Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Food for thought, this morning, when I trundled along to a breakfast event hosted by the AMI, featuring Dr Don E Schultz of Agora fame, and author of a number of books (none of which, it would seem, we have previously added to our shopping cart).

Don’s main thesis is that:

1)  The “modern” approach to marketing emerged in parallel with the industrial age of society, and hence is based on similar principles (e.g. a Taylorist view of the world – which leads into a “command and control” focus internally, and a top-down mentality in terms of push-based marketing to “consumers” (how I hate that term).

2)  Given that we’re progressing from this Industrial Age into what’s been termed by a number of people as a “Customer Age”, Don’s view is that marketing also needs a transformation.

Don talked quickly through five aspects of this transformation.

The following is my re-creation of Don’s points based on my scratchings during the event:

Transformation #1  Marketing at the Speed of Customers, not Competitors

Most of what has been taught at universities, and is still in most books about marketing, is premised on a top-down view of marketing and sales

i.e. build a widget, and then find people to sell it to

Hence, principles such as the 4P’s (sometimes extrapolated to 5 or 6) are dated concepts based in an old paradigm.

My view is that this does not necessarily make them worthless - just dangerous, if used without reference to context.

In contrast, Don talked about how the companies that will prosper in the future start with working out what the customer wants in the first place (seems simple, I know).

Don talked about how the iPhone was an example of a product was one in which the manufacturer worked in collaboration with users (through the iStore) to flesh out the scope of the “whole product” (as described by Geoffrey Moore).

This reminds me of Lars’ description of how the development of content for Google Maps was effectively outsourced to the users of the service, as well.

From our point of view, this is very much the reason why our “GM Software” (which we are recruiting now) has a title which explicitly incorporates discerning what the customer wants as a core responsibility.

In summary – stop focusing on the competition, start interacting with your customers.

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Transformation #2   Marketing at the Speed of Listening, not Talking

Don’s main thesis is that sales has traditionally been viewed as a linear, push-dominated process (e.g. a “sales funnel”).

In my view, this has the effect of creating a false impression (within a Marketing Department) that they have more control over the message the customer hears and how they respond.  In my view this was never really the case, and it is increasingly becoming less tenable.

In some staid industries (such as the electricity supply industry, in which we operate) traditional sellers have been able to live that way to this point in time.

In our industry, the government’s $100M “Smart Grid, Smart City” project, we very much would like to see this high-profile project as a way in which the industry experiments with ways to move to a more bottom-up mode of interacting with end-use customers.

Our company has been active in progressing this transformation at the large-end of energy-use (with industrial energy users) and will progressively look for opportunities through which we can also do this with smaller customers, as well.

Hence, when we go out to talk to customers, our focus should be on listening to what they want to tell us, not asking them what we (think we) want to know.

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Transformation #3  Use consumer consumption, rather than communication distribution

Here Don was mainly talking about changing the way that media/marketing companies measure the reach of the messages they promote – given everyone increasingly multi-tasks (in terms of how they consume media) measuring minutes of usage of a particular media channel is a misleading indicator.

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Transformation #4  Speed up marketing with predictive models

What’s the point of measuring the effectiveness of money already invested (wasted?) on marketing?

Given a choice, it would be far more effective to work out ways in which to more effectively prioritise money that is yet to be invested into the most effective communication channels.

Don says that no-one has really nailed this one, yet (hence we’re betting on the next horse race based on who we bet on last time - without even really knowing if that horse won the last race).

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Transformation #5  Get rid of silos – customer focus is cross-functional

I agree entirely.

This is why the leadership team I am establishing internally will all have explicit responsibility for some touch-point with the customer.

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Given we will be kicking off recruitment of a “General Manager for Customer Relationships” (aka GM M&S) shortly, we will be giving these type of ideas much more focused thought….

Tags: 04 - Sales & Marketing, Chief Software Engineer, GM Marketing Sales

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under 04 - Sales & Marketing, Event Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.