I've been enjoying the philosophical plane of discussion over the past week, but I'm also conscious of trying to bring the dialog back down to earth to look at the real-world implications for marketers. I have an opportunity to pull some philosophical and practical threads together today, after following some threads in the ongoing discussion about the meaning of social media which led me to Peter Kim's post on reinventing the marketing organization.
If you want to dive into the navel-gazing details of the ongoing dialog, I'm continuing to post on the issue at Marketonomy. It's a little like listening to a bunch of auto mechanics talk shop, so I'm not going to continue to flog that horse here. But Marianne Richmond made the connection between the broader evolution of social media and its impact on institutions and organizations. The shift in control over how knowledge is shaped and how it's accessed--what many are calling the democratization of information--is forcing changes in institutions from politics to education. She suggests a parallel change in business, and points over to Peter Kim's post on reinventing the marketing organization.
Peter Kim is an analyst at Forrester, and last summer completed a report called Reinventing the Marketing Organization. In a blog post that accompanied the release of the report, he invokes the enduring disconnect between what businesses say and what they do when it comes to building a customer-centric organization, and he sums up the executive summary of the report:
Today's marketing organizations are broken. Three out of four marketing departments have reorganized in the past two years. Almost 80% of marketers don't influence a critical customer interaction like customer service, and 85% don't even own the "four Ps" of marketing anymore. To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires: 1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics; 2) shifting culture away from marketing communications; 3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and 4) rethinking agency relationships.
Finally, he asks, why is there "so much more talk than action today around being customer-centric?" And this is where a few of the threads came together for me that bring the impact of social media right down to the front line of marketing. I wrote a comment on Peter's blog that I'll paraphrase here.
When it comes to customer centricity, I think there's a missing part of the equation that is highly relevant to what's driving social media. It's not just about "customer-centricity" per se, but about what that actually means to an organization. Businesses can be customer-centric in ways that are predatory, empowering, manipulative, supportive, exploitive, collaborative, opportunistic, or even just utilitarian.
People are engaging in social media to directly inform purchasing decisions like never before. Why? Distrust of marketing spin. People feel manipulated and exploited by advertising and marketing, and they want to see behind the spin before they invest their trust in a business or product.
Much of the literature on customer-centric metrics highlights the depersonalization of customers in ways that run in direct opposition to the trends driving social media. If you look closely at specific metrics, they are cast in the mold of Corporate Strategy--internally focused metrics that highlight efficiency. You can be incredibly efficient at doing the wrong things, a truth that is hammered home every day by mercenary marketers that drive relentlessly toward a 1.5% campaign conversion rate, while antagonizing the other 98.5% of their prospects--people they'll go back to again and again in the future, but couldn't care less about if they don't convert today.
If you're truly going to be customer-centric, you need to define what that means to your organization. If you want to be customer-centric in a way that resonates with today's highly networked customer communities, then you better define it in terms that actually have meaning for the customer.
This doesn't mean a tectonic shift in the tactical mechanisms of marketing as much as it means a shift in the attitudes companies have toward customers, and how those attitudes shape behaviors. I see many companies call themselves customer-centric while spamming their own customer lists repeatedly in order to squeeze out an extra percentage point in conversion. In a few cases they actually justify their approach by saying they're doing their customers a favor by giving them another shot at an incredible offer. Is that customer-centric? Absolutely. But not in any way that's going to help them sustain their customer base in an age of Word-of-Mouth on steroids.
Over the next few days, I'm going to post more tactical and practical information on social media. But I hope this resonates as one bridge between the philosophical debate--which can get very tedious very quickly--and the practical implications. Social media is an emerging concept that many people are trying to frame in ways that help us understand where all this networking technology is leading us. What it means in the simplest terms is this: Your customers are comparing notes. So are your partners and suppliers. That means effective transparency about everything you do and say--not just what you wrap up in a pretty bow for consumption--whether you like it or not.
Does that change the way you think about and market to your customers? If not, you're either already well-aligned with your customers, or it will take the market and not a blog to convince you otherwise. If it does change the way you think about customers, then the place to start is by asking what customer-centricity means to them. They're the ones who will be spreading the word about you.
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