Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer at Forbes Media, and his Insights Group team conduct research and provide thought leadership around building customer-centric organizations and around driving data and analytics throughout an organization. Rogers recently sat down with Loyalty360 and shared some of those perceptive insights about the changing state of loyalty marketing, today’s ubiquitous and mystifying complexity, and how to work toward the rewards of customer experience simplicity.
Tell us about your research—what you’re seeing, hearing and doing—especially in light of what the Loyalty360 audience struggles with: For instance, data access and using data to create actionable strategies. What is the biggest challenge facing chief marketing officers today?
Complexity. CMOs’ lives are so complex, and the discipline and practice of marketing has changed in the past five years— that is everything they’ve learned throughout their careers that helped get them to the CMO role. They need to ask themselves these questions: Do we have the organization in place to address complexity? Do we have the skills in place? Like a conductor of an orchestra, are we bringing in to our process as many virtuosos as we can attract? As a conductor, you don’t have to be a virtuoso yourself on every instrument, but you have to know what the instrument is supposed to sound like so you can both be on the same page.
Other questions they need to ask themselves: Do we have the data capabilities? Do we have data scientists? Do we have marketing analysts who understand data? Data that drives customer engagement and loyalty is seen as a huge competitive advantage. Recent research Forbes Insights conducted among CMOs and senior marketing leaders shows that there’s a huge delta between those who are at the forefront of the organization and those who are trying to get there, and that delta is a significant point of competitive advantage.
There are best practices around what we would identify as laggards and leaders in this area. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in data analytics, but it’s important that you hire experts, obtain resources, or attract partners to help you get there.
How do you define the leaders and the laggards?
We conduct a self-assessed survey of brands. We’re not observing companies in the field, but are asking them questions like, “Is data at the center of all your decisions? Is data a cultural focal point for the organization?” It’s a battery of questions that illuminates and illustrates those at the forefront whom we’ve identified as leaders versus those who are yet to embark on that journey and those who fall somewhere in between.
Do CMOs need this sort of analytical insight? Can it be out-sourced, or is that going to be a challenge?
If you’re a laggard in this space, you need to start somewhere, so you bring in outside partners. But I think what’s increasingly the most successful strategy is when analysis and the analytical approach are ingrained into the organization—they’re endemic, not out-sourced. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have partners that enhance your capabilities, but you need to have a deep knowledge in something and the organization around it.
There’s what we term a “cauldron call” for simplicity. Technology will help us achieve that, but to get there is going to be very challenging.
We’re in a particular phase in marketing. There’s significant innovation both on communications platforms and on technology−and data spins off those communications platforms. That’s the good part. The bad part is that it has increased the level of complexity in marketing so that CMOs are crying out for some simplicity in their lives. “Where’s the Easy button?” And they understand that to get to the Easy button, life is going to get really complex before it gets easier.
Brands and technology providers struggle to truly listen. Hearing something is passive. But listening introduces a response mechanism and a reciprocity piece. Do you see that brands struggle to truly listen and understand the customer?
You must find the right balance between understanding the customer needs and leading the customer. Listening to customers completely would probably drive you out of business. Customers want more functionality and they want more for less. But striking the balance between leading customers and what something could become or something that could make their lives easier, that’s still very much the intersection of the art and science of product marketing and customer interaction.
That art and science area is what has changed. It has become more complex because there is more disintermediation between customers and marketers or brands or solutions. This is an area that marketers can capitalize on.
If brands don’t have the technology culture, they don’t have that understanding, most of the installations have a high propensity to fail, and brands struggle with “How do I make sure that the returns and the outcomes you promise or the insight you’re going to provide actually can be delivered?” As a technology agnostic, you have the ability to help brands in that regard.
A particular focus for us is understanding the ecosystem and the supply chain around marketing content, because that is our business and what we do as publishers. As the world has changed and marketing has changed, marketers are now becoming publishers too.
Marketing content has inspired one of those transformational moments, because it’s an enabler of effective marketing but it’s also a huge pain point. There’s a supply chain issue between marketing content and sales or customer enablement or satisfaction. That’s particularly the case in B2B organizations that offer long-considered, more-complex products and services. We’re seeing that 25% of marketing budgets are being spent on content, yet 70% of that content is misaligned with either customer or sales needs. Either it’s content that’s in the wrong context, or you can’ find it. Customers are actually better at finding content about you than you are as a marketer getting content to the right person at the right time.
The whole marketing technology explosion is going to winnow out, but that’s probably going to take a decade, maybe longer. There will be winners and losers on the technology side. The biggest mistake that most people make is that “the solution is technology,” when the solution is strategy. And even more important, that strategy is culture. As Peter Drucker is quoted as saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If your culture recognizes the primacy of customer data and its importance in making all decisions and connecting the organization throughout all aspects of operations and customer touch points, you can have a strategy that will lead you toward the technology solutions that will help you enable your strategy.