Carnival of Marketing: Marketing experiences, not products

The carnival this week spotlights one post that signals a permanent shift in marketing.  Becky Carroll points out the importance of Marketing Experiences, not Products.

Becky's key points echo some of the points I speak about for companies that want to Reinvent The Marketing Organization:

• The customer experience encompasses all aspects of a customer’s interaction with us.
• The entire company plays a role in “marketing.”
• Once we understand our customer’s wants and needs, we can begin to market to them through the customer experience.

Customer-centric marketing is key.  What happens when it's not?

• A car story, regarding Subaru
• Another car story, regarding Saturn

Marketing has evolved from products to services and now to experiences.  I've heard some say that the next step is "transformation."

Comments

[GrahamHill]

Pete

I think the messages have got a bit mixed up with the metaphors!

I agree with your suggestion to move on from the 'who owns what' discussion and to create our own viewpoints for broader discussion.

I agree with you fully that Reinventing the Marketing Organisation is a complex and difficult matter. There are many formal structures in common use for marketing within organisations. And there are even more informal networks that sit under the formal organisation and that actually get things done. These structures & networks are starting to expand out of the marketing department to other departments (through collaboration networks), to other companies (through e.g. open innovation) and to broader markets (through, e.g. customer generated media).

And then there is the enormously difficult process of changing from one structure to another and all the interlinked changes that requires to a company's marketing capabilities. All of these need to be brought into a thought piece about Reinventing the Marketing Organisation.

I will pull my thoughts together, share them with you and let's go from there.

This should be an interesting discussion.

Graham

[Pete]

No Graham, you're wrong. The material on this blog does not belong to Forrester. Moreover, "proudly" is your word and I disagree with that characterization.

What I choose to share here publicly is the basis of discussion. Linking to a source that requires paid subscription (e.g. Forrester, WSJ, HBR, McKinsey Quarterly, etc.) doesn't mean that I must give the world access as well - it's not my right to do so.

I don't claim any monopoly on the concept of reinventing marketing. Another great source that's advancing thinking on the topic is the ANA. They post a lot of great information on their blogs. But to get the full benefit of engaging with them, guess what? You need to pay and become a member.

Why not offer readers of this blog a link to your thinking on the topic? Let's move the discussion forward - I'll create another post to start cataloging the dialog and would be happy to include you.

[GrahamHill]

Pete

That's not the point. The point is that you promote your thinking in public whilst keeping the contents private. The public has no way to assess whether what you write is good or not, without committing to buying the report.

Yes, the work belongs to Forrester. But so does other material that proudly sits on its author's non-Forrester blog.

My wish is simply to bring your work out into the open to stimulate a bigger discussion about organising for customer-facing business. Reinventing marketing is far too importnat to be left inside the walls of Forrester.

Graham

[Pete]

Graham - I get paid for the work I do at Forrester and I blog for free.

[GrahamHill]

Peter

How on earth can the majority of your readers comment on your Reinventing the Marketing Organisation paper when it is not in the public domain?

As it happens, I have seen a Powerpoint presentation of the article. If I look back at my own experience as an organisational development consultant, it strikes me that your paper hugely oversimplifies the complex process of developing an organisation's customer-orientation and the organisational structure required to sustain it.

Is this oversimplification a problem? Well, only if you have seen the paper and intend to act upon it!

Why not persuade Forrester to put the paper onto your blog (there are other examples of Forrester allowing this on the Internet) so that we can dissect and discuss it a litle more publicly.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager

[Becky Carroll]

Thanks for this great post, Peter. Marketing the customer experience works when all customer touches are coordinated and the right metrics are in place. And sometimes, it can take only one bad experience to shake the trust that has been carefully built up over time (your car examples).