Is Your Organization Ready For Marketing’s ‘New Normal’?

Tomorrow’s market leaders will be companies that accept the efforts of consumers to shape their own brand experiences.

Chief marketing officers operate in an environment of change and uncertainty. Digital technologies have grown more sophisticated and are reshaping consumer engagement. Consumer behavior, meanwhile, has become unpredictable, fluid, and experimental. CMOs not only have to help their organizations adapt to these challenges, they must also demonstrate a return on every dollar spent. This is marketing’s “new normal.”

The emergence of innovative, digital-centric competitors is adding to these challenges. Take Nomi Beauty, an on-demand beauty platform that sends hair stylists and makeup artists to customers’ hotel rooms via an app or through their hotel’s concierge service. This combination of high-quality product, convenience, and inexpensive service is proving to be a hit, and has won over high-profile customers, including several A-list celebrities.

Companies like Nomi Beauty embody this “new normal marketing.” These are B2Me businesses: brands that target consumers as individuals and focus on delivering experiences. They have built extremely valuable relationships with consumers and a level of intimacy that traditional marketing struggles to achieve.

Forward-looking CMOs see the emergence of B2Me as an opportunity and are looking to transform their marketing operations accordingly. These CMOs recognize the split between marketing, sales, and customer services and how it is out of step with what their businesses now need. Some are redefining themselves as chief customer officers (CCOs), with the goal not only of building customer intimacy through B2Me, but also driving business growth across channels and navigating the enterprise through a new era of customer-centricity.

From Customer Experience To Consumer Intimacy

One of the most important platforms for this change is personalization. Consumers are increasingly willing to share data in exchange for personalized attention. Innovative brands are tapping into this trend to deliver compelling consumer experiences (CX).

But CX is only the beginning. CCOs are looking to create a new category for marketing: consumer intimacy (CI). CI means engaging with consumers in new ways to shape their experiences at every opportunity and helping consumers become active participants in creating the intimacy that underpins loyalty.

Tomorrow’s market leaders will be companies that accept the efforts of consumers to shape their own brand experiences. Such companies will engage continually with consumers and, in the process, map what Accenture Interactive calls the “customer genome.” This a living profile of the customer’s unique preferences, passions, and needs built on analysis of past interactions and product DNAs, allowing companies to move beyond simply knowing what customers purchase or consume and begin to understand why they made those choices.

A second area of focus for the CCO is “servitization” and how it can unlock the lifetime value of consumers by providing highly convenient, subscription-based services built on the insights gained when mapping the customer genome. Living services, which are contextually aware, self-learning, and designed to anticipate and respond to consumers’ liquid expectations in every environment and situation, hold particular promise.

By taking advantage of the digitization of everything and the unprecedented understanding of customer genomes, businesses will be able to realize the B2Me dream of mass customization and deliver living services that adapt, evolve, and pivot around the individual and radically change the consumer experience.

To achieve this change at the speed required, CMOs will need to create a living marketing organization in which everyone plays a role in brand revitalization and quickly adapts to drive better CX. This living marketing organization will comprise several elements:

• Living creative capabilities, which enable the organization to continually exceed consumer expectations and keep pace with the speed of content production required.
• Living content, which is continually updated, scoured, and analyzed to generate actionable insights.
• Living organizational structures, which enable marketing to continually and rapidly adapt and anticipate consumers’ changing demands.
• Living channels, which make it possible for marketing to reimagine the traditional path to purchase and build intimacy in new ways.
• Living ecosystems, which work as a collaborative engine to ensure that the consumer experience is flawless and seamless across every consumer touch point.

Need To Orchestrate

New normal marketing is exponentially more complex than that of the past. As a result, CCOs will be required to orchestrate a wide variety of players, all working together to meet consumer expectations, create local market intimacy, and drive business results. CCOs will need to ensure marketing, sales, and services can seamlessly deliver a joined-up and timely customer experience. This will include the orchestration of each of these business units with other key partners, including the IT department and third-party agencies.

These changes also will demand a new approach to talent management. First, creating an agile, best-in-class marketing team for the new normal requires balancing human and robotic/AI skills to create experiences that are both data-driven and empathetic. Second, CCOs must constantly rebalance their in-house and outsourced resources, as well as their ecosystem partners, to deliver one-to-one campaigns that resonate with consumers.

New Normal ROI

In the age of living services, ROI takes on new meaning: return on the individual, which will include soft metrics, such as advocacy and contribution to brand health. Moreover, as CCOs balance resources among their in-house talent, agencies, and ecosystem partners, they will be expected to calculate the returns on their investments—and use those ROI measurements to justify their budget requests.

For the CCO, this could mean a projection such as: “We make £100 per customer each year. It will cost us £15 per customer to improve their experience, and with that investment we expect to make £150 per customer each year.” This contrasts with the situation in many organizations today, in which the CMO is often required to make a case for a budget but not for a return.

The new normal for marketing and the consequent rise of the CCO has created a huge opportunity to transform the marketing function from an overhead into a profit center. These CCOs will take on a much broader set of responsibilities and help lead their organizations through this period of change.

Customer experience is going to be a big topic of discussion at Adobe Summit 2017, March 19-23. Click here to view the agenda and register. (Bonus: Enter code CMDC17 for an additional $200 discount.)