Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently made a comparison between PCs
and trucks, vehicles that once dominated the car market in the US, but which
got killed by smaller cars as the US consumer got real.
In an article in the WSJ,
Mr. Jobs said computers, including Apple’s own Macintosh, won’t go away, just
as trucks didn’t disappear. But he suggested that sleeker portable products
such as his company’s iPhone and iPad would be the equivalent of cars—offering
touchscreen Website browsing, droves of applications and other features not
found on PCs that run Microsoft Windows.
Arch rival Microsoft reacted negatively to the
pronouncement, after all laptop shipments are still showing double digit growth
rates. Yet Jobs is simply facing up to the reality of a changing world.
And so to the analogy: in business, we have witnessed
just as profound a change in the challenges that confront CMOs in the face of
the mind-blowing explosion of online and interactive channels; increasingly
important social media with the potential to become as significant a source of
demand as Search; in short the most radical market-led upheaval we’ve ever
experienced.
You’d wonder whether the same tools and platforms
proposed by marketing services providers that promised tremendous business
improvements just a few years ago might be struggling to make an impact in
today’s shifting landscape. You’d be right to.
Forrester, in
a report entitled Campaign
Management Needs a Reboot (April 2009) highlighted how platforms were
struggling to keep up with business change:
Today
the notion of campaigns extends beyond traditional communication channels to
include emerging and inbound channels like mobile, Web sites, landing pages,
and social networks. Campaign management applications struggle to keep up with
the design, management, and reporting needs of these channels. But an explosion
of channels is only one of the many challenges that threaten the relevance of
campaign management solutions. Campaign management tools also struggle to:
·
Improve cross-channel customer interaction.
·
Make sense of the social phenomenon.
·
Lack defined processes and methodologies to use
social insights to improve marketing campaigns.
·
Marketing campaigns no longer have finite start
and stop dates.
· Social media channels and customer conversations.
·
Lower the learning curve associated with
technology adoption...As one direct marketer said, “The complexity of the
system makes it hard for our distributed stakeholders to build and execute campaigns
and increases dependence on our small group of power users.”
Forrester’s perspective is that there are too many different platforms that make it hard to integrate, leading to missed business opportunities, poor customer experiences, and inefficient program execution.
Whilst I agree with the analysis, I disagree on this conclusion. On the one hand, multiple marketing
execution platforms tend to make it harder to integrate and measure the vast
range of engagement activity that marketing has to deploy across. On the other
hand the solution isn’t to create one meta marketing platform. Software
rarely shines when it’s asked to do many tasks in one. Marketing users hate ‘integrated’
platforms that attempt to do everything, because they’re hard to use, overly
complicated and tend to be too rigid.
Specialisation is the name of the game. Solutions for
lead generation that work on demand pull principles are a totally different
proposition to campaign managers that are designed for push marketing
applications.
In the world of multi-channel integrate
marketing, the execution platforms can be managed in house, outsourced or
rented - in the form of SaaS or cloud computing. Frankly, it doesn’t matter in
principle. What matters more in practise is which platform suits the business
needs best, and complies with their policies in regard to security, control,
strategic and privacy imperatives.
But how to integrate effectively, in order to deliver
the vital operational improvements whilst allowing the organic and fluid nature
of marketing communications to follow its customer-led path of least resistance?
The answer lies not in embedding rules engines, data
management et al into campaign management and other marketing execution tools.
That’s yesterday’s model and simply reflects the established order: one of
channel specific siloed organisational structures where marketing teams are
responsible for online, for direct mail, for contact centres and so on.
What's needed is a much broader marketing
biosphere, which comprises 3 key areas:
1. Data management, analysis and rules
definition
- Design of
the data model, single customer view creation, activity data, semantic web
data.
- Analysis
and segmentation
- Rules engine
2. Marketing Activity Management
- Document
processing
- Digital
asset management
- Marketing
workflow automation
- Resource
management/ web-based utilities
3. Marketing execution
- Campaign
managers
- Email/ SMS
platforms
- Networked
lead generation deployment & settlement platforms
- Online
advertising network platforms
- Social
network solutions
- etc.
The centre of gravity in creating a truly effective, flexible, adaptable customer communications management environment lies in getting the first two areas correctly architected. Herein lies the solution to true multi-channel integration, an approach that can be orchestrated manageably.
It means that wherever the media explosion
takes us, however many new and unpredictable IP enabled channels open up, the
means to be able to simply integrate them exists; using the right data,
content, channels, technology and people.
More specialisation around execution, not less, is likely to win out. Fees associated with those platforms will continue to fall, as users pay for what they actually need and use, safe in the knowledge that their marketing biosphere is in place, ready to meet with every fresh challenge.
