Graham,
WOW!
Of all the companies I have worked with over a 25 year career as a consultant, interim director and in private equity, the ONLY company that was genuinely interested in creating mutual value with customers was Toyota. It is the only company I feel privileged to have worked with.
This is so strikingly true of all the creative professionals who are joining COMRADITY. Not Toyota specifically. But in careers of over 20 years, one maybe two projects/clients they were proud to have worked on.
In the marketing business there are a lot of blowhards quick to take credit for a success story. Then there are those who know "it takes a village" - client management with the courage to listen to the customer, and a company-wide commitment to respond. As a strategist, you can identify the spark that will turn on the customer and the plan and tools, but if the enterprise doesn't respond, it will fail. Marketing is complicated.
The blowhards who write the case studies everyone studies in business school oversimplify. And many management teams will gladly drink that koolaid rather than actually listen to their customers.
Yes marketing could be a science. But science is for the curious. You start with a hypothesis, you consider the implications, and then test. You listen for the feedback.
When you make the hypothesis, the prediction of what consumers will do, and stop there, without listening for feedback, that is not science.
Adtech is not curious. It is sure it is right. It stalks customers to find a soft spot and then spams incessantly, without any ability to detect feedback. It is a hunter. An inherently flawed model for relationship building.
On another front, The reason click fraud is successful is because adtech is designed to stalk and shoot. If it were designed to listen for feedback and respond, click fraud would be impossible.
K-
On Oct 18, 2013, at 4:13 AM, Graham Hill <
">
> wrote: Hi Iain
Most of my consulting, interim and private equity work is at senior and board level of multi-billion dollar banks, insurers, telcos and so on. I see these discussions played out on an almost daily basis.
I agree with Iain entirely when he says that customer experience is often overwhelmed by other factors on the corporate agenda. The fact is, customer experience was never particularly high up the agenda in the first place. It was introduced about 15 years ago on the coat tails of Pine & Gilmore's book 'The Experience Economy', largely as a replacement for CRM as it started to become less effective through over and mis-use. The thinking was that as CRM was starting to alienate customers - who found nothing in it for them - focusing on improving the end-to-end experience would be the next competitive battleground in customer-facing business. Despite a few high-profile successful examples, the majority of customer experience implementations are focused on the companies and not on customers, and as a result have failed to improve the lot of the customer by much.
I agree with T.Rob too when he says that high-cost expenditures almost invariably involve senior management if not board approval. I have been involved in the planning of a smarter marketing capability for a major bank. Part of that involves building an enterprise-wide Content Management System so that appropriate content can be algorithmically served in almost real-time to support marketing interactions across different channels with customers. This requires a medium-sized investment of about $35-50 million for the CMS technology. Even for such a small sum (1/1,000 of the bank's turnover) the board has got embroiled in the discussions. However, once the investment has been agreed and after it has been implemented, decisions about how it will be used to serve real-time content to customers will be a 100% operational management decision.
Neither of these two activities are done with either an understanding of what customers need, want or can use, or with any interest in the customer over and above the bit of the customer that controls their wallet. Companies are simply NOT interested in their customers providing they keep buying. Of all the companies I have worked with over a 25 year career as a consultant, interim director and in private equity, the ONLY company that was genuinely interested in creating mutual value with customers was Toyota. It is the only company I feel privileged to have worked with.
Best regards from Bishopsgate, London, Graham
On Oct 16, 2013, at 7:01 PM, Iain Henderson <
">
> wrote: Quite right T-Rob. For all the hype and so called focus on 'the customer experience', there are many, many times when that gets kicked into touch by the product manager whose job is to maximise revenue and profit.
CEO's know that, and typically back the product manager, in the knowledge that to do otherwise could cost them their jobs.
There are CEO's and PM's who understand that dilemma, even some who try to do something about it; but the bulk get swamped by the need to hit those quarterly targets.
Thanks
Iain
On 16 Oct 2013, at 16:52, "T.Rob" <
">
> wrote:
is really happening. Make believe stories of what happens in board rooms
of evil media tyrants simply doesn't move the discussion forward.
True I made that illustration up but the point was that the very thing we
are told we are supposed to be happy about is just as easily used against us
as it is in our favor. If dynamic personalized pricing is available it is
possible to attract more business from price sensitive shoppers by offering
them personalized discounts. Woo hoo! I get a discount! But it is just as
possible to *increase* the cost for price-insensitive shoppers and that's
already been implemented. That implementation required proposal
development, executive reviews, significant investment in hardware and
software, and a LOT of discussion about how to present this - if at all - to
the customer.
So yeah, that boardroom discussion I alluded to was hypothetical. It may in
fact be possible that our largest global retailers allow mid-level managers
to implement discriminatory pricing, including funding all the hardware and
the software development, without any executive oversight whatsoever. I
don't have an MBA or anything and I may be extremely naïve in my thinking
but it just seems to me that some executive sign-off was required to do this
and that nothing of this magnitude gets implemented in production without
the board's knowledge.
Regardless of the validity of the illustration I used, the observation was
that consumers are being asked to judge the worth of the system based on
incomplete information. The system deviates both above and below a baseline
price, depending on the profile of the identified individual and does so by
conscious, deliberate design. The criteria that comprise levels of price
sensitivity had to be identified, quantified, tested over time and refined.
That it charges more when possible was no accident. However the individual
customers involved are never told that they might pay more. The story we
are fed is that we are always better off for the personalization and
tracking and should therefore welcome it with open arms. At least half of
the behavior of the system is hidden from customers and, again, deliberately
so.
I don't see how calling for more equity and transparency in the relationship
fails to move the discussion forward. Unless of course the trajectory is
toward even greater inequity and opacity and my approach would slow or stop
that momentum. In that case I'd completely agree with your statement but
not the implication that reversing that trend is a bad thing. In fact, I'd
say that establishing these as formal requirements is more likely to result
in an engaged and trusting customer relationship than not and if that's the
case, calling it out explicitly could be the textbook example of moving the
discussion forward. I guess it depends on the discussion you want to have.
-- T.Rob
-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Guldimann | Enliken [mailto:marc@enliken.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 9:39 AM
To: 'Don Marti'
Cc: T.Rob; 'Doc Searls'; 'Shannon Clark'; 'Katherine Warman Kern';
'ProjectVRM list'
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Theory of peak advertising
No, that's not the adtech story, Don. The NYT is one of the biggest
proponents of programmatic advertising now:
http://www.beet.tv/2013/09/nytprohaska.html
Listen, if we are really out to find a better solution for consumers it's
important to drop the hyperbole and rhetoric and start talking about what
is really happening. Make believe stories of what happens in board rooms
of evil media tyrants simply doesn't move the discussion forward. Yes,
there are some bad eggs, as there are in EVERY industry, but for the most
part advertisers are simply looking to use data to increase measurement
and reduce waste.
I suggest reading http://www.adexchanger.com/ it's a great way of
understanding what is actually happening in the ad-tech industry.
Marc
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