It’s All About The Customer's Journey

I had a wonderful opportunity to speak the other day at the Financial Times’ Future of Marketing conference. My topic was about how executives should think about aligning their strategies and operations with customer journeys – the series of interactions with a brand where a customer makes a decision or completes a task. Most decision journeys these days involve many parts of the organization – sales, marketing, product development – and those functions need to work together if they want the customer’s journey to reach a successful conclusion.

We recently finished a survey with executives across 20 industries about the role of digital in their companies. And a few things really popped out. At best-in-class companies, 70% of senior marketing managers can articulate the performance goals of the top five digital KPIs. For companies in the bottom quartile, that was a shocking 10%. When it comes to measuring impact of digital spend through effective ROI techniques, the best-in-class companies can measure the impact of 85% of their digital spend. For those in the bottom quartile, it’s 10% again. I’ll post more about this survey later, but what it really drives home is that to make digital successful, companies need to overcome significant organizational challenges.

One of the great things about going to a good conference is being able to learn from other people. I was particularly interested in Marc Speichert’s talk (he’s the CMO of L’Oreal) where he said how much the company was investing in training their people to be more digital. He’s also made a conscious effort to work more closely with his CIO – in fact, they sit on the same floor. They work together, plan budgets together. He is the CIO’s biggest customer so that level of cooperation is so important. He also talked about another interesting point, which is that they’re shifting to building more integrated plans for their brands that are not siloed by channel.

I also really enjoyed the discussion with Linda Boff (GE’s Chief Digital Officer) and Candace Matthews (CMO for Amway). They focused on this great point about how to balance the global brand with local relevance. In practice, that requires a good and flexible agency partner. And it requires excellent management of a global content supply chain to provide and coordinate global brand attributes – logos, messaging – and local incarnations of that brand – ads, marketing messages, etc. It’s a huge issue on which Linda and Candace provided some fascinating insights.

How is your organization shifting to be more centered around the customer? And how are your marketing and IT departments working together?

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