Process is the new black: understanding digital disruption
According to marketing whizz Lisa Arthur, better addressing the needs of customers has to start with a look at what you're doing internally.
Lisa Arthur knows data. It’s been a subject with which the former Terradata Applications CMO and author of ‘Big Data Marketing’ has helped many people tackle.
“[I] focus on data driven marketing and how we as digital marketers can drive better value by being more customer centric,” she tells me. When I ask why it’s been such a source of frustration for those who say they are stuck in a rut when it comes to attribution and ROI’s, she simply smiles and says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” She’s like a zen superhero amidst a sea of data driven dilemma.
Speak to almost any of the C-level executives at the GDS International CMO Digital Marketing summits and they’ll all tell you they crave data to make sound marketing choices. But feeding the beast is a key challenge to almost all projects they take on.
“The biggest problem I have is access to data to make data driven decisions,” says Neil Ackerman, eCommerce Director of Mondelez International.
“Attribution. Everyone in the C Suite wants an ROI,” says Ed Schwitzky, Vice President of eCommerce, TPG Hotels & Resorts.
Marketing agency Hello World says their research from 2009 shows one of the primary barriers stopping companies from adopting social media was the fact there was no reliable measure to establish its effectiveness.
“I think there is some gut magic in this also, good judgment I call it, but good judgment is just one part of it and good judgement is not a strategy,” says Ackerman. “Big data with good judgment is a strategy.”
But that reliance on numbers in the digital world of marketing has an evil twin named social media, and that twin doesn’t like to always play by the same rules. This is why I’m glad I’m an only child.
“How do we use this new technology, which isn’t proven or necessarily secure but it’s absolutely what the consumer demands?” asks Sasha Strauss, Founder of brand consulting and design firm Innovation Protocol. “How do we use it to share our messages in an authentic way?”
Trying to directly attribute views, likes, pokes, and smiley faces to sales certainly hasn’t been as easy as marketers would always like and only a small number of professionals admitted in a 2016 survey to being able to achieve great success with data driven marketing. You have to wonder what’s getting in the way?
Back to our superhero protagonist. This is precisely the challenge that Lisa Arthur has focused on with many other CMOs looking for answers, including those at the CMO Digital Marketing Summit. “[For many of us] it comes down to internal silos and not being focused on the customer because those internal silos are in the way,” says Arthur.
She’s like the guru of frustrated marketers and she wrote the book, literally, on the biggest challenge that most executives at the GDS International summits claim to have.
Arthur says the problem exists today for most enterprises because we’ve grown up very product focused and internally focused and so marketing has also become focused on different silos.
“You have digital marketing, brand marketing, store marketing, and online marketing,” says Arthur. “All that fragmentation has created complexity that stops us from driving better customer value.”
Arthur says her motto to marketers who feel stuck is “Process Is The New Black.” It’s the new functional fashion statement.
“Process is the new black is an internal focus so we can be better externally focused,” she says. “People don’t want to evolve their process. What we’re seeing is dynamic organizations that are disruptors that are coming in fresh and they’re not letting process get in the way, but instead are adopting agile processes so they can quickly respond to the market. That’s why process is the new black, we have got to get out of our own way.”
Arthur suggests a three pronged approach to getting the support of the CEO in an effort to becoming what she calls change agents (a genius moniker that once again conjures up images of superheroes).
“The thing that I’ve seen the most successful for those change agents to get their CEO on board,” says Arthur, “is number one understand the corporate objective and strategy, two is to bring in the data and the voice of the market and then three is connect the dots so that it’s clear what needs to be done.”
So go forth change agents and be the change you want to see in the world. And invest in a cool superhero uniform while you’re at it.
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