Marketing can do anything!

The functionality arms race in the CRM/MRM/Customer Insight market rumbles on like a family feud at a party. In this stifling atmosphere, marketing departments have to get to grips with THE fundamental question:

Can they change the way they market, profitably, in line with the newly acquired knowledge they will have at their disposal? If they can, will they be able to influence and convince the rest of their business that this is not just the next snake oil cure?

Someone has to say this - 'Current available technology can deliver virtually anything which has been predicted in marketing terms - right now.'

There it's said. Now for all those choking on their Chardonnay, let's get that thought in perspective. There are precious few organisations which are prepared to commit unlimited budgets to creating a marketing led organisation which puts the customer’s needs and wants at the centre. In reality most businesses remain product and function led and there is a serious case of COMMUNIACTION (not a typo) ongoing in business. COMMUNIACTION in my view is the talking up of a good story but betraying that vision with the actual actions.

We have become adept at distinguishing between brightly coloured, fully incorporated, integrated, enterprise wide, customer centric, scalable, multi dimensional, future proofed, market focused & driven powerpoint slides, and the more mundane reality of functionally based systems, multiple data sources stitched together with ETL tools producing a 60% view of an aggregated customer segment. A view which ignores data that seems too difficult or costly to use, overlooks inconsistency, disregards the customers’ latest requests or actions, drives delivery through a pre-purchased or predefined delivery channel and is then used in an inappropriate way by the marketing group. Insight that can only be used for a single purpose does not support wider reporting. It creates its own metrics and perversely reinforces the stereotype of marketing departments being spendthrift, ill informed and a little out of control.

Sadly the majority of marketing departments that have made considerable progress, using what has been available to them, have received precious little recognition of their successes. The slow shift from product to customer centricity is stalled by the lack of clear metrics to define the success, and where these metrics do exist, the vision to define and achieve the way forward are often disjointed, badly costed or at odds with corporate strategy. Marketing finds itself unable to influence mainstream thinking at an infrastructure level, effectively preventing itself from marketing in the manor it intuitively knows it should.

It is time for marketing to grasp this metaphorical nettle. In technology terms marketing arrived at the party late. Our colleagues in finance, operations and even HR were much quicker to embrace the possibilities of the new technology twenty or thirty plus years ago. This has meant that we have ended up with their legacy systems, their infrastructure, their preferred suppliers and their view of what we in marketing need. Unfortunately IT people have had more in common with finance and operations. Their language is common, their view constrained by compliance and regulatory issues, and we in marketing have not been able to articulate exactly what we want and need with the same precision.

Our fight back in the 90’s and early 00’s has involved going our own way with marketing datamarts, salesforce automation, marketing software, outsourcing of data and to agencies for analysis and using operational, transactional and finance data to enhance our sales and marketing data to create the customer insight which we need to remain competitive.

Our marketing world continues to develop apace. Real-time decisioning, RFID linking of our movements in stores, our purchases, our web interaction, predictive modelling, our credit transactions, text messaging, interactive TV, attitudinal/transactional segmentations, all are available at a price.

Marketing has to know which of these available technologies will give value to their business. Marketing will have to engage with IT in defining their requirements for the future; this is already beginning to happen with a new breed of IT savvy marketers, who are as at home talking product and market strategy, as they are debating system integration and database design. Marketing has to have access to all available data so we can no longer ignore the decisions on IT and infrastructure being made in our name in sales, operations and finance. Marketing will have to engage with all the functions to standardise metrics and reporting, moving towards the goal of customer centricity positively, via an evolutional route, and actively championing and understanding the technology infrastructure that is right for marketing.

It should NOT matter what the technology is but in reality IT DOES and therefore marketing must understand and contribute to decisions made. Bitching after the event helps no one. Marketing must be able to contribute to the ROI debate and must deliver a vision that is both pragmatic but achievable, building towards an infrastructure that meets the requirements of other functions while retaining the flexibility to develop in marketing terms. As latecomers to this particular party we have to demonstrate that the investment we require is proportional and will generate value for the business.

By David Arrowsmith, Head of Customer Intelligence Strategy, SAS UK

www.sas.com