Customer First Thinking

Personalization at scale has long been a dream of marketers. But until recently it has been more superficial than helpful, constrained by legacy technology and processes. Today, however, AI makes it easier to do than ever before. Now the only thing holding marketers back, according to personalization expert Mark Abraham, is their campaign mindset. 

Select excerpts from interviews with some of marketing's most prominent thought leaders on the state of marketing and the need for transformational change.

B2B companies tend to be laggards when it comes to delivering a superior customer experience, focused more on selling than servicing. But as a result of digital disruption, they have finally begun to embrace the need for a better post-sale journey, according to Jim Tincher, a leading expert in B2B experience design.

The market research industry is facing an existential crisis. Brand marketers have lost faith in old school methods of research – too slow, cumbersome and costly, in their view. To regain the trust of marketers, the consumer insights industry has to modernize their practices and start delivering insights that make more of a strategic impact, says Brett Townsend, a leading market research authority.

Buyer Personas have become a standard part of the marketing toolkit for creating customer empathy. But where they can go wrong is failing to reveal why customers make the decisions they do, according to persona design authority Jim Kraus.  

These days it can be risky for brands to take a stand on social issues or promote inclusiveness. But if marketers are able to honestly depict the diversity of society in their brand communications, their message has a far greater chance of being heard, according to cultural theorist Anastasia Karklina Gabriel.

Companies still tend to over-invest  in the acquisition of new customers while paying scant attention to relationships with existing customers. The solution to correcting that imbalance, argues value creation expert Allison Hartsoe, is knowing the collective lifetime value of all customers, known as customer equity. 

CX quality has declined in recent years as companies struggle to keep up with the expectations of customers. But the main reason, according to renowned CX expert Jon Picoult, is that they settle for mediocrity when they should be aspiring to make the experience more distinctive and memorable.

For all its flaws, social media has become the preferred way for people to stay connected with each other. Yet for too long marketers have failed to take it seriously. The time has come, says social media expert Andrew Jenkins, for marketers to give it the respect it deserves.

Brand tracking studies are a standard research tool for marketers who need to understand how people feel about their brand. The problem with them, according to brand health expert Jenni Romaniuk, is that they don't tell marketers what they really need to know to grow their brand.

Content glut has suffocated the chances of discovery for most marketers. The only way for content marketing to succeed, according to renowned content strategist Robert Rose, is to transform content operations teams into specialized publishing units closely attuned to audience interests and needs.

Marketing today has grown far too complex for decisions to hinge on loose assumptions and guesswork. A more disciplined and fact-based approach is needed, supported by rigorous performance analysis, testing and forecasting, according to Koen Pauwels, one of the world's leading marketing scientists.   

No one understands what marketing does anymore, least of all the CEO. For marketing to be seen as more of a difference maker, it must expand its role beyond branding, according to Accenture's Brent Chaters, and earn a greater say in the strategic direction of the business.        

Marketers have long sought to discover the motivations that explain why people make the decisions and buying choices they do. The answer, according to Valuegraphics founder  David Allison, is their values. To make more meaningful connections with customers, marketers must first understand how they differ in their values.     

The best way for brands to stand out today is to offer a distinctive experience that earns them an everyday role in people's lives. But that means knowing where the brand can make the greatest difference in the lives of customers, according to brand expert Allen Adamson.   

If businesses hope to survive the potentially lethal disruption ahead due to massive technological change, they need to accelerate their digital transformation. The first decision they must make, according to digital transformation expert Howard Tiersky, is to embrace the need for continuous transformative change.

 The top priority of CMOs is to grow top-line revenue. But the best way to achieve that growth is a matter of debate. Do you go after as many buyers as possible, or focus on winning the loyalty of existing customers? Wharton Professor Peter Fader says the answer lies in examining the behavioural patterns of current customers.    

Marketers have an opportunity to play a lead role in helping their organizations adapt to the massive wave of change expected in the years ahead. But first marketers will have to “future-proof” themselves, according to Alison Simpson, the new leader of the Canadian Marketing Association.

