For as long as companies have existed, marketing departments have asked themselves the same question: How can products and services be sold as cleverly as possible? For a long time, the answers had much to do with intuition, creativity, experience, gut feeling, and innovation. Chance or the correct interpretation of a campaign often leads to success. I call this phase the era of mad men marketing.
Of course, several acclaimed marketing campaigns have been and still are proven to be successful based on creativity and gut instinct. Data also plays a role in Mad Men’s marketing. However, there is a decisive difference between data-driven marketing: Up until now, the focus has been on the campaigns – this is different from customer centricity.
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Is Customer Centricity The Future?
With digital marketing, on the other hand, those responsible have more and more data at their disposal, which they can use to gain deeper insights into the thinking and behaviour of customers. Finally, place the needs of customers radically at the centre of marketing. Keyword: customer centricity. However, it would be easy to claim that the overwhelming amount of data alone will radically change marketing.
Status Quo: Distributed, Inhomogeneous Data Pots
In practice, the transformation to data-driven and customer-centric marketing often proves difficult in many companies. Over the years, complex, primarily departmental and product-specific, monolithic IT systems and tools have grown in these companies, making it impossible to take a central look at the behaviour of individual customers. Let alone enable real-time adjustment of marketing activities along the customer journey—the reason: distributed, inhomogeneous data pools.
So what to do? To achieve closed-loop marketing, companies must establish a continuous flow of strategic marketing planning, campaign execution, and automation. To do this, they need a perfectly orchestrated technology stack. From my point of view, the basis for such a framework is to first break down the old marketing structure into its most minor components and then rebuild it without unnecessary components so that all parts interlock.
A Data-Driven Approach To The Customer
This approach, which I call “ma. topics”, enables a rapid transformation to a data-fed, customer-centric organisation. Here, all data on individual customers flow together in one system, enabling maths-men marketing – the intelligent, data-driven approach to customers.
Perhaps this will close the gap between the company’s perception and the customer’s opinion concerning the quality of the customer experience. According to a recent IDC study, 87 percent of companies attest to an excellent customer experience, compared to only 11 percent of customers.
The topic can be read in detail in Mathias Elsasser’s book: “Intelligent Data-Driven Marketing: When Physicists Start Thinking about Marketing: From Mad-Man to Math-Man Marketing.” Chance or the correct interpretation of a campaign often leads to success. Data also plays a role in Mad Men’s marketing. However, there is a decisive difference between data-driven marketing. Finally, place the needs of customers radically at the centre of marketing. Over the years, complex, primarily departmental and product-specific, monolithic IT systems and tools have grown in these companies, making it impossible to take a central look at the behaviour of individual customers.
