Chief Marketing Officer Mandate: Seek First To Understand
The CMO Role is Under Attack; Let’s Get Back to Basics
Chief Marketing Officers be Feeling a Combination of Fear and Optimism.
Fear in that you are operating by and large in what is an un-credentialed profession pushing buttons on a black box, judged by creativity AND results, as the landscape gets more and more complicated, and the role of CMO is experiencing a death by 1000 cuts.
Optimism in that you are operating by and large in what is an un-credentialed profession pushing buttons on a black box, judged by creativity AND results, BUT as the landscape gets more and more complicated you have 1000 ways to distinguish yourself by streamlining this mess for your Brand.
Despite all of the noise in the marketplace, there are probably only a handful of things that are truly important to your success and the success of your marketing team and company. A good place to start, as recommended by Plato, is “seek first to understand”. For most, this is a deeper learning to discover who your customers are and why they buy from you (or a competitor). There are a number of qualitative and quantitative methods to employ here aimed at providing a point of view supported by data that yields actionable insights to better understand customer behaviors, preferences, and overall trends.
Getting started down this path does not need to be over complicated. Here are four ways we most often help our clients that want to get started on their journey to better understanding.
The most basic steps to begin are really just a matter of taking the time and making an effort. This would include doing basic Secondary Research through white papers, industry, trade, or academic studies, and other public or subscription-based research data and information. There is a wealth of data on your market and customer segments out there. Slightly more effort and planning is required to do Primary Research in the form of surveys, focus groups, and interviews with your customers, partners, and even competitors or customers of a competitor. There is a lot to be gained from just asking people what they think and what they want. Don’t fret over statistical relevance at this stage.
Getting more quantitative and scientific will require of course secure access to your customer data and typically involve performing a proper data exploration, data quality assessment, and a third-party data enrichment exercise. There are a lot of considerations when it comes to what data should be in scope for any analysis. Here is our [[Glossary of Critical Data Types]] that should provide an expanded understanding of the types of data that might provide useful.
From here the process generally leads to a Customer Profiling exercise based on data that can be attached to the customer records at an individual, household, or geographic such as demographics, interests, and behaviors. Lastly, the most sophisticated step in this journey would be to undertake the development of a Customer Segmentation based on the demographics and product or category data in combination with a Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) model, and possibly Geographic, Seasonal, Lifestage, or even a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) considerations.
Armed with a deeper understanding of your customers, you now have the ability to apply these learnings to tailor marketing strategies for maximum impact on new customer acquisition, customer retention and growth, and to inform the business of product and service opportunities not currently being served.
If this sounds like a journey you’d like to start or accelerate, we’d be happy to meet and discuss your plans.