Transform Your Business with Mobile, Social, Global, Digital Marketing

A joint interview with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development, Oracle Corporation and Lars Silberbauer, global director of social media and search for LEGO Group  on three compelling areas of marketing that are influencing the business environment: customer experience, data-driven marketing, and the real-time marketing organization.

1. 1.    What pressure does the increasing importance of customer experience (CX) to business competitiveness put on the marketing organization?

Reggie Bradford: Today’s CX is increasingly driven by technology-fueled consumers and their rising expectations—and not so much by your competitors. The consumer is clearly in control and has been for some time. Social media and emerging platforms, such as (especially) mobile messaging, are not fads but mainstream components of communication by consumers and businesses, and should not be siloed from other areas of marketing.

The chief marketing officer has become more ACCOUNTABLE for revenue and ROI, and the ubiquity of mobile and social has caused the CMO to become responsible for customer experience (CX). This necessitates a digital-first skill set, more science than art, as automation becomes mainstream in more areas. The cloud creates the opportunity for the entrepreneurial CMO to be fluid and respond to rapid change, and forces the CMO and CIO to collaborate. Creativity and content are still in huge demand, but channeled and applied differently today.

Lars Silberbauer, global director of social media and search for LEGO Group.

Lars Silberbauer: I think it’s important not to regard the social media department as driving the organization’s customer experience strategy. The social media group is the eyes and ears of the organization—they’re not executing the strategy, they’re making the organization aware of where to go and why!

The CX pressure comes from the need to be real-time—even more than real-time, actually, to be forecasting what will trend tomorrow and why. The opportunities come from the change to being proactive in setting the direction—not the follower of consumer trends but being able to create them by connecting with consumers.

1. 2.            How does a marketing organization make the most of today’s “media fragmentation” and the proliferation of consumer data?

Reggie: “Eyeballs and attention spans” have splintered in material ways. Mobile and social technology have created a near-ubiquitous market where consumers’ interests and attention flow across multiple interfaces: online, in-store, and digital devices. Massive amounts of data exist in many parts of the organization. Being able to access that and use it to understand customer behavior—even, as Lars said, predict it—is compelling and vital to today’s marketer.

This means a greater need for data to become “liquid,” or unlocked, so that its true value can be leveraged in real time.

Lars: An essential part of data-driven marketing is to go from the basics of collecting and storing large amounts of data to the point where you make the data actionable—you enable marketers to take action based on the data. That requires at least three things: (1) making sure that the data can be understood by people who are not data analysts; (2) keeping a strong focus on the sense-making part of analyzing data; and (3) executing across all marketing media segments—paid, owned, and earned media (POEM)—instantly.

To really scale the power of data-driven marketing, the data needs to be accessible to all marketers, and not just from a platform perspective but also in the way that the design of the user interfaces, dashboards, and basic interactions with the data are created. It should be possible for everyone in the marketing organization to easily access and drill down into the data to increase their knowledge and insights about their business. Basically, you need to make sure that marketers have easy access not to all the data but to the relevant data. So a strong focus on minimizing the signal-to-noise ratio is essential.

1. 3.            What is a real-time marketing organization, and how does it affect business overall?

Lars: A real-time marketing organization is much more than just being able to post content during the Super Bowl. It’s about building very agile marketing capabilities—an organization that has the capability of change at its very core. Disruption is daily business in digital marketing, so the generic capabilities that you need are all about being agile and able to change.

There are four core disciplines that are essential for building a real-time marketing organization: (1) data and insights; (2) content creation; (3) distribution/publishing; (4) consumer engagement.

The interesting challenge that occurs in building these capabilities is that the real-time marketing organization will create a need for change in other parts of the business. For instance, the finance department will be required to develop more agile ways of assigning, executing, and tracking budgets. The legal department will need faster turnaround times. And the increasing need for automation will require managers to move more decision-making to the front line, so that decisions can be made in real time. That, of course, requires competency and empowerment of the involved staff.

Reggie: Consumers want a real-time experience—real-time communication, real-time service. In fact, they’re demanding it or they will go elsewhere. By 2020, more than 80% of global customers’ purchase behaviors will occur through digital interactions, according to research firms. The disconnect comes as many consumers have inconsistent experiences across business areas, channels, or departments. And that’s because companies’ consumer profiles and customer data are illiquid and not integrated. As Lars said, data must be useful and actionable to create this seamless, real-time customer experience.

Poor customer experience correlates negatively to brand value. It is essential to create a seamless, real-time customer experience, as mobile-only players like Uber andAIRBNB create the new consumer expectations.