Peter van Teeseling interviews Michael Moon of GISTICS, an international thought leader and author on customer engagement systems, global brand management, and digital asset management.

Key challenges marketer face today

Peter van Teeseling: Michael, in those firms with whom you consult, what do you consider as today’s greatest challenges in marketing?

MM: Well that constitutes a fairly open-ended question. So let me respond with a kind of a similarly open-ended response and then we can build from there.

Most organizations drive their businesses against a strategic plan with pretty clear objectives and quarterly milestones against those objectives. In one way of looking, that means that most organizations really represent executional systems—where most of the roles and responsibility, and more specifically, the clarity about who does what, relates to activities and tasks directly related to execution of annual objectives and quarterly milestones. And that’s all great so long as the strategy and objectives remain aligned with customer requirements or congruent with the realities of the world; however, increasingly that’s not the case.

In today’s world, customer requirements and preferences continue to change more, if not transform, in ways not easily predicted. Paraphrasing the cyperpunk novelist, William Gibson, “The future arrives unevenly distributed.”

Increasingly, many global organizations find themselves not well-aligned with customer requirements, including a broad range of capabilities and/or offerings, and/or services of the organization. In particular, customers seek deeper, more interactive, and personalized communications, flexible interactions and mash-ups, and collaborations with brands AND the community of brand users.

Next, generally, and this is a distinction I draw between what I’ll call senior marketing executives and junior marketing executives. Junior marketing executives think in terms of programs and campaigns, and what I’ll call easily defined, easily recognized wins in their particular market, and that’s all good, that’s why we have junior marketing executives.

Senior marketing executives don’t think in terms of tactical wins, they think more in terms of a broader front – in the language of generals, you’d call it a theater – and more specifically building operational capabilities by which to monitor the execution many programs and campaigns. Do get me wrong, senior executives want to achieve short-term wins; it’s not their primary focus; it is the primary focus of their subordinates.

Senior marketing executives watch the measurable progress against objectives. Increasingly, the data has become real-time and granular—specific to a market or segment. These granular or detailed data become proxies or suggestive of larger patterns of execution and marketing effectiveness.

If we examine the idea or underlying assumptions of an operations capability and say, “Well, what does the term really mean?” I think that it means that senior executives understand a hard won lesson in their career: You can manage people or you can manage systems, with the one caveat. People are unmanageable! So operational capability really means that senior executives know their sustainable success directly correlates to their building systems, process, and accountabilities by which to execute strategy – by which to marshal available resources for competitive advantage.

And so senior executives, for the most part, grapple with working through which of their existing operational capabilities should be enhanced which ones they build from scratch, which ones to secure through acquisition, and which ones to secure from partners, understanding that the operational aspect of marketing drives major global organizations forward, and more specifically, gives them competitive advantage.