I read a fairly provocative article by MIT's  Michael Schrage on Why your Analytics are failing you in the HBR Blog.

I totally agree with Scharage's perspective in the article. Today, there is a hyper-sensitivity & hyper-activity in enterprises about analytics and putting it to use quickly for competitive advantage. Jargons like Big data, predictive models, propensity scores and customer life time value are used loosely. My prognosis is that, this is leading to a kind of an "Analytics Bubble" just like the " Internet Bubble" of the early 2000s.

What's is critical in companies is the need to spend time on how to align structure, behaviour, incentives and right measurements to ensure analytics is made to count for business impact. What I find most difficult in companies is aligning behaviour and management of systems & processes to make this happen. No amount of more sophisticated tools and more data can help here.

What is needed is "mindfulness" amongst employees on the importance of making it happen. A lot time needs to be spent on conversation amongst departments, collaboration between teams, recognising individuals within teams who are early adopters of the analytics value on the ground, simplifying the execution blue print to make customer value and experience count every day amongst marketing, sales, customer service and operation teams.

Also, what CXOs need to understand is that behaviour from people is the most diffiuclt to change and transform. That's where patience & resolve is needed. There is a need to allocate budgets and time for the same.

We need to remember analytics begins with a few diagonstics and provides some prescriptions. The larger business impact will happen, only if the prescriptions is followed by the patients regularly - day-in and day-out.

The need to get the organization culture right is as important as the resources, tools and techniques!

I have been reading a lot of blogs, views of consultants & research reports over the last couple years on the growing need for marketing automation in companies to manage customers better.

This is an irony that has always suprised me - the companies that have made the marketing automation investments don't use them enough and the ones planning to invest don't really plan well on how to get enterprise-wide acceptance.

It was interesting for me read an article by Carlos Hidalgo

• “Less than 25% of organizations that have implemented a fully currently utilize its potential.”
• According to a recent study, 78% of marketers state that generating high-quality leads is still their biggest challenge.
• Various reports have between 70-90% of leads still being ignored and going to waste.

This was quite relevant points that corraborated with what I have been observing over the last few years.

Here's what I would like to see in 2011 for exponential adoption first,  lest marketing automation will die its natural death:

1. Organizations must break-down silos and exponentially adopt marketing automation across various departments as customers don't do business with departments in companies!
2. Determine metrics that are relevant to each of the departments and all these must roll-up to an enterprise-level metrics on lead management( lead capture, lead nurturing & scoring),  lead fulfillment and post-sales customer management.
3. Practice byte-sized execution plans across mutliple customer-facing departments and clearly think multi-channel -  web,  mobile, call centre etc.
4. Create a marketing budget across customer acquisition and customer retention and look at the ROI across both these parameters.
5. Build a "marketing automation tree" across both acquisition & retention and determine when the grid-lock link breaks across various stages of customer interactions.
6. Build a test and control group for various marketing automation campaigns to clearly benchmark success &  incremental lifts - to enable other deparments see the benefits for quick adoption.

To be successful, there must be a sound foundation, definition of the business process across marketing, sales & customer care - alignment across these departments  is critical &  key to exponential adoption of marketing automation across companies.

The right way for marketing automation to grow is to now focus on exponential adoption as it will act as the much needed catalyst for growth in the coming few years.

Here's an interesting perspective on relationship visualization by threeminds.

The key point that's being made is that now-a-days data, files, transactions, access and usage by customers is a lot more real time.  How can one get to know the behaviour and relationships between various dimensions to take action faster then ever before.

Use of all this information & data has to to get a lot more simpler, easier and flexible. That's where execution will move & get focussed in the next couple of years.

code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Here's an interesting presentation by Jamet on using marketing data for decision management. Take a look:

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=data-to-decision-transforming-marketing-data-to-enable-decision-management-29165

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Frank Capek drew my attention to a recent report  on how customers & devoting signifcant executive time on managing customers will be central focus of CEOs during 2008 (Report)

From the executive summary:

”The first theme is that this may be a year in which there is renewed vigor around the customer - 2008 may be a year where many CEOs put the customer at the top of the long list of issues on which they must focus. Why?  Simply stated - customers are at the core of growth.  Here are a few points from this year’s study that are the foundation of this theme:

• CEOs are planning greater investment, both budget and time-wise, on customer relationship management.
• The importance of sales growth as a performance measure has increased since the prior study. Customers are the engine of sales growth.
• Brand, reputation, and investments in corporate social responsibility are more important this year - all efforts that are focused on the winning the hearts and minds of the customer.
• While many CEOs say it is easier to attract customers than it used to be, many, particularly outside the United States, say it is getting harder to retain customers. CEOs recognize that losing customers can be costly.”

Key take-out: It's heartening for me to note that managing customers will be on top of CEOs' agenda. To make it a reality,I think they will have to spend significant time in driving it down the organization - amongst their business heads and their ranks. This has always been a key challenge as there are a lot of issues regarding channel conflicts, change management, marketing budget allocation, linking performance incentives wrt customer management goals, technology investments, profit & cost allocation etc. that will need their focus, to drive this kind of a culture in an organization. Also, they will have to invest significantly in identifying metrics and measurement dashboards around how customers are being managed real time in an enterprise and drive this relentlessly across lifecycle of their customers over the next couple of years once they make a start in 2008.

 

I have been coming across some interesting quotes (which resonate a lot & appeal to me) as building blocks towards creating a customer-centric organization. There is no one formula but I thought I will blog about them (as and when I find them), aggregate them here so as to serve as a resource for all. Here's the first!

Recently, I had a written a post about new media getting the attention of marketers. In fact, I had mentioned there that I hated the use of the word non-traditional media and called it convergent media.

Looks like radio stations are fast adopting convergent media strategies. NY Times has an interesting article on how radio stations are using their websites to have videos that literally 'extend' the listening experience.

I personally think this is an extremely sticky & brilliant idea for radio stations. It just moves seamlessly from offline 'listening' to online 'viewing and listening' very well. Take a look at the opportunities it provides when you view radio media with a convergent mindset:

• A simple camera in the broadcast booth( How about seeing your RJ?)
• Web-only musical performances

Radio Stations can become a visual medium if you have the right imagination!

Much has been written about the power of blogs and its power to shape customer opinion. Measuring the business impact of blogs is an area of great interest to me. Some key questions I often ask myself are:

• Is blogging an island without too many inhabitants - Is it a niche waiting to get mainstream?
• Does the opinion of bloggers matter at all when it comes to brand purchase decisions?
• Do consumers consider blogs as a trustworthy source vis-a-vis other forms of media?
• Is user-generated content considered valuable by customers?
• Is it possible to summarize the business impact of blogs by way of addressable customer numbers? Is it a large enough market waiting to be tapped by marketers?

Well, there seems to be some answers for these questions. Here's a research done by IPSOS in Europe - a leading marketing research firm. I think this research clearly gives directions for other markets too, on how customers perceive this new medium and its impact on brands. Here's the presentation:

https://s3.amazonaws.com:443/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=16820&doc=business-impact-of-blogs-14692