Am 16. September, dem Vortag oder online-marketing-düsseldorf, findet erstmals der Marketing Leaders Day (MLD) statt. Die beiden Teilkongresse MD Marke Digital und me marketing efficiency werden Marketingverantwortlichen einen komprimierten Überblick über die neuesten Entwicklungen und Methoden für die digitale Markenbildung bei optimaler Nutzung des Budgets vermitteln.

In beiden Kongressen wird US-Marken-Berater Michael Moon (Gistics) als einer der Hauptredner dabei sein.

Hier im Messeblog reißt er schon vorab einige seiner Thesen zu “Leadership in Brand Management & Customer Engagement” an, die er beim Kongress weiter ausführen wird.

Er erläutert das Konzept einer digitalen Wertschöpfungskette und die daraus resultierenden Herausforderungen an das Marketing. Er fordert dabei von den Unternehmen, die “Stimme des Kunden” in den Mittelpunkt zu stellen und plädiert dafür, ein 360-Grad-Engagement im Unternehmen zu etablieren.

Aber lesen Sie selbst:

Let’s start with the concept of a value chain, adding digital and a marketing emphasis to well-developed foundation.

Value chains describe how a network of organizations and individuals create and add value to their immediate customers the next step of often a complex multi-step process and ultimately the end-of-chain user or customer. For example, a consumer buys a car from a auto dealership, taking delivery of a finish manufactured product – the car – that an entire industrial ecosystem helped produce, including manufacturers steel, semiconductors, and glass as well as the myriad up-chain suppliers of raw materials (iron ore, silicon, etc). One key feature of healthy value chains entails that every key producer performs one or two things brilliantly and keeps to that without trying to poach up-chain or down-chain customers from the firm’s suppliers or customers.

Value chain strategies emphasize four things: ongoing reduction of costs, higher quality outputs or results, faster cycle times (that contributed to overall faster time to market), and better process-control information across the entire value chain.

Digital value-chains reframe the Internet as a business ecosystem, a network of digital or digitally enabled businesses that create and add value to the end-of-chain user or customer. Digital in this context also means that technical systems become the basis of added-value processes and, more particularly, the integration of various technical systems in what IT calls a ‘loosely coupled’ fashion meaning that if any one system fails, all other system may continue to operate instead of shutting down the entire network of firms.

Digital value-chains for marketing exploits the Internet as business-resource ecosystem, finding and integrating the operational capabilities of business partners that help the firm (marketer) find and serve customers. Digital value-chains for marketing builds the concepts that marketing has evolved beyond ’storytelling’ or as I like to say, ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ – products that R&D or product management threw over the metaphorical wall and tell marketing to go find customers for product (however stupid, incomplete, or ugly).

Today, marketing must not only a far larger role in R&D and innovation, marketing must lead. However, two more things compound the need for innovation leadership by marketing. First, more customers no longer want to hear stories (ads, pitches, proposals, etc) they want to participate in the ’storytelling’ and ’story-making’ process. Some marketers now call that ‘engagement’. However, I think that’s only half-right. When customers get a real taste of engagement, they want the whole meal: they want to participate, influence, and take pride in co-ownership of the finished product. They want to participate in product development.

Let IT own the terms of engagement, the tools of engagement and, ultimately, the customer and the brand

This leads to the second the hindering force to innovation leadership by marketing: technical maturity. Marketing has become to develop, provision, and engage customers with digital, online self-service applications. This means that marketers must develop into an IT service delivery organization! Or, let IT own the terms of engagement, the tools of engagement and, ultimately, the customer and the brand.

We see this emerge in a number of ways: the tenures of CMOs continue to fall because most CMOs only know ‘lipstick’ and ’storytelling’. The huge increase on online spendings and investments in quantified return-on-investment digital marketing programs (ad words, search engine marketing, social media, webcast theaters, etc.) Finally, the emergence of VP-level jobs for online governance by firms that now accept that the online-interactive relationship with customers and other stakeholders has challenged if not overtaken all other forms of relating and, therefore, driving corporate reputations, share price, and sales.

This transformation of marketing into IT service delivery organization also leads to another revolution in branding and brand management.

• First, we must accept that consumers own the brand; it lives in the minds and hearts of customers.
• Second, brands tell stories about the buying and using experience.
• Third, brand stories evolve over time, becoming more trusted or just a habit of mind.
• Fourth, brand stories create tribes and communities of practice, where brand use or display signifies membership.
• Fifth, brand tribes create and consume an ever-increasing amount of digital information and content, creating what I call ‘social assets’ of the brand community or band of practitioners.
• Sixth, the social assets of the brand live in blogs, forums, social networking site, emails, text messages, user-generated videos, etc ‹ all forms of digital assets that lie outside the governance, policies, and control of the vendor.
• Seventh, the social network now filters, refutes, refines, and amplifies vendor-generated marketing communications ‹ stories – about offered or promoted services, thus rewarding those vendors who have a truly sustainable offering and truly satisfied customers

Using the case that I have just made, one belief leads most marketers make all types of mistakes: customers own the brand and, increasingly, the received or socialized value proposition. I won’t bother going into the many mistakes that marketers make from the mindset that marketers own the value proposition, the conversation, and the brand.

