Welcome to the Future of Customer Experience Marketing

Old marketing habits die hard

by Dale Wolf, Cincom Systems at Expert Access

Looking back from the future we can see that as the century changed, marketing went from intrusive to helpful.

We left the safe cove of mass media. Our conversations with customers became more relevant at a personal, one-to-one level. We stopped communicating with people who had no interest in our offerings.

We learned how to locate and win over prospects with more personalized and helpful service, reliability and quality.

We discovered that giving up control of the selling process and shifting to a focus on making customers happier actually improved sales results.

Both the marketer and the customer profited. Marketing became more accountable for results.

The line was drawn

Marketers will mark 1995 as the point in history when a line was drawn between traditional marketing and data-driven marketing. This was the point in time when the rise of consumer power, a convergence of technology, and the potential for longitudinal customer relationships mandated we change how we converse with customers.

Two innovations in 1995 changed the customer conversation: Amazon's personalized recommendation engine and eBay's online auction engine. Together, they launched e-commerce in new directions and began a revolution in marketing that has reached far beyond the World Wide Web.

Just three years later, two Stanford programmers sent out a third tsunami when they developed an algorithm that echoed Amazon's automated personalized recommendation engine. They founded Google with an engineering concept that treated website links as recommendations, and from that foundation came the world's most effective search engine.

When was the last time you walked into a store where the clerk greeted you at the door with an item selected just for you? In the world of online commerce, Amazon and eBay can accomplish the seemingly impossible. They have built stores for every customer, picking perfect items from a universe of millions, all in the blink of an eye, thousands of times each second. In other sectors like package shipping, pizza delivery, discount airlines, electronics and low cost retail, companies such as UPS, Dominos, Southwest, Best Buy and Wal-Mart have changed customer expectations that every other company must meet just to be in the game.

The 4 Ps yield to a new kind of conversation

Customers already are demanding that we change the way we talk with them -- more personalized, more relevant, less interruptive. It will take time at many corporations because a generation of marketers who grew up practicing the 4Ps is still at the helm. They are only begrudgingly giving up on traditional mass marketing. This change will happen faster at companies led by marketers who see clearly into the future.

Few companies show sustained growth

A 1998 study by the Corporate Strategy Board examined 172 companies that were at one time in the Top 50 of Fortune 500 companies. Only five percent achieved sustained inflation-adjusted growth of more than six percent while 95 percent stalled. Of the companies whose growth had stalled, only four percent were able to successfully reignite their growth even to a rate of one percent above Gross National Product (GNP) growth. Once growth has stalled, it is nearly impossible to restart it. [1]

[1] The Innovation Solution. Clayton Christensen. Page 5

Four recently published studies indicate that roughly only one company in 10 succeeds at sustained growth:

1. Profit from the Core (Chris Zook and James Allen) only 13 percent of 1,854 companies achieved sustained growth.

2. Creative Destruction (Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan) only 16 percent of 1,008 companies achieved sustained growth.

3. Good to Great (Jim Collins) only nine percent of 1,435 companies achieved sustained growth.

4. Stall Points (Corporate Strategy Board) only five percent of Fortune 50 companies achieved sustained growth.

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Dale Wolf began his career as a sports journalist, followed by several years as an advertising and promotion copywriter. Both account for the lively and engaging writing style found in his blogs. After several years running his own sales promotion agency serving Fortune 500 companies, Dale joined Cincom's marketing team as a brand marketing manager with responsibility for direct marketing best practices, campaign strategies and global website strategy. He is a recognized expert in customer-centric marketing, and a thought leader in customer experience management strategy.