This morning, (October 11, 2011) IBM (TSX: IBM:US) released a valuable study into the pressures, stresses, and some successes of corporate Chief Marketing Officers trying to come to terms with the rapidly shifting ground-rules in their worlds.
IBM conducted face to face interviews with more than 1,700 chief marketing officers from 64 countries and 19 industries. This study, entitled From Stretched to Strengthened is part of an ongoing work called the C-Suite research program, interviewing 15,000 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CHROs and CSCOs.
Over the next few days I will be exploring different facets of the CMO study; it has significant implications for corporate communication. At the heart of the study is the leitmotif that there is a “critical and permanent shift” in the way businesses communicate to and with their customers.
Customer Intimacy is Crucial
The keystone insight is that organizations must turn from addressing the crowd (market segments, demographics, populations) to addressing the individual.
As consumers, we no longer trust the one [corporate] voice that addresses the many. World War II and the Cold War probably started the questioning that continued through Naomi Klein’s No Logo, and brought us to the social world today. We don’t trust it, and we no longer even hear it. That one voice has been drowned out by the millions of myriad voices addressing each other through social networks. The challenge for the corporate world, which its very name defines as not-individual, is to engage in conversation with each individual in its existing or potential customer base. The central challenge: how do you do that?
The ROI of a Conversation
Not only is the corporate world struggling to come to terms with these simultaneous individual conversations, the CMO’s in this study are also challenged to provide ROI numbers their CEO’s and shareholders are demanding. The irony of this is that while social networks atomize the marketplace, they simultaneously provide more public data than we have ever had. Blog comments, web traffic analytics, customer review sites, and in so many other ways consumers are voluntarily (an often unknowingly as well) providing feedback and other purchase and experience data. Never has the conversation about your business been more public and more open to analysis. When you combine this with POS (point of sale) and order tracking data many businesses now have available to them, the potential to connect the dots is huge. The serious challenge underlying this is to find common systems that can speak to each other, without compromising privacy where it matters.
A personal side-bar:
For the last two months I have been posting on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook about my hunt to find my next smartphone. I have been using Blackberries for years, and am not sure of RIM’s future. In my tweets and posts I have asked lots of questions and mentioned both Blackberry, RIM, and Android by name many times. Now. You would think that any corporate marketing team would be monitoring the public portions of my social stream (and there are many) for mentions of their products or issues of interest to them. Not that I can see. I have never had a response or query after any posts. Well, I did have one, because I am a huge fan of Xobni, I did mention them. They responded in hours.
In response to IBM’s study I upped the ante on my experiment and posted this on Twitter:
“#smartphone decision down to this: #samsung #android or #rim #torch #bb? From #telus.”
There are enough hashtags in there to pretty much smack anyone who’s paying attention in the face. Let’s see what happens. [Update: after 4 days, not a word]
Big Blue Gets It
I have to say that as I read the 61 pages that constitute the main part of the study, I was impressed, not with the data, but with the questions and the synthesis.
The questions around ROI and delivering value to empowered customers are important. What struck me most however, was the attempt to grapple with an issue on the corporate level, that we can’t even get small to medium sized enterprises to accept: developing a one-to-one relationship with your customers through the full buying cycle is probably the number one marketing challenge of the next several years. I would expect smaller businesses, that have a more obvious need for the loyalty of a smaller customer base, to jump all over this. Not so. In walk Big Blue and the corporate subjects of this study, and flat out own the question. Whatever happened to ‘small, nimble, and responsive’?
My message to clients these days is simple: “You don’t see the value of engaging social networks? That’s fine, because your customers and your competitors do. And they are managing the conversation just fine without you.”
Want to improve your communication with employees, partners,and customers? I help organizations improve communication through leadership & management-level workshops & coaching. Check out my website to learn about the different ways I can support your organization.There’s more! Looking for success in your small business? Read my Small Business blog at Small Business Fundamentals (www.smbfundamentals.com).
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