to create new forms of useful, continuous engagement, writes Forrester in new research published today.

McCormick & Company has cracked this code, creating a customer interaction cycle that self-perpetuates new customer insight. Its FlavorPrint program promise is simple: If you tell it what you like, what ingredients you have, and how you feel right now, it provides recipe recommendations. Those recommendations grow finely tuned to your context — so well-tuned, in fact, that users have doubled repeat usage, increased time spent ninefold, and doubled their spice purchases since the platform launched.

According to the research, creating this type of interaction cycle is not only possible for all brands today, it’s essential in order to survive in the age of the customer. Success will depend on an effective combination of marketing automation, real-time analytics, and relevant content to orchestrate an engagement platform that offers utility to each customer.

To learn more about this research, visit the Customer Insights blog.