Back to the Future: The New Realities of Customer Centricity and Marketing, Forecast Five Decades Ago
Over the past several years, leading companies have entered a period of marketing and operational convergence, or intersection. During this time, those of us who actively follow, and consult in, such trends are witnessing significant multichannel media application (and resultant omnichannel application by consumers), along with more effective and pervasive customer data gathering, analysis, and application, a stronger enterprise-wide focus on customers, and recognition by senior executives that a dedicated high-level function, supported by a team and sufficient resources, is needed to lead and manage the customer experience.
One of my business heroes is direct marketing pioneer, adman Les Wunderman. In the late 1960s, speaking about the future of interactive media, customer relationships, and customer experiences, he predicted many of the realities and challenges we are seeing today. The past decade has brought profound changes to consumer decision making and approaches to customer experience and marketing. Significant advances in communication technology are, at the same time, impacting all marketers and enterprises and in a big way. Marketers have to adjust their budgeting, relationship building, omnichannel influence and personalization methods, “Big Data” generation, analytics, and microsegmentation—all while attempting to hit the moving target that is their continuously transitioning customer base.
These changes include:
• Mobile marketing, direct response design and execution—Though younger consumers have led the way, mobile communications methods are now a “must’’ for every marketer, as their targeting becomes hyper-local and hyper-timely.
• Emotional and relationship drivers, even in business-to-business (B2B)—It’s no longer just about functional and rational elements of customer value. We’re now seeing a return to, and greater emphasis on, neuromarketing.
• Accurate, real-world performance metrics—Customer satisfaction is an 1980s, minimally actionable measure, and most loyalty indices, and metrics like NPS, CES, and other simplified scores have serious granular application challenges. Marketers must ask: What works? What monetizes?
• Downstream behavioral power of customer experience and brand reputation/image—Along with the recognized impact of customer experience touchpoints, company/brand equity and image are now as important in driving behavior as customer features.
• Customer collaboration, social dialogue, and content development—Today, customers have lower trust, and resulting reduced loyalty behavior, levels if they are not included in message, product, service, and process development.
• Testing, modeling, and analysis—In a simpler time, marketers were principally doing A/B message and content testing, if any testing was going on at all. Some companies still practice minimal testing, relying on conventional wisdom, and unwilling to stray beyond the basic; but the trend is toward greater accuracy coming from application of multivariate testing techniques, and the more actionable analyses this yields.
• Blending traditional and new marketing techniques for great effectiveness—While there is rightly lots of focus on the impact of online and mobile social media, and how it can be leveraged, offline informal communication remains the stronger driver of customer decision-making behavior. Like skilled chefs, marketers need to learn the combined art and science of blending established print and electronic media and messages with what is floating in the cloud, which will most resonate with consumers.
In addition, virtually every company in every B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) sector is vulnerable to reputation attack and resulting business impact. As noted by Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist for international public relations firm Weber Shandwick:
There is an increasingly critical connection between brand and service promise, corporate and brand reputation trustworthiness, the transactional experience (as delivered by people, processes, communications and culture), and downstream customer behavior. Any small ripple in reputation change (such as through a product-related issue, online rumor or executive miscue), brand performance or customer service can have a tsunami-like effect on business outcomes which may last indefinitely. This is especially true now because of the permanency provided by social media.
So, in the interest of building customer centricity, optimizing relationships, and delivering more positive results to marketing, operational, and communication efforts, all enterprises would be well-served to treat “trust,” “trustability,” and “trustworthiness” as a critical core emotional driver of downstream customer behavior, and to assure that confidence, represented by a positive image and reputation, is a major focus.
The developments in customer-centric marketing are incredibly important to all organizations, irrespective of size or industry. The goal of Customers Inside, Customers Outside, and the five key areas it covers—
• The customer-centric enterprise
• Customer and brand decision making and influence
• Customer behavior measurement
• Big customer data
• Customer strategy and tactics
—is to offer both perspectives and approaches for optimizing customer behavior, and building a more customer-focused culture, to keep pace with these sea of changes and rapid evolutions in customer decision making and customer experience dynamics.
Keywords
marketing, customer loyalty, customer centricity, customer experience, employee loyalty, employee ambassadorship, performance metrics, communication, corporate image and reputation, customer data, big data, chief customer officer, word-of-mouth, trust, brand, loyalty program, customer complaints, advertising, social media, leadership, relationships