Want to Be More Customer-Centric? Begin with the Customer in Mind

If mar­ket­ing is about reach­ing cus­tomers, it makes sense to begin with the cus­tomer in mind. That’s the com­mon think­ing behind sev­er­al of our exclu­sive con­tri­bu­tions to CMO.com over the last two weeks. With the increase of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, the num­ber of oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands to con­nect with cus­tomers on a per­son­al lev­el has nev­er been high­er. Cus­tomer expec­ta­tions have nev­er been high­er as well. Read on to learn what your brand can do to become cus­tomer-cen­tric and meet the demands of a rapid­ly chang­ing world.

Volkswagen’s head of glob­al mar­ket­ing, Anders-Sundt Jensen, recent­ly sat down with CMO.com to dis­cuss the ways the com­pa­ny has been chang­ing its mar­ket­ing approach. He described the company’s goal of being more con­sumer-cen­tric and always on, meet­ing cus­tomers where they are. Jensen also touched on how mar­ket­ing has changed in the last two decades and the chal­lenges it brings.

Kristof Fahy, CMO of Lad­brokes, shared some thoughts on the key points from Adobe’s white paper “Con­duct­ing the Cross-Chan­nel Sym­pho­ny.” Fahy began with the sim­ple fact that most mar­keters real­ize the poten­tial impact of deliv­er­ing a deeply per­son­alised expe­ri­ence to cus­tomers on a con­sis­tent basis. The chal­lenges are many, how­ev­er, and cus­tomer expec­ta­tions are high. Fahy chal­lenges mar­keters to think like their cus­tomers, which means doing the work to dis­cov­er who their cus­tomers real­ly are. Get­ting every­one in the com­pa­ny on the same page will help to cre­ate a more coher­ent and con­sis­tent per­son­alised experience.

While speak­ing to CMO.com at Adobe Sum­mit EMEA 2016, Voda­fone Ireland’s head of dig­i­tal, Bri­an Cor­nish, shared his belief that dig­i­tal is more than just part of a brand’s cus­tomer expe­ri­ence strat­e­gy; it actu­al­ly is the strat­e­gy. Cor­nish came to this real­i­sa­tion after see­ing that 81 per­cent of Vodafone’s con­tacts with cus­tomers are through dig­i­tal. The log­i­cal out­flow of this dis­cov­ery was the under­stand­ing that becom­ing a cus­tomer-dri­ven com­pa­ny means start­ing with dig­i­tal because that’s where the cus­tomers already are.

Lukas Kircher, founder and man­ag­ing direc­tor of C3, touched on cus­tomers’ desire for a deep­er con­nec­tion with the brands they love. Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion has pro­vid­ed con­sumers with numer­ous ways to cel­e­brate their love of a brand that wasn’t avail­able to them a few years ago. Because it’s easy for a cus­tomer to opt out of receiv­ing con­tent, Kircher chal­lenges brands to cre­ate con­tent that is rel­e­vant to their cus­tomers. He adds that con­sumers are look­ing for brand­ed con­tent that tells authen­tic sto­ries based on per­son­alised interactions.

Thomas Bar­ta describes a cus­tomer leader as some­one who knows what the cus­tomer wants. At the same time, cus­tomer lead­ers know their prod­uct, why it exists, and how it’s made. Since knowl­edge of the com­pa­ny and its prod­uct is just as impor­tant as cus­tomer knowl­edge in climb­ing the organ­i­sa­tion­al lad­der, Bar­ta out­lines some of the key ways mar­keters can grow as cus­tomer lead­ers, and all cen­ter around get­ting to know more about the organ­i­sa­tion you work for than just the mar­ket­ing department.

We hope you’ll take some time this week to read our exclu­sive con­tent at CMO.com and learn from some of the top mar­keters in the indus­try. Let us know what you think.