The mainstream banks are facing massive disruption due to the rise of fintechs, forcing them to speed up digital transformation. Leading those efforts at BMO Financial Group is Greg Brown, whose mandate is to change how the bank does business. 

Brand positioning has been part of marketing orthodoxy for over half a century now. Yet marketers often fail to get it right, due mainly to formulaic thinking. To come up with truly novel positioning statements, according to global branding expert Ulli Appelbaum, marketers must treat it as more of a creative exercise, coming up with as many potential ideas as possible.

To turn customers into lifelong fans, brands will need to put community development at the heart of their marketing plans. It is the “last great marketing strategy”, according to the acclaimed marketing consultant Mark Schaefer. People “long to belong”, he says, and that presents an opportunity to connect with them on a more meaningful level.

In a bid to earn front-of-the-wallet status, the Scene loyalty program has been transformed into a full-fledged coalition program with the addition of new partners in the grocery, e-commerce and travel sectors. But its greatest strength, claims Scene's Senior Vice President Matthew Seagrim, is its strategic emphasis on creating membership value.

Many corporate leaders now accept the need to define a brand purpose beyond making a profit. Yet most purpose statements fail to resonate with people. The only way to excite all stakeholders, argues Scott Goodson, is to activate it through a grassroots social movement. 

Marketers have relied on lifestyle segmentation for half a century now, targeting people based on their shared values, interests, and attitudes. And it remains a highly effective tool even in a digital age due to the increasing segregation of society into like-minded communities, according to Jan Kestle, head of Canada's largest marketing analytics company.

Despite all of the effort being made by businesses to improve the customer experience, it is not paying off in higher satisfaction ratings. A large gap still exists between what customers expect of that experience and how they actually feel about it. What businesses need to do, advises CX pioneer Colin Shaw, is design a more memorable experience, focusing on those parts of the customer journey that evoke the greatest emotion.

Every transformative era in the evolution of marketing has been triggered by a dramatic shift in people's media habits. Now marketing has entered a new phase of evolution, according to Professor V. Kumar, only this time the catalyst for change is the desire of customers for more meaningful engagement.

Finance and marketing have always been implacable foes, unable to agree on the performance metrics that matter. Before they can ever see eye to eye, suggest MASB's Neil Bendle, they need to develop a standardized measurement model that validates the contribution of marketing to the financial health of the business.

Despite its lowly status e-mail marketing continues to thrive as a media channel. The reason for its enduring popularity amongst marketers, according to leading e-mail expert Chad White: its versatility as a one-to-one communication medium. 

The Net Promoter Score has become the primary method of calculating customer loyalty, adopted by companies everywhere as a beacon metric. Earning a top NPS score often requires a big shift in management culture, according to its creator Fred Reichheld, driven by a top-down commitment to enrich people's lives.

In a post-cookie world marketing will need to give up campaign-building in favour of delivering a more dynamic and real-time omnichannel customer experience. But the quality of that experience will hinge on harnessing first-party data to drive more personalized interactions. And that will require a single view of customer tightly connected to a next generation engagement platform, according to SalesForce's Marty Kihn.  

Tired of waiting for IT to build them a “single view of customer”, marketers are turning to commercial solutions called Customer Data Management Platforms. That trend is likely to continue in coming years, according to the world's leading CDP expert David Raab, as more companies recognize the value of first party data.

Battered by the pandemic, and facing even more disruption ahead, the retail industry is in crisis. With even more stores expected to close in the coming years due to declining foot traffic and the flight to ecommerce, retailers will need to offer shoppers a more distinctive experience if they hope to survive. A new retail model is needed, argues retail futurist Doug Stephens, which will pull shoppers away from their screens and entice them to shop in person.

Marketing technology is now essential to business success. Yet marketers continue to struggle with the complexity of their bloated marketing automation solutions, citing lack of application integration amongst their toughest challenges. The answer, according to Hubspot's marketing technology expert Scott Brinker, is to develop more open and compatible platform ecosystems that make it easy for marketers to add on any application they want.

