Chief Marketing Officers are Chief Experience Officers
Backdrop: The Opportunity & Obligation to Win on Experience
Business has evolved from data-supported to data-powered, fueled by advances in analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS, security, IoT, and intelligence. The extreme volume, velocity, and variety of data available to every company has made it possible to take any action, anywhere, anytime.
Yet, the experience gap - the difference between what customers desire and what’s delivered - has never been wider. Too often, companies serve up products that aren’t relevant, experiences that aren’t personalized, and brands that don’t have a clear purpose.
Closing this gap requires Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) to stay more attuned than ever to the experiences of their customers and employees. Those whose organizations have the capability to sense, capture, analyze, understand, and take action on all the right Experience Data signals will not only close gaps, they will build bridges. And they will become the experience architects of our future.
This reflection makes the case that the CMO is in fact a Chief Experience Officer - a leader who must not only build brand relevance and generate sales pipeline, but also build an organization based on deep customer empathy to design and deliver breakthrough product, brand, and customer experiences.
Thesis: Zero-Party Data as the Basis for Experience Transformation
Over the past decade, the growth of mobility, ubiquitous Wi-Fi, cloud computing, and IoT has been met in the martech stack by innovations in customer data platforms (CDPs), retargeting, and hyper-personalization. Behavioral data (what can be known by observing and understanding third-party data) has often taken pole position relative to experience data (what cannot be known without interrogating zero-party data). But CMOs and marketers don’t actively repudiate experience data. They simply haven’t had access to platform technologies that enable them to sense, capture, understand, analyze, and act on zero-party experience data at the pace of business today.
But the challenge is that, over the next decade, Experience Transformation will be the primary source of competitive advantage for every organization on the planet. Fragmented touchpoints will give way to connected experiences, impersonal communications will give way to personalized interactions, reactive guesswork will give way to intelligent actions, and the bar will be raised on experiences. Those that exceed the bar will prosper. Those that don’t will perish.
Application: Five Areas of Relevance to the Chief Marketing Officer
Experience-First strategies are required for organizations to grow and to win. These strategies require a deep and holistic understanding of customer opinion, sentiment, and feedback, which is best achieved when the organization has a way of building empathy at scale based on zero-party customer data.
Following are key focus areas and business realities for CMOs, and the ways in which a strategy built on a zero-party data platform provides business value given each of these realities.
1. Modernizing Martech to Develop a Single Customer View
CMOs have highly uneven levels of expertise when it comes to marketing technologies and operations. Some have cut their teeth in these parts of the marketing organization and have a deep fluency in the obstacles and opportunities associated with MarTech. Others have more experience building categories, brands, and relevance closer to the top of the funnel. But all CMOs know that seamless, effortless experiences are the order of the day. Creating these kinds of experiences for customers requires modernizing the approach and toolsets used by many marketing organizations.
It’s important to understand that, in most organizations, data is highly fragmented (within and across marketing). This owes to a history of disparate buying centers standing up various point-solution technologies to drive “their” piece of growth at a particular time for a particular reason. But when there is significant fragmentation of many platforms, it’s impossible to know what data is available, who owns it, how to get it, and how to integrate it - let alone to know what actions to take to design and deliver the experiences customers expect.
What’s worse, many point-solution technologies are not built for scale, and cannot adapt as priorities change and companies grow. Without the ability to bring together all of their sources of data and embrace new technology when needed, marketers won’t be able to keep up with expectations, and will fall behind the innovation curve.
The need to consolidate data to create seamless experiences will create a forcing function for more platforms to open their APIs so that data can flow freely from one system to the next. It will also provide a moment for CMOs to centralize this data on one overall platform, or “operating system,” for experience management. This approach - open yet centralized - will enable CMOs to listen, understand, and act with the speed, agility, and innovation that customers demand in the Experience Era.
2. Driving Growth in Omnichannel Experiences
In May and June of 2020, consumers leapt forward five years in the adoption of digital in just eight weeks. On the heels of the pandemic, QSR, grocery and retail apparel companies had to become digital businesses nearly overnight. The shift to digital commerce all across GDP is by all accounts a permanent one, simply because it delivers greater efficiency, lower costs, and less friction - all at scale. For CMOs, we are still in the early days of the massive retooling of customer experiences, and this moment is a significant opportunity to develop category leadership and grow customer loyalty by bringing together digital and physical experiences in remarkably consistent ways.
CMOs cannot be content to just shift operations and processes to digital channels - though they need to modernize delivery of digital experiences as discussed in Theme 1 above, customers still expect great experiences in stores, restaurants, gathering places, and in their vehicles, to name a few. Omnichannel feedback loops based on Experience Data will need to be stood up so that companies can understand what is - and isn’t - working, and respond accordingly. And marketing teams will need to think through how to manage today’s new wave of data and use it to better personalize offers and messages to ever-narrower customer segments. Experience Data will need to play a core role not only in tracking preferences, but also in enabling rapid responses to opportunities or threats. A baseline of Experience Data can give CMOs the insights they need to know when and how to expand from digital into the physical world, and vice versa, to create more useful shopping experiences and meet customers where they are.
