Over at The Marketers Consortium, Elana Anderson of Forrester Research, is guest host. 

In this post she asks if Customer Centricity is a realistic goal.  This is something I looked at here, and co-incidentally (honest) I referred to a Forrester article in that one.

This was my comment, and I wanted to elaborate after on this.

Customer centricity is an essential goal. Anything less is going to be product focussed, or single channel focussed. These will fail because the media savvy customer is protecting themselves from the results of such activities.

We have to consider the media savvy consumer of the 21st century armed with spam killing devices such as, e.g..

• firefox ad blocker
• popup blockers
• tivo for skipping television ads
• gmail with advanced spam blocking
• wordpress blog hosting with blog spam comment blocking
• online bill presentment (so no mail spam with the bill)

The solution is not going to be simple, but will have characteristics that are diametrically opposed to old marketing:

– inbound vs outbound
– listening vs telling
– niche vs mass
– authentic vs spin

The last four are some of the attributes from pinkomarketing, that Tara Hunt started to get us talking about. 

Its interesting to relate those four things to the technology needs of marketing and see how they fit.  Some thoughts on the first two:

Inbound vs outbound, listening vs telling

Old style marketing is outbound by its nature.  Marketing goes to the database folk’s or buys a list. That list drives direct mail, online banking pop-ups, email campaigns, or ATM alerts to buy something. For all the reasons above, these not only won’t work, its quite probable the customer won’t even see them.

Inbound marketing would involve listening to the customer.  The multi channel customer already talks to you 9 times per month in your online banking, 12 times per month on your ATM, and emails you once or twice a year with problems.  Those interactions account for 85% of all your transactions.  This profile is real and its now.  Why on earth would it make any sense to hit that customer again with yet another message to try and sell something. 

One thing we know about customers’ channel use is that is driven by a need.  Pay a bill, get cash, view balance, pay down mortgage etc are all reasons customers use your channel.  We have to let them do that, and stay out of the way.  But as they do these things a pattern emerges.  We can build a useful profile of that customer.  This is listening. This will allow us to develop meaningful responses to them, and at the right moment just when they need something, we can be there for them with the right solution. 

This is the challenge for marketing technology.  Make us better listeners.  Allow us to hover with the customer, and at the right moment when they need us, let us be there.

Account alerts, or Interactive Financial Messages is one potential output that if its based on meaningful information, will be just the right thing for your customer, and be the right thing to keep them coming back to you for your services, and products.

tags: marketing, pinkomarketing, customer+centric