Rather, let’s start with the correct mindset and ask, what systems, processes, and accountabilities do we need, now, next, and later, to engage the customer? What operational capabilities should we build, buy, or rent?

Voice of the Customer

First and foremost, all marketers need an operational capability called Voice of the Customer, comprising a system, process, and accountabilities for interviewing 20 to 50 customers each month; transcribing verbatim what they said about the buying and using experience of your product or service as well as what they said about being in relationship with your firm; placing these transcripts into a content database and text mining the content, creating topic maps and ontologies (key words and phrases that signify awareness, consideration, trial, purchase, commitment, loyalty, and advocacy for the various brands in a selected marketspace). This should support a Voice of the Customer dashboard, summarizing sentiment pro and con about every facet of the enterprise; every policy, program, product, and service: hard data that no otherwise stupid but well-meaning senior executive can refute with careless fiat such as, “I don’t believe that our customers ….” A true Voice of the Customer capability establishes a bright, shining, and irrefutable ‘north star’ by which to navigate R&D, innovation, marketing, sales, service, training, HR, administration, and finance.

360-degree engagement

Next, marketers need an operational capability called social media monitoring, a way to track conversations among the myriad blogs and social media: key words and phrases that signify awareness, consideration, trial, purchase, commitment, loyalty, and advocacy for the various brands in a selected marketspace.

Concurrently, marketers need to build or enhance the operational capability called 360-degree engagement, the integration of multi-channel marketing analytics, content management, dynamic messaging (newsletters, etc), and marketing process orchestration, and a full-spectrum social marketing platform: blogs, wikis, forums, widgets, RSS feeds, screencast video explanations, etc.

Marketing Revolutions from the Bottom-up:
360-degree engagement requires that marketing become IT service delivery organization!

In my keynote, Marketing Revolutions from the Bottom-up, I start with this admittedly provocative and unpleasant thought: the operational capability of 360-degree engagement requires that marketing become IT service delivery organization! Now what?

In most courses in managing complex projects you will find four key principles:

• First, you can and must break down complex things or systems into smaller and smaller units of work, ultimately creating a collection of Lego building blocks that enable project planners and teams to quickly reconnect these blocks into more useful, efficient configurations.
• Second, to accomplish this ‘atomizing’ of value into small reusable chunks, you need a framework or a periodic chart for classifying these elements and recombining them.
• Third, you need a way of sequencing and prioritizing the steps or procedures.
• Fourth, you need clear role definition and accountability management systems.

That all sounds very German to many and quite startling for an American to lecture Germans on process and procedure! I agree! However, I will add the new element of Process Innovation. Most product firms have well-established procedures around product innovation.

However, most firms do not have a structured, repeatable process for innovating new processes! In fact, I argue that most firms innovate new processes by acquiring an innovative firm or deploying new software, that mostly automates ‘execution’ of an already established business strategy or prevailing business model. All good and fine in a world that never changes and for customers who only want lipstick on the pigs sold to them by never-changing vendors!

Define ONE 45-day single-person or small-group project

Now, every firm need execution systems; I intend to expand the conversation to include innovation systems and, in particular, how to jump-start the process of innovating new engagement processes!

To the end, I will introduce or reintroduce a practice used in Google: take on a really big idea, brainstorm with other really smart folks about what an end-state solution would entail, define ONE 45-day single-person or small-group project, and execute on that one project full-out.

I will integrate this idea of 45-day personally accountable projects to a master project roadmap containing 50 to 100 45-day personally accountable projects, placed in 4 to 9 concurrent tracks and sequenced by phase of Now, Next, Later, and May be Some Day. The concurrent tracks could entail the following:

1. Corporate leadership / headquarters
2. EMEA business unit management / policy
3. Marketing operations, including Product Management
4. Marcom and Internal creative services
5. Procurement, contracts admin, legal
6. Creative and media agencies
7. IT operations

So a master project roadmap would comprise 50 to 100 projects detailing how a marketing operations will become IT service delivery organization that successfully sources, provisions, promotes, and co-brands the operational capability of 360-degree engagement, true process innovation from the bottom-up.

Brands in Germany: You’re own you own … Get to work!

Closing, some words to compare and contrast brands in US, EU and, particular, Germany. First, all great brands work as a mechanism of culture, defining and propagating social norms of perception, thought, feelings, and social interaction Brands reflect the desire and aspirations of a people; thus the meaning of BMW or iPods mean very different things in different countries. Thus, the goal of branding or brand building entails drawing out of a people or culture the best that a people possesses and holds dear.

Finally, brands signify relatedness and belonging; here we see stark contrasts between EU and US and subject of many books. However, in a few phrases, in America “you’re on your own; it’s matter a personal character and desire that determines you destiny; to hell with history, castles, and follies of dead monarchs. It’s up to you; you’ve got no one to blame; don’t bother blaming yourself, either. Just get to work!”

Curiously, Germany continues to undergo many social and societal changes, immigration, low birth rates (come on now, get busy, will you?), low-cost global competition (China, India) for exports, restructuring of core industries, and a general uprooted mobility of Germans, that make Germany look more and more like America: You’re own you own … Get to work!