The discipline of brand building has atrophied over the past two decades, as corporate chieftains focused mainly on short-term growth objectives. But for companies to succeed in a post-pandemic world, the brand must become the face of business strategy, argues branding expert David Kincaid, with the CEO leading the way.

The pandemic has been costly for traditional retailers who were slow to adapt to omnichannel commerce. In Canada, Canadian Tire avoided that fate, launching its Triangle Rewards program three years ago to deepen its relationship with customers. Under the stewardship of Senior VP Shawn Stewart, the 10-million member program has become instrumental in the retailer’s shift to a digital-first model.

Under pressure to act fast during the pandemic, businesses sped up their digital transformation plans, compressing their timetables from years into months. Now they face the next phase of evolution, what digital prophet Brian Solis calls the “novel economy”. For businesses to adapt and thrive, says Solis, they must take a more profound and humanistic approach to transformation.

Slow to awaken to market disruption and too reliant on ad spending, the global agency holding companies have seen their valuations plummet in recent years. To reverse their fortunes, they need to transform their service model. MDC is leading the way, aided by an infusion of capital from the new CEO Mark Penn, who is set to turn his collection of “partner agencies” into a “modern marketing company of choice”. 

Marketing has always been on the front lines of change. Each seismic shift has brought a new set of challenges. But now, in this new world of “infinite media”, marketing is facing its greatest challenge ever. The only response, Mathew Sweezey believes, is for marketing to pivot from harnessing media to creating experiences that help customers in the context of the moment.

The world is awash in mediocre content, mainly because most brands struggle to find something meaningful to say. Yet in times of crisis, when people are feeling anxious and concerned, there is never a better time to speak up. The key is the ability to show empathy, Ann Handley argues. She urges brands to “do less” and “obsess” about producing higher quality content that matters. 

Welcome to the Customer First Thinking podcast, Episode 12. My name is Stephen Shaw, the host of this podcast. In this episode we interview Bryan Pearson, the former CEO of LoyaltyOne and a true pioneer in loyalty marketing.

Marketing as a discipline is going through an identity crisis due to the radical shift in the buying behaviour of people. The answer, for some companies, is to ditch the classical marketing function in favour of a broader mandate that makes the customer experience more of a corporate priority. But just fixing what’s wrong is not enough, according to Jay Baer. Companies must also offer customers an experience so memorable and unexpected, they’ll be keen to talk about it with everyone they know.

The practice of content marketing began to evolve into a grown-up discipline about a decade ago. That was around the time social media platforms had reached the size where they could serve as a practical delivery channel. Companies no longer had to rely on paid ads to drive visitors to their own branded web properties – they could attract inbound traffic organically through social media. And then with the democratization of publishing the content floodgates burst open. Today the world is awash in blogs, streaming video, e-books, white papers, infographics, webinars, podcasts, newsletters and so much more, in a dizzying dogfight for attention. We’ve reached a saturation point, where no matter how good the content may be, the chances of it being noticed are remote. Despite this explosive growth, content marketing remains a leap of faith for most companies. They may have become better at generating content – but whether it works or not remains to be seen, especially when you consider that 70% of content reportedly goes unnoticed. Which is probably why 86% of companies say that their content marketing efforts aren’t generating business value, according to Forrester. Pretty distressing when you consider how much money is spent on content marketing – oftentimes, as much as one third of a company’s marketing budget. Despite the questionable contribution to business results, marketers are undeterred – budgets are expected to keep growing. But that means the content glut will only get worse. Even more money will have to be spent making that content visible – relying, just as before, on paid ads. The solution, according to Randy Frisch, is to say “F#CK to Content Marketing”, which just happens to be the provocative title of his recently published book. Despite the attention-grabbing title, he’s been an ardent proponent of content marketing ever since he and his partner founded their company Uberflip in 2012. Uberflip competes in the hotly contested arena of content marketing platforms. But unlike a lot of its CMP competitors, which function as publishing workflow engines, Uberflip prefers to optimize what it likes to call the “content experience”: allowing marketers to offer a more personalized and interactive way to engage with content. Every year the Toronto-based company hosts a highly regarded event for marketers called CONEX - short for “content experience” - which just last month drew a crowd of over 700 attendees from across North America. The main thesis of Randy’s book is that marketers have spent too much time worrying about content scalability and not enough about content discoverability. Even the best content can get buried in a chronological scroll. And often the content is too elementary or generic to be of much value to prospective buyers deep into self-education. Marketers should be thinking about how to map the content journey to the purchase journey, Randy argues, and design a dynamic experience that aligns with the knowledge level and decision stages of individual buyers. But before getting Randy’s take on the state of content marketing I wanted to know: what’s up with that book title?

