Obsessed: The ten rules of the principle abiding marketer

 

Organizational readiness: Customers determine the relevancy of the organization

Rule #6: Acknowledge that your customers don’t care about departments and their correlative dysfunctionalities. Strive to create seamless experiences that do not stop at the sale. 

 

 

A BLOGPOST BY Renout van hove,growthagent

 

 

So, the first part: customers don’t care about your departments and their correlative dysfunctionalities: in other words: stop thinking in silos of Marketing, Sales, Service.

 

 

Marketing is death. Long live Marketing.

 

 

Marketing has become so ridiculously complicated, so profoundly essential and so all-encompassing, one might imagine the role of the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) was never of higher value than it is today. But…an increasing amount of major brands are ditching the role of the CMO. So, what’s happening here?  

 

Let’s take Coca-Cola. One of the most recognized brands in the world. They ditched their CMO way back in 2017. Ever since, other significant players such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Lyft, Hyatt, Kimberly-Clark and McDonald’s have irradicated their CMO roles. 

 

While research shows that today, 70% of the Fortune 500 companies still have a CMO (dropping slightly from 74% in 2009) – the fact that all these brands ditched the CMO role tells us something’s up.

 

 

 

The Chief Marketing Officer is dead, long live the CMO

 

 

Coca-cola created a new role as Chief Growth Officer, replacing the CMO. The title says it all – and is a clear sign of how Marketing is penetrating deeper into the funnel and the organization. McDonald’s has split up its CMO role into roles – one for Marketing Technology and one for Global Marketing.

 

Brands each take their approach when eliminating the CMO role, but this is the similarity: the role that once was one is now split up among two or more positions. Put simply: the CMO is dead in name only, especially as more than ever, marketing leadership is needed at the highest level but needs to be able to handle technology, data, and transformation in parallel. And that is a transformation in both customer-centric thinking, as in organizational change. 

 

Hence, the vast complexity of marketing makes it more difficult to find these competencies in one single role or person. Marketing has now become transversal. 

 

Part 2 of Rule #6: Strive to create seamless experiences that do not stop at the sale. 

 

 

Companies need to concentrate on how to raise the lifetime value of customers and how to reliably boost loyalty, and then to align on defining precisely which primary long-term metrics will drive that type of long-term value for the organization.

 

Accenture research shows that 90% of CMO’s are the connective membrane between all moving parts of an organisation. And the Martech platform as a membrane needs to be able to have data flowing throughout the organisation. Hence Customer Data Platforms (CDP’s) are becoming increasingly essential as a component to enable just that. Without a CDP – there is little membrane. At best you have patch to cover your wounds – in other words pieces of uncoordinated MarTech solutions left and right working isolation and uncoordinated. 

 

When activating data correctly, you will notice a direct impact on customer experience. Knowing only 1% of data in any company today is being put to use to improve customer experience. Hence we need to start measuring differently. 

 

NPS in that context is a thing of the past. And hence Customer Engagement Score (CES) is gaining traction as a new metric that ties customer satisfaction and loyalty together as a metric. A fundamental principle of CES is that consumers tend to punish an organization before they reward them. Bad service experiences usually reach twice the audience than positive experiences. In that context, optimizing customer dissatisfaction overclasses increasing customer satisfaction.

 

The importance of CES is greater than ever since there are only a few metrics that empathize with the customer and focus on the long term relationship; while at the same time zooming in on essential processes that are a fundamental part of the customer journey.

 

The CES projects what the effort was to perform a certain task during the customer journey. Efforts meaning spending time and money but also taking a risk.

 

When thinking in this mindset of minimal effort, everything you do – gets a whole new dimension. Whether it’s planning a meeting, sending out content, having users consume and perform tasks on your website.

 

 

 

 

This blogpost is based upon the new book of Marc Bresseel and Renout van Hove: OBSESSED: Decode the data landscape. Reboot your sales and marketing.

 

 

 

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