Moving Brands Towards Customer Centricity

Many of CMO.com’s exclu­sive con­trib­u­tors over the past cou­ple of weeks shared about the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and mov­ing brands to a place of cus­tomer cen­tric­i­ty. As one con­trib­u­tor shared, cus­tomers today are more informed. Their expec­ta­tions are high­er and they exer­cise a greater degree of con­trol over what they give their atten­tion to. For a brand to grab and hold con­sumers’ atten­tion, much thought must be giv­en to their per­son­al jour­neys and how they impact the con­sumers’ buy­ing choic­es. Brands need to give a great deal of atten­tion to the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and to giv­ing the cus­tomer control.

CMO.com had a chance to inter­view the CMO of Atom Bank, which is about to launch as the UK’s first app-based dig­i­tal-only bank. CMO Lisa Wood shared the strate­gies Atom Bank is adopt­ing to give cus­tomers more con­trol over what mat­ters to them most when it comes to banking—their mon­ey. Not only is Atom Bank work­ing to empow­er cus­tomers and con­nect them to their mon­ey, they’re also using ana­lyt­ics to nudge cus­tomers with sug­ges­tions for bet­ter man­ag­ing it.

Mhairi McE­wan, Group CEO for Brand Learn­ing, shared some strate­gies for organ­i­sa­tions look­ing to increase growth. The strate­gies begin with embrac­ing more cus­tomer-cen­tred lead­er­ship. This involves restruc­tur­ing a com­pa­ny by begin­ning with the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and work­ing back­ward. Addi­tion­al strate­gies for increas­ing growth McE­wan shared include estab­lish­ing a growth pur­pose and pur­su­ing inno­va­tion and collaboration.

Mar­ius Smyth, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor EMEA for AdRoll, shared some insights on attri­bu­tion mod­els in mar­ket­ing in light of the increase in pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing. The key dri­ving ques­tion for mar­keters is to find out just how much influ­ence a piece of mar­ket­ing played in a suc­cess­ful con­ver­sion. Smyth encour­ages mar­keters to embrace attri­bu­tion mod­els that track mul­ti­ple cus­tomer touch points in order to “give cred­it where cred­it is due.”

Klaus Som­mer Paulsen, CEO & Founder of Adven­ture­LAB and Co-Found­ing Part­ner of, CNA | SOPHIS, shared the need for brands to use new tech­nolo­gies to be inno­v­a­tive in find­ing new solu­tions and strength­en­ing cus­tomer rela­tion­ships. He described the ben­e­fits of the Audi­ence Expe­ri­ence Loop, which is about cre­at­ing a “a vir­tu­ous cir­cle of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence from the Before, Dur­ing, and After stages of a con­ver­sion, which ulti­mate­ly leads to more conversions.”

In an exclu­sive inter­view with CMO.com, Moni­ka Schulze, Glob­al Head of Mar­ket­ing at Zurich, shared what she’s doing to bring more of a cus­tomer focus to the Ger­man insur­ance com­pa­ny. This includes learn­ing to speak the customer’s’ lan­guage and shap­ing the com­bi­na­tion of media based on the tar­get customer’s journey.

We hope you’ll spend some time engag­ing with our exclu­sive con­tent at CMO.com. Please let us know what you think.