Dipanjan Chatterjee says, “For all the talk about customer centricity, there’s a dirty little secret that no marketer will easily admit to: Marketing — as a discipline and as the core of most traditional business school marketing curricula — is inward-looking. Take the much-vaunted four Ps: build the right product, price it correctly, put it in the right place, and promote it to induce purchase. It’s all about the brand, not about the consumer. The consumer responds predictably, robot-like, to the various strategies cooked up by marketers. Meet Homo economicus — the rational consumer.... [...]

Peter O’Neill says, “At the B2B Marketing 2016 forum last October, we had several sessions when we reflected on some external forces that affect our work as marketers. Trends included the movement toward as-a-service business models (our CEO once famously predicted that every business will eventually become a software business), the increasing use of video content in marketing, and the leverage of social channels. These sessions had great attendance, and the feedback was very positive. We had made attendees aware of possibilities that they may not have yet discussed in their own companies. Similarly,... [...]

Susan Bidel says, “Marketers have always carefully calibrated their messages and the audiences they wanted to reach, and, for most of advertising’s history, the process was pretty straightforward. Marketers used content as a proxy for audience, and worked with known and trusted entities to carry out their plans. They bought space, delivered materials to publishers, and ads appeared. That was the process for the first banner ad, too, for AT&T on Wired Magazine’s website on October 27, 1994. While the intent of marketers has remained consistent as they have embraced digital channels,... [...]

Brandon Verblow says, “Poor quality inventory and lack of transparency are problems for the digital ad industry. My colleague Susan Bidel and I have recently published reports that show how the related problems of fraud and lack of viewability result in wasted spending by marketers and a lost revenue opportunity for quality publishers. For further detail, clients can read Forrester Data Report: Ad Fraud And Viewability Forecast, 2016 To 2021 (US) and Poor Quality Ads Cost US Marketers $7.4 Billion In 2016. While not an issue of ad fraud or viewability per se, recent concern over YouTube... [...]

Kate Leggett says, “Amazon just launched a preliminary cloud contact center offering, built on AWS. It offers an IVR, natural language understanding via Lex, queueing and routing and telephony infrastructure. It supports basic self-service interactions, and phone interactions. The best videos to explain what Amazon Connect does is at: Getting Started With Amazon Connect  and Introducing Amazon Connect. Even though this is a first step in the commercial contact center world, this offering is really cool. Why? Because Amazon knows how to build and run contact centers. They built their own... [...]

Caroline Robertson says, “My former neighbor bought the house next door primarily due to its 9-acre potential. Over the years, I got to see his garden develop from a razed backyard to a well-orchestrated, nearly year-round landscape of seasonal beauty. He’d continually prune out the anemic and plant new varietals that he deemed would more likely thrive in our climate. I was amazed at the ongoing evolution of his garden — and how much of it ended up on his burn pile. But he focused on the success of his garden overall and didn’t overly invest in any one plant, bush, or tree. Despite... [...]

Dan Bieler says, “Poor customer experiences remain the Achilles’ heel of telcos’ digital transformation efforts. We live in the age of the customer, and today’s telco customer has expectations that far exceed the traditional standard of telco customer service. A random search on Trustpilot for customer satisfaction with telcos in various countries shows widespread dissatisfaction. Offering customers seamless omnichannel experiences is critical for telcos’ digital transformation efforts. Today, customers expect to use a variety of digital touchpoints. This omnichannel approach affects... [...]

Chris Gardner says, “In a past life I was a system administrator, or “sysadmin”. I enjoyed it, but even in those halcyon days of remoting into servers and driving to the office at 2 AM (hoping the server room wasn’t on fire), I knew I had a limited shelf life. It wasn’t until years later that I fully understood why: Administrators are babysitters. The era of tech babysitters is over. In the age of the customer, admins need to be just as dynamic as their developer brethren. That means a hard shift to software-defined infrastructure. It also means using the same... [...]

Anjali Lai says, “If Thursday morning’s controversial tweet from McDonald’s is any indication, brands are no longer safe. I’m not just talking about the threat of a data breach or hack — I’m talking about the threat of consumers who force brands to expose their ethics and beliefs or remain at the mercy of consumer perception and interpretation in a polarized environment. As we’ve seen with other examples of ubiquitous and once universally loved brands like Kellogg’s and L.L. Bean, consumers increasingly judge companies on the basis of their values — and while customers are... [...]

Nick Barber says, “Marketing resource management (MRM) vendor Aprimo snatched up ADAM Software, which bolsters Aprimo’s digital asset management (DAM) capabilities and reinforces the consolidation and convergence that we predicted. There are a lot of small DAM vendors, but there has been a move to consolidate. Specifically, the capabilities of MRM, DAM, and content marketing platforms (CMP) continue to blur. MRM vendors like Aprimo help marketers assign tasks, track resources, budget, and review materials. But they stop short of organizing large libraries of content, integrating with upstream... [...]