Tewks Blog

Stop the presses (I mean for the print circulars)! Marketers and advertisers need our help. A deluge of new and maturing technologies like video on demand (i.e., Tivo), streaming video (TerryTate), ubiquitous broadband access, interactive web 2.0 applications, and digital social networks are absolutely clobbering the returns of marketing campaigns. Not just traditional campaigns mind you, all campaigns – this isn’t just a channel issue.

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In culmination what these technologies have wrought is an overall c-change in the way consumers engage with advertising. Attention spans are shorter; it’s much easier to opt out; interactions are occurring through many more channels; and everyone is more adept at tuning out the noise. “Going digital” isn’t going to solve these problems. They are too deep rooted in the fabric of the way marketing has gone about its business. No, to address these issues something more radical is needed.

Enter the Customer Centric Marketing Organization (CCMO). To be customer centric an organization must hold the customer, not themselves (we are a great company), or their products (our stuff / brand is the best!) as the central tenet of all subsequent activities. Value must be framed into context of value add to the customer.

Understanding what a CCMO is can be more easily understood by understanding how one is built. There are three, layered upon one another, pieces: the roots – Customer Loyalty Management (CLM), the trunk – Customer Experience Management (CEM), and the branches and leaves – Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

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While it may sound like buzz word bingo, each piece plays an integral role without which the whole thing falls apart. Since there are so many variable definitions for each term, let’s take a moment to define what they mean in context of the CCMO.

CLM

Like roots, the strategic oversight provides the stability and foundation for planning and executing meaningful interactions. Principally, the CLM effort must address organization structure, and establishing customer experience KPI’s (e.g., NPS, C^3, etc.) that are correlated to financial performance.

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The next step is then to take the KPI’s and perform a rigorous data analysis to extract insights and identify key segments.

CEM

Once segments have been established, the experience map can grow into shape. During this phase a combination of user experience and analytic resources are charged with mapping behavioral patterns. This isn’t a lifecycle or valuation exercise, but a very granular focus on the channels of engagement. The intent is to not only optimize the interaction, but also to bury analytic sensors, or listening posts throughout to help drive future micro improvements to the experience.

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It cannot be overstated how difficult, or how critical to the success of the CCMO is this behavioral mapping process. Without good maps, the heavy investment, execution driven CRM piece is bound to fail.

CRM

Talk about the leaves on a tree. There are more definitions than you can shake a stick at (ouch – my puns hurt). In terms of the CCMO, however, let’s constrict this to tools that address channels of interactions, or that facilitate marketing decision making. Better, but still a lot of vendors and not a lot of shape. To help further form this, let’s frame it context of the Customer Information Factory (CIF).

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Building a CIF is certainly not for the faint of heart. Doing so requires disparate skills from across the IT and marketing organizations as well as an ultra-unique hybrid that can float across both. Hopefully you’ve been avoiding saturated fats, because for sure, to drive profitable relationships today the CIF is a prerequisite.

Another important concept the CIF diagram captures, that actually is also addressed during the CLM and CEM phases is the notion of concept of brand versus relationship (an evolution of direct response) marketing.

Brand advertising has been around for a long, long time and it has been king. A preponderance of the dollars, energy, and acclaim has been dedicated to it and for good reason – brand has consistently delivered results. A lot of customer centric approaches (or practitioners) trumpet its demise. However, I think this is reactionary and ignores the strategic role, while maybe somewhat diminished or shared, that brand advertising still plays.

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The concept here isn’t to flip the funnel, but focus on the pipe within the funnel. It’s the pipe, where the current runs deepest and fastest, where you fattest (pretend you’re selling Krispy Kreme) customers swim, and where you can find the highest ROI for today’s marketing and advertising dollars.

In conclusions, today’s marketer’s are at a crossroad. The tried and true approaches for building brand and wealth are returning diminishing returns and the extension of the status quo into digital can only stave off the inevitable. Change is hard and it can be painful. Ultimately, though, the visionary organizations who commit to building a CCMO, who commit to serving their customers, and who learn to define value through the eyes of their customers are poised to steal the lunch of their less nimble competitors.