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“Marketers Fail to Envision, Fail to Imagine ” © 2010 Metzner Schneider Associates, Inc.
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Recently we shared some Worst Practices we’d seen and experienced which result, we believe, from companies failing to focus on creating appropriate customer engagement strategy and tactics – even in the presence of the most advanced CRM tools available. Now we’d like to suggest some ways to gain focus – and turn that focus into an actionable vision.
The goal of any marketer should be creating the kind of customer experience and relationship that leads to increased sales and profits. What makes them lose focus? Here are a few of the distractions that divert companies from their real marketing mission: Shiny Object syndrome: Marketers, if they are to be any good at what they do, must be in touch with whatever is new or more accurately what is just about to become new in the market. The problem is that marketers often leap on new marketing tools or media with more vigor than they leap on new customer insights. Douglas Rozen of Carlson Marketing identified customer-generated content / social media as the latest shiny object occupying marketers in November 2006 and the following month Time magazine published a shiny cover, reflecting “you,” the consumer, to demonstrate the same trend. And as soon as mass media like Time anoint the current trend in cool marketing tools, marketers will be off searching for the next new tool rather than seeking to gain insight into their customers—even the customers busy generating content about the product or service in question. Black Box blind beliefs: Although it initially would seem to be a badly mixed metaphor, once marketers acquire their shiny object they then treat it as a magic black box. Marketers behave as it owning the technology will make the right thing happen for the customer. But that is like assuming that buying exercise gear will result in improved fitness or that obtaining a light bulb will produce light in a dark room. Impersonal personalization: According to a 2006 study of 300 marketers by Responsys, less than half of marketers personalize any aspect of their e-mail campaigns and of those, nearly 40% limit personalization to the salutation. We’ve talked with several CRM providers who privately express concern that marketers learn and apply so few of the features of their applications that they won’t upgrade when the time comes because the software will not have had an opportunity to produce value. So the tools exist, but most marketers are apparently not using them in the marketplace with customers. The maze of silos: Most of the Worst Practices we’ve observed leave the customer wondering if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. As consultants, we meet plenty of capable marketers who have a pretty good idea of what both hands are doing and that the results sometimes appear absurdly uncoordinated – it is simply that the hands are in different departments and coordinating with hands in any department outside their own is beyond their reach. Being realists, they set goals and make plans for deliverables that are within their control. It is hard to argue with that rationale but the end result is that no one looks at the customer’s experience at all touch-points, across communications channels and over time. Each of the above draws marketers away from what they really should be doing—setting appropriate strategy to inform the technology and create the desired results. First, let’s acknowledge that those magical tools contribute to the problem as well as the solution. Your desktop CRM screen will tell you that there are 30 segments with statistically significant variations between them, but that does not mean that all 30 segments are actionable. So what’s a marketer do? What we see happening now is failure to: Envision the real current experience of their customers. Return to the example of the 30 statistically valid segments. The real way to figure out which segments are actionable is to attempt to envision what happens to an individual within each segment – if you can’t do it after a good faith effort, then the segment is probably not actionable on its own. You are more likely to find that what you envision will be the same for more than one segment. There are several techniques to help with this process. The current “bright shiny object” technique is to develop and analyze personas. The technique has been documented by Forrester throughout 2006 in the context of web design, especially for online retailers. On the first business day of 2007 MarketingProfs.com published an article on using personas to assist in B2B prospecting. The basics are to take all the demographic and behavioral elements in the profile of a segment and use them to write a description of an individual focusing on their needs and wants in relation to your product. It is a fine technique we have used for several years, although admittedly we didn’t call our customer scenarios “personas.” The drawback of the persona technique as currently practiced is that it can be hard to visualize the interactions an individual customer has with your company over time—communications received, purchases made, profiles completed, satisfaction surveys, etc. – touches which can total in the hundreds over the course of a year for any company sending a weekly e-mail or interacting with a customer for weekly purchases. To repeat that visualization process for multiple customer segments becomes onerous, especially when customers can migrate from segment to segment based on their interactions at contact points. We have a client who is so customer focused that they asked for a way to map the interactions for a variety of customer types over hundreds of potential contacts. So we developed a way to facilitate visualization across segments over time that we now call enVision. The technique highlights how simple changes to programming logic can change the customer experience more dramatically for some customers than for others. There are likely other ways to accomplish the same end – the key points to remember remain.... Fully ENVISION the current situation. ....And view both the situation and the potential solutions in multiple dimensions:
Imagining what it really feels like to be someone else is generally considered the province of children or actors. Marketers should make it their province too—unless they enjoy seeing examples from their company on Worst Practices lists.
By Kate Baumgart Hogenson for Metzner Schneider Associates Copyright 2010 Metzner Schneider Associates, Inc. |
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