The Marketing Consortium

Great conversations!

Well, I've come to the end of my tenure as guest moderator and I'd like to pass the baton to Chris Kenton.  You all will really enjoy Chris' take on things and he is sure to stimulate some terrific conversation.

I've really enjoyed our dialog on taking a more targeted approach to marketing and hope you all have as well.  Stay tuned as we flesh out more ideas and have some fun doing so.

As always, please feel free to contact me directly at liz.roche@customersincorporated.com.  And you can stay up to date on what I'm doing by visiting my personal blog at crmdiva.typepad.com. 

Thanks to all!

If You're Not Following the CCO Topic, You're Missing Something...

There is some GREAT dialog going in the CCO topic ("Who Owns the Customer Relationship?")  I encourage you to join the conversation as this is clearly a topic that marketers care about.

More later....

Targeting and Channel Integration

This week, I ran into a former client with whom I worked extensively when I was at META Group (since acquired by Gartner).  It was like old home week and we reminisced about the projects his team had worked on and my involvement.  The company this client worked for back then had spun off his team as a subsidiary business to be focused on providing online marketing and loyalty services back to the parent.  As with so many dot.bomb era ideas, this one fell by the wayside after a few years and the sub was ultimately rolled back into the parent.  My client told me that after all was said and done, the online marketing implementation we had been working so diligently on was never implemented and the technology company they were working with has since been acquired.  Part of the problem was that online marketing and offline marketing had become so different as to be problematic to the brand.

So it got me thinking about the notion that taking a more targeted approach to marketing in some ways is all about cross-channel integration.  If we look at it from the customer's perspective, the marketing experience must be consistent across channels (and personalized, respectful etc. etc.), and information must flow multi-directionally across channels.  But all too often, I see marketers themselves (artifically in my opinion) segmented based on function:  brand marketing, relationship marketing, internet marketing, channel marketing, etc.  I think this exacerbates the problem of channel silos and ultimately precludes sophisticated targeted marketing.

Here's what I'm wondering:  does tarking a more targeted approach mandate channel integeration?  Are the cultural barriers too great?  Does marketing compensation even get close to encouraging us to work across channels?  So tell me, what do YOU think? 

Who Owns the Customer Relationship?

I'm often asked whether competing analysts know each other, and if so, do we somehow collaborate.  I suspect that most folks would be surprised to hear that yes, we know each other (we meet at industry events), and some of us really enjoy working together.  While we don't formally collaborate (though I think a cross-industry analyst consortium would be pretty cool), we can't help but be influenced by one another since no one lives in a cave.

So It's in this context that I'd like to pick up a conversation I started back before Thanksgiving with an analyst from another firm who I really like and respect, though has a vastly different opinion from my own about who "owns" the customer.  I believe if we're trying to influence customer behavior across a lifecycle -- how a customer is engaged (mindshare captured), how the transaction is effected (exchange of "currency"), how the fulfillment works (product/service delivery) and how the service looks (post-sale service and support) -- we must have visibility into and the ability to effect change among each lifecycle stage.  If we buy this notion, then to me this means the customer relationship must be coordinated/directed centrally -- and NOT from within any one of the disciplines in the lifecycle.  I've always said that if for example you have a marketing hammer, then you'll be hammering marketing nails.

So I think that the customer relationship must be coordinated by something like a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) organization, which doesn't live in sales, customer service, marketing or product, but exists independently (reporting to the CEO).  And as such is able to create segment-specific treatment plans (down to segments of 1) that have involement across the lifecycle.  My friend believes (though she's too polite to put it exactly this way) that the notion of a CCO just a bunch of idealistic, unrealistic crap and that since marketing has most of the information about the customer anyway, marketing should own the relationship.

I think this is THE key issue to getting more targeted.  For my money, if I'm going to do more targeted marketing, then I want to take the next step and actually apply differentiated lifecyle treatments based on the (current or future) economic value of that relationship.  If marketing "owns" the relationship, I don't see how it's possible for that organization to credibly influence/direct activity for particular segments say in Customer Service.

I think taking a more targeted approach requires us to think beyond marketing and thus the relationship should be owned (i.e., coordinated) from "on high."  My friend thinks taking a more targeted approach requires us to dig very deeply into behavior-based marketing and that while information could (and should) be shared across organizations, marketing should ultimately control the treatment plans.

What do YOU think?  And does customer ownership really matter at the end of the day?  Or is it just something us analysts like to talk about?  Let's hear it!

Does Using a Blog for Lead Gen Violate an Unspoken Social Computing Norm?

There's a really interesting thread going in the post on what it means to take a more targeted approach.  Since it deals with marketing via social networking, which is a topic we wanted to discuss anyway, I thought I'd bring it up to a main topic.  Chris writes:

"As an avid cyclist, I recently bought a very expensive bike. I spent a lot of time researching the bike and visited maybe 100 web pages, including cycling discussion boards, blogs and reviews. By the time I decided on my purchase, I had visited the manufacturer's site only once, and there was only one piece of information I wanted from them: frame specifications. I didn't want to hear anything else they wanted to sell me or tell me about the bike. Everything I wanted to know about quality and performance I learned from other cyclists. Personally, I see this kind of purchasing behavior growing rapidly, and I don't see a lot of marketers addressing it. Will it eliminate targetted marketing? No. But there's clearly a changing dynamic that intersects with targetted marketing."

What if by "targeting" we meant applying the right message at the right time? In the case of Chris' bike purchase, the right message would have been only about specs, and toward the end of the decision-making process. How would the manufacturer have known about you and where you were in your process? Well, if they were really into social networking, perhaps they'd be monitoring the biking blogs, and if you had visited their site once and they captured any information about you (via opt-in registration of course), perhaps they'd have sent you a follow-up asking what they could do to help your research. Dare I call this notion "social marketing"? Does it violate some unwritten rules of social networking?

What do YOU think about "social networking?"  How would you feel if you received some sort of marketing touch, even if personalized, after posting to a blog?  Let's discuss.

What It Means to Take a More Targeted Approach

Before we can discuss best practices for taking a more targeted approach to marketing, we've got to define what it actually means to do so. The interesting thing is that to some marketers, increased targeting is about who is targeted (e.g., micro-segmentation) while to others it's about targeting the content of marketing messages (e.g., personalization).

To my way of thinking, there are three basic component concepts to a more targeted approach: (1) WHO is targeted (micro-segmentation), (2) HOW they're targeted (personalization, multi-channel marketing; and (3) with WHAT are they targeted (e.g., promotions/offer management).

As marketers, we know that a more narrowly focused marketing effort generates better penetration within a given segment. But it is a different mindset completely to depart from a mass marketing approach to one where you deliberately market differently to hundreds and maybe thousands of tiny segments.  Most of all though, it requires us to embrace the massive fragmentation of our companies’ brand constituents and let go of our long-held belief that the more people we can market to, the better (as opposed to the smaller the segment, the better).

Do you agree with this general framework for taking a more targeted approach to marketing? Tell me what you think!

Taking a More Targeted Approach to Marketing

Hello! I'm thrilled to join the roster of guest moderators and have enjoyed following the various conversations over the past several months. The group of active participants is energetic and I look forward to interacting with you over the next month.

Here's the thing: more folks are reading this blog than are posting to it, and I'd like to challenge you readers out there in the blogosphere to participate in the conversation, not just stealthily follow it. Even if you've never blogged before, give it a try here.  No one is going to judge your "blogging prowess" or style. If you have something to say, this is your forum to say it; to share ideas, rant, vent, challenge, learn and get really jazzed for 2007.

If you're like me, you're officially on vacation this week, but are still putting in a few hours of work every day. Who wants to start the New Year with the mound of e-mail that would otherwise be waiting? So here's my first challenge to you lurkers out there: take a break from e-mail and spend 15 minutes reading through the posts and associated comments. Get a feel for the blog and the people who actively participate; you'll find a nice cross-section of marketing opinions represented. Next, post a response to this entry with some thoughts on what you'd like to discuss relative to how companies can take a more targeted approach to marketing. I'll read them and post some "starter comments" on each topic and we'll be off!  Oh, and you regulars, I'm hoping you'll continue to participate, so please respond with some deas as well.

As for me, I'd like us to be talking about getting more targeted both within and across marketing channels. Here are some topics that I'll be starting conversations on:

• Channel addressability:  Is network TV dead?
• Lead generation:  Is inbound marketing bound to fail? Does using a blog for lead gen violate an unspoken social computing norm?
• Relationship marketing:  Micro-Segmentation vs. personalization - redundant or mutually exclusive?
• Lifecycle Marketing:  Why targeted marketing will ultimately fail and what you can do to prevent it.

Finally, I'd like us to have a conversation on the topic that's perhaps more important to taking a more targeted approach than any other: who actually owns the customer, and does it matter?  I'll tell you why I think this is targeting's "make or break" issue in the upcoming weeks.  It's not the reason you might expect.

So take a few minutes to check in with us here at The Marketers' Consortium. Otherwise I'll look forward to some challenging and insightful conversations in January.

I wish you all a restful week and a terrific New Year.

A Year of Great Marketing Dialog

We are very excited to welcome our first moderator of 2007, Liz Roche, managing partner, Customers Incorporated. Please join the dialog with Liz on how companies can take a more targeted approach to marketing, from December 27 - January 26, 2007.

Unica would like to thank our tremendous line-up of moderators from 2006:

• Don Peppers, noted author and founding partner of Peppers and Rogers Group.
• Elana Anderson, Vice President and Research Director, Marketing Strategy and Technology, Forrester Research.
• Pat LaPointe, managing partner, Marketing NPV, an expert in helping marketers measure their marketing efforts for greater success.

And thank you to those visitors who contributed insightful comments as well!

Unica would like to wish you all Happy Holidays!