Beyond the lipstick of messaging

PvT: And from your point-of-view, how will marketing’s contribution to the organization evolve?

MM: Marketing is really about what I’ll now call engagement with customers and stakeholders that affect the purchase, consideration, trial, and ultimately loyalty and advocacy of customers.

Marketing remains core, fundamental to the value and purpose of a company. However, marketing must evolve beyond messaging—you know the old saw, lipstick on pigs.

Unfortunately, most senior marketing executives lack fundamental skill sets to innovate new services, especially digitally provisioned services.

Most senior marketing executives lack – are utterly bereft of what I call IT service management chops. And yet, the marketing executives that will have the big wins over this next 5 or 10 years will essentially be senior IT execs and CIOs that understand the concept of customer-making, the primacy of brands as a way of engaging customers in the value proposition, and more specifically, the provisioning of online interactive services as a core innovation to the customer-making process.

That’s why most chief marketing officers of major companies today will simply be out of the game in 3 to 5 years. They will have to retire out or do other sorts of boutique consulting because fundamentally they are suited up for hockey when everyone else is doing ballet.

Not good news, huh?

PvT: No, not at all. Not at all, and I’m sure most marketers would not want to hear that, so.

MM: Well, as I mentioned it before, William Gibson, has this great aphorism: The future arrives unevenly distributed, i.e., some people get it, some people don’t, those that don’t end up feeling a lot of pain and hurt as a function of being laggard on innovation-adoption curve and, more specifically, the future that arrived yesterday. We need to play a little catch.

Customer-making mindset, plus systems

PvT: Okay. So what do you consider as the core elements of a tightly integrated marketing model? And that’s sort of a loaded question…

MM: It sure is. Well, not to belabor the points that I’ve already made. First, you need to have a customer-making mindset; you must integrate the systems and compensation of pre-sales and post-sales to customer-making process benchmarks.

Second, you need to have the analytic discipline and rigor to be able to identify your ideal customers and predict lifetime or long-term value. You must understand your customer.

Third, you need to develop the operational capability of listening: mood of the market, voice of the customer, and patterns of engagement.

Fourth, you to put into place agile methodologies for the development of content and services used promotional reach and engagement.

Now some companies people start with the social media and social networks; they start with a voice with which some customer might connect and begin a dialog.

Social media enables a firm to initiate emotional connection with its customers, and get hints about what’s really going on, and then using those intuitions and soft perceptions drive a broad-spectrum analytic practice and develop true rigor about who is your customer.

So, you know, it can mean a Yin and Yang kind of thing where they feed on each other. It should result in a positive feedback loop: listening begats better content and services that in turn produces “earned media” in the form of praise and recommendations in the Web 2.0 mediaspace, that you inform above the line mass market creative strategies, and so on.

So to unpack your loaded question, the fundament challenge confronting the marketing executive today entails building operational capabilities within the context of an operational marketing platform—a business process-management platform for marketing-related activities.

Unlike marketing automation tools for “doing the marketing process”, the operational marketing platform must also support the rapid, agile development and provisioning new interactive services—essential software applications, service mash-ups, and widgets.

With good listening tools and process, combined with collaboration and scheduling systems, the operational marketing platform becomes an innovation-services platform

That idea nicely summarizes how innovation and marketing have converged in terms of a core competency, vis-a-vie this platform.