Welcome Alton Adams!

Welcome Alton Adams, Global Managing Partner for Accenture's Customer Insight practice, as our guest moderator!

Comments

[Graham Hill]

Alton

The challenge as you describe it is mostly about one-way traffic: Marketing knows what's good for the company and for customers (and presumably for America too!). The rest is just marketing execution so that customers get to "experience the brand".

The trouble is, they aren't. Research shows that 80% of customers don't believe that what brands promise will actually be delivered, and 80% of them will still be dissappinted when it isn't. Marketing clearly isn't working from the customer's perspective.

Perhaps companies need to involve customers more in brand co-creation so that the outcomes customers expect from brand consumption are properly understood. And the rest of the organisation in end-to-end execution so that the desired outcomes can be delivered profitably too. That way the company gets to "brand the (real) customer experience".

It rather begs the question: "Is customer business too important to be left to the marketing department?".

Graham Hill