Influence the C-suite

How to bring the customer into business strategy

Takeout1. Use customer intelligence to power business growth. 2. Become a CEO 'consigliere'... with marketing solutions to business problems. 3. Leverage marketing's IT spend to rebalance IT relationship. 4. Dig into customer management insights for opportunities. 5. 'Couple-up' customer management and marketing content.What does the business need from marketing?As we’ve discussed, the transformative marketer is the one that now sees customer data as the ticket to influencing business differentiation and growth.Once the marketing strategy reflects understanding the why of customer behaviour, the performance metrics will begin to speak for themselves.

As such, marketing will be able to deliver what the business needs most from it... the customer intelligence necessary to power business growth.

“Marketing, with the tools we now have, is more respected than at any other time in my career. We are now able to influence the C-suite and contribute to business strategy.”

Gareth Case, CMO UK & Ireland, CSC

Marketing and the CEOWith marketing’s new paradigm emerges a much more powerful relationship between marketing and the CEO.Using customer data and analytics, marketing can not only identify problems that affect the business today (or could affect it tomorrow)... marketing can help deliver business solutions, transforming total business strategy.A dramatic example of this is Rokenbok, an American toy manufacturer. Like many consumer businesses, it included a critical B2B element: high street toy stores. The main distribution and sales route, stores also represented the main marketing arena. In-store displays accounted for 80% sales (word-of-mouth the remaining 20%).

Economic changes five years ago, coupled with behavioural changes in customers’ buying habits, strangled the model. Effectively the independent shops died a death, and the toy brand had no choice but to go direct. Replicating the marketing role played by the stores, Rokenbok gave digital life to displays through fun mini-video ‘demos’. Replicating word-of-mouth, they began to host user made videos on YouTube.YouTube is now the largest source of traffic to the Rokenbok website. Customer data is gathered whenever viewers land on the site (the toys are expensive: Rokenbok expects and tracks multiple touchpoints before purchase).And using this data to drive business strategy, the company has a thriving, ecommerce only business today.Customer-centricity doesn’t always look as dramatic as Rokenbok’s metamorphosis: but the shift in marketing’s relationships with other functions in the business requires just as much effort.¹Marketing and ITGartner predicts that by 2018, marketing will be spending more on technology and systems than IT.

"For 54% of marketers, IT was their preferred partner of choice."

Forrester, 2013

While this may not sit well with IT, it gives marketing an opportunity... leveraging its more powerful relationship with the CEO... to bring IT into the fold of genuine customer centricity.

This collaboration between IT and marketing is so crucial that Eduardo Conrado, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Motorola Solutions, says it requires marketing and IT to merge their mindsets.Formerly as CMO, he worked to strengthen his IT knowledge to more effectively align marketing and IT to focus on customer journeys.In an unusual move in 2012, he was put in charge of IT to accelerate digital transformation. And his combined marketing and IT team reached out to other functions. In his words, "Marketing, technology, sales and service were finally working off the same strategy. Before, each function developed and implemented its own strategy, which prevented us from being truly customer centric."By cementing IT and marketing, both are better able to listen and respond to customer needs. This doesn’t need to be a combined department... but IT does need to think of marketing as its primary customer. Marketing and customer management

Customer management is where customers go for help... having the right relationship with customer management can result in one of the best sources of customer data for the business.And one of the best places to deliver customer experience.

"With more customer data a capable marketer can better support customers. Not just lead acquisition, but pipeline acceleration and customer retention too."

Richard Hemming, CMO, Ebiquity

How? Content created to demonstrate product features for existing customers can be used in broader marketing.Marketing and customer management can identify emerging issues or needs, then look to see what existing products... with minor repackaging... might meet that need. And good content saves money!For instance, at Sony each customer service call costs on average €7. A source of calls to the European centre was a specific issue with a specific TV set.A post to deal with this was visited by 42,000 customers in the first two weeks. It helped Sony identify the need for similar content, and generated tangible return: 42,000 (views) x €7 (call cost saved) = one piece of content saved the company almost €300,000.²

^{1 & 2 Altimeter - Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact}