CMO.com Highlights: The Customer Experience

Over the past week, CMO.com has engaged sev­er­al lead­ing Euro­pean mar­ket­ing exec­u­tives in com­pre­hen­sive con­ver­sa­tions about dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Focus­ing on a dif­fer­ent theme each week but give each exec­u­tive an open forum to talk about it in a way that describes how he or she han­dles it with­in their own com­pa­ny. That per­spec­tive then becomes borne from the cus­tomer point of view, presents as a rich dis­cus­sion with dif­fer­ent twists, and turns around that com­mon theme. These exclu­sive arti­cles and inter­views are pub­lished on CMO.com dai­ly under the Euro­pean region list­ings, with one exclu­sive arti­cle is pub­lished each week day.

Last week’s focus was on the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. There is a com­mon agree­ment with­in the mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ty that improv­ing and per­son­al­is­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence will dri­ve mar­ket­ing strate­gies well into the future. The increas­ing matu­ri­ty of mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy is at the root of this rev­o­lu­tion of dig­i­tal strate­gies as the abil­i­ty to learn more about the cus­tomer at the indi­vid­ual lev­el grows expo­nen­tial­ly over time. That fact, cou­pled with com­pa­nies devel­op­ing bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy that pro­duces more fresh and engag­ing per­son­alised con­tent at the blind­ing veloc­i­ty of cus­tomer inter­ac­tions over the ever-increas­ing dig­i­tal chan­nels avail­able, is trans­form­ing dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing into an enter­prise effort that dic­tates the dis­man­tling of iso­lat­ed cor­po­rate orga­ni­za­tion­al silos into a bet­ter inter­nal­ly con­nect­ed and inte­grat­ed team.

Simon Gill, Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer at UK Dig­i­tasLBi, and Simon Michaelides, Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor at UKTV, began the week’s dis­cus­sion on one of the hottest top­ics of the day, the role of cre­ative design in the mar­ket­ing process. Both men pro­vid­ed a pow­er­ful one-two punch high­light­ing inter­nal organ­i­sa­tion­al trans­for­ma­tions that must take place to make cre­ative “design think­ing” an inte­gral part of the brand sto­ry­telling process. The strength of their view is borne out in the doc­u­ment­ed per­for­mance of design-led com­pa­nies evi­denced in the Simon Michaelides obser­va­tion, “How­ev­er, design con­tin­ues to be a dis­tin­guish­ing fac­tor, as design-dri­ven com­pa­nies have out­per­formed the S&P Index by 219% over 10 years.”

The Jere­my Coren­bloom, Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor of Match.com for the UK and Ire­land, exclu­sive inter­view was eye open­ing in two respects. First, the efforts to pro­vide a pos­i­tive cus­tomer expe­ri­ence aren’t lim­it­ed to online dig­i­tal efforts. The omni-chan­nel expe­ri­ence must extend to offline chan­nels in his line of busi­ness. The per­son­al, phys­i­cal con­nec­tion is key to his company’s suc­cess. Sec­ond, peo­ple recog­nise that the world is not per­fect and nei­ther are they. In his case, part of deliv­er­ing on the expec­ta­tions of the cus­tomer is to “love their imper­fec­tions” as part of the match­ing process. That is an inter­est­ing cus­tomer insight.

The final two exclu­sives of the week were con­tributed by Katz Kiely, Direc­tor of Strat­e­gy Con­sult­ing for Cog­nifide, and Shane Mur­phy, Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor EMEA for Adroll. Katz was extreme­ly artic­u­late and diplo­mat­ic in point­ing out the cus­tomer cen­tric­i­ty has to imple­ment­ed inter­nal­ly and com­plete­ly with­in any com­pa­ny that wants to suc­ceed in meet­ing the cus­tomers expec­ta­tions. It’s the only way to ensure that your mar­ket­ing mes­sage is seam­less, con­sis­tent, and rel­e­vant across all mar­ket­ing chan­nels while recog­nis­ing that chang­ing the cor­po­rate cul­ture is no easy task. Shane, on the oth­er hand, clear­ly demon­strat­ed that change couldn’t stop there. Dig­i­tal inno­va­tors are need­ed in every mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tion that chal­lenge the sta­tus quo and moves beyond it in pre­sent­ing the mar­ket­ing mes­sage in an enlight­ened and unique way that entices the cus­tomer to engage and inter­act with your brand.

We invite you to our inti­mate and high­ly engag­ing place on CMO.com. Read our exclu­sive engage­ments with the most enlight­ened dig­i­tal mar­keters in the Euro­pean region. Con­nect with us and let us know what you think.