Knowing the customer (marketing’s secret superpower)

I recently introduced the seven forces helping turn brand builders into marketing engineers - publishing the first, Structural change: our constant companion.

Today we address the second, and possibly our most important:

Knowing the customer (it’s our secret superpower).

If the marketing team doesn’t, by now, know the customer better than anyone else in the organisation, it’s already being marginalised. No other department is better placed than marketing to advocate for the customer and drive business growth.

But beware: it’s not enough simply to represent the customer in the room.

As marketers, we must demonstrate our proprietary understanding of the marketplace and its key players, as well as our customers and their journeys. We must identify changing customer behaviour, develop insights into the drivers of those changes, and form strategies to influence those interactions so we can achieve our desired commercial outcomes.

We need to reference metrics that give us relevance, recency and frequency at the boardroom table. We must stop talking about likes and reach, or Net Promoter Scores that (barring disaster) barely move throughout the year. We must start talking about conversions, revenue, basket size or renewals: realtime customer data that signals marketplace intention behaviour and commercial contribution at a frequency that demonstrates our credibility and authority in the boardroom.

To quote Mutinex President (US and Multinational) John Sintras,

“As an industry, we need to get better at articulating our value to business growth. Fast. We’ve become exceptional at talking about societal issues and vanity metrics, but, if we’re honest, a little short on showing how marketing actually builds businesses....Proving impact is going to be a prerequisite to maintaining budgets and justifying your place in the outgoings column”.

Those among us who can leverage customer data as marketing’s superpower will build authority and influence in shaping the growth agenda.

The recent CMO.com.au report into the State of the CMO indicates one in three Australian CMOs (34 per cent) now own the customer experience outright in their organisation. Even more common is joint ownership, nominated by a further 38 per cent of marketers.

Owning the customer experience increasingly requires cross-functional collaboration with our peers in technology, sales, service and finance.

So, where to start?

A superpower is not called such without good reason. It must be something others perceive in us as being of extraordinary or exceptional ability. Something that helps them in ways not considered feasible before.

And the opportunity for marketing and it's knowledge of the customer is this:

To build and master the technical capability and operating systems that help us sense immediate changes in customer behaviour and demand, and turn it into a meaningful insight at a frequency that matters to our business.

Marketing's potential superpower is actually a hyper-awareness of the customer, their behaviours and demand for our offering - at a frequency that shapes decision making.

And if we can get our own house in order when it comes to understanding customer and marketplace data, we’ll be in a powerful position to expand our remit in the organisation, for example, by taking a leading role in shaping revenue operations for growth.

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Part 2 of 7?in this series exploring the forces at play supporting a leader intent on reshaping the role of marketing, helping turn marketers from brand builders into marketing engineers for growth.

Read Part 1: Structural change: our constant companion

Next, I'll share how?Marketing and the CEO get on the same page.?Stay tuned for this and 4 other themes over the coming weeks.