3. Developing and Scaling Remarkable Personalized Experiences
The past several years have seen varying degrees of adoption of online services. Banking and media/entertainment, for example, have largely shifted to mobile platforms as Internet bandwidth and security standards have risen in many parts of the world. Services in other sectors have lagged, for reasons ranting from limited demand to suboptimal experiences. But the pandemic reset nearly all customers’ expectations for what can be done online, and companies are responding. Consider the healthcare industry, which pivoted quickly to allow, enable, and ultimately encourage more digital interactions. Telemedicine visits to Teladoc Health, the virtual healthcare company, have increased to over 3 million per quarter as of Q2 2021 (a 7x increase over Q2 2019).
This sudden yet sustained usage of digital platforms for previously physical interactions has created untold opportunities for sensing and capturing Experience Data which can inform future platform experiences. Imagine, for example, soliciting open-text responses from patients within the chat feature of a videoconferencing platform following the completion of a telehealth appointment. The individual patient’s experience could be improved at the next visit based on their feedback, and the aggregated and anonymized data from tens of thousands of patients can be used to drive innovations in the overall experience that is delivered by the company.
The same kind of data capture mechanisms are just as useful across industries, whether or not they’ve been digitally disrupted - consider the possibilities of an airline collecting real-time sentiment data on passenger comfort from an in-seat touchscreen or of a university to understand student perspective on the quality of online instruction through data entered through SMS or a chatbot at the close of a course. More zero-party data on what’s working and what’s not can help CMOs give guidance to Marketing, Product, and Operations Teams on the gaps that need to be closed to attract and retain customers (and thus grow and protect revenue).
4. Creating Connection and Community
If there’s anything that the pandemic helped reconfirm about our society, it is the importance and power of community - and the role that community plays in creating powerful experiences. Companies in categories like fitness and gaming have led the way in driving experience-centric growth by creating and innovating communities of shared passion and interest at scale. Brands like Peloton and Riot Games put customers (i.e., riders, gamers) first, relentlessly innovate the core platform and experience, and experiment with new ways of engaging people.
In a world with seemingly infinite ways to create authentic customer communities, what moves should CMOs make with their brands to stay authentic, relevant, and distinctive? Should a brand like Stance create stronger ties with its loyalists by developing a shoe line that drives conversation among fans, or should it curate a series of design contests that pit people against one another in a friendly competition? Should Marriott develop a health and wellness experience that’s consistent across its Category 7 properties and connects them to like-minded guests amidst their travels, or should it gamify certain experiential elements within Bonvoy to encourage unexpected, fun digital connections? Though behavioral data from A/B testing in cases like this is invaluable, CMOs also need to make decisions with the benefit of direct customer feedback on prototypes and ideas. In this way, zero-party data helps Marketing to quantify demand and make recommendations on the product and experience innovations that will drive revenue, expansion, and engagement while building and sustaining community.
5. Developing Brand Intelligence
We live in a world of constant change: Trends are consistently emerging, technology is always advancing, and opportunities are newly opening. In this world, one of the CMO’s most exciting yet most challenging jobs is to define, articulate, and steward a brand that is deeply authentic to the company and relentlessly relevant to its customers and employees.
We all know relentlessly relevant brands when we see them. They’re the ones that consistently inspire us and move us to action. The ones that make smart, bold moves that impress customers, amaze employees, push competitors out of consideration, and - at times - define entirely new categories. And do it while remaining unwaveringly authentic to who they are.
Building and sustaining relevance is hard for a CMO. But it’s even harder when there’s a paucity of Experience Data on what customers believe about the brand.
In a world where substitutes are a click or a swipe away, CMOs need to develop deep relationships with customers and employees based on shared interest and common understanding. That requires not just perfunctory brand tracking, occasional focus groups, and tweaks to messaging. It demands asking the hard questions of audiences - what resonates with you about our brand, and what doesn’t? What attributes drive you to consider and purchase things in this category, and what characteristics matter less? Where are we doing well, and where are we falling short? What do you think of specific products and services? How relevant are the messages we’re sending?
To get to a relentlessly relevant brand, CMOs require a modern brand intelligence platform based on Experience Data. Of course, many decisions around brand (brand purpose, creative activations, new-to-the-world moves, etc.) can be made without the benefit of immense volumes of data. But in general, a good rule of thumb is that brand decisions should be made with a nod to the type of empirical rigor that would be recognized by growth and digital marketers.
In Closing
CMOs have a tremendous opportunity - and perhaps also a significant obligation - to usher in the era of Experience Transformation. Building a business and a culture based on deep customer empathy, diving deep into zero-party data, and harnessing new sources of intelligence to chart new paths to growth will be the new normal for any CMO wishing to create and sustain value over the coming decade. The Chief Marketing Officer has, in so many important ways, become the Chief Experience Officer.