Most traditional businesses are just now getting used to the idea of a mobile-first world where people spend six hours a day immersed in digital media. But as the digital economy starts to take over, businesses will have to be ready for even more tumultuous change. A new wave of disruptive technology is coming. It will usher in a post-digital age of continuous connectivity and transform how society functions: what’s been called the 4th Industrial Revolution. AI-powered smart speakers, streaming services, messaging platforms, apps, mobile commerce, 5G-connected devices, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain – all converging to transform how people live their lives. No wonder IDC is forecasting over $1 trillion in digital transformation spending this year, an increase of 18% over 2018, as businesses frantically try to upgrade and modernize their infrastructure and systems. But most businesses remain “digitally distraught”, as IDC puts it. New ways of connecting with customers means new ways of doing business – hard to pull off if the C-suite can’t see past the next earnings report. Digital transformation is not for the “faint of heart”, IDC warns. It takes an enterprise-wide commitment to change. It requires an inspiring vision of how to create an unforgettable customer experience. And it means rewiring the business to become more agile, collaborative, daring, innovative. In other words, it means acting more like “digital natives”. Since the number one goal of digital transformation is almost always to improve the customer experience, marketing should be leading the way. Yet, according to Forrester, that job is usually handed to the CIO, who’s more likely to be thinking digital-first, not customer-first. Which is why efforts at digital transformation generally run aground: siloed mentalities, timid goal-setting and risk aversion get in the way of being customer-obsessed. To act like a “digital native” demands an inquiring mind and a constant itch to defy convention. Those attributes perfectly describe Mitch Joel, the Montrealer who’s made a name for himself as a digital expert specializing in decoding the future, as he puts it. He built his reputation as a trailblazer in the early days of the digital revolution, dating back to the start-up of his digital agency Twist Image in 2002, which he later sold to WPP. Mitch writes a popular blog called “Six Pixels of Separation” which he started 16 years ago and produces a weekly podcast by that same name. He’s also written a couple of best-selling books, the second of which, “CTRL ALT Delete”, was about “the evolution and reboot of business”. So it was natural that digital transformation would be the main subject of our conversation. But first I wanted to know – how did he go from being a music journalist and publisher at the start of his career to becoming a renowned digital seer?

Download for offline listening. In one survey after another marketing leaders cite driving growth as their biggest challenge. Judgement of a CMO’s performance invariably boils down to one measure: the year-over-year increase in brand sales. And as much as marketers have glommed on to the idea of customer experience as a differentiator, they are still mainly accountable for selling more stuff to more people. That’s why marketing strategy and planning, according to Forrester Research, “remains stubbornly old school”. Marketers see their job as spear carriers for the brand, leading the hunt for new customers. The only thing that’s changed from past practices are the KPIs: Engagement now tops ad impressions – social shares trump share of voice. But the goals are still the same: create top-of-mind awareness; lead people down the path to purchase; get them to convert. No wonder the idea of putting customers first seems so abstract. Marketers are still caught up in the game of brand messaging. That game was relatively easy to play when the choices were confined to broadcast media. But today marketers are forced to spread their dollars across a broad mix of channels, hoping to catch customers at exactly the right moment. The problem: Messages go unnoticed in an ever-expanding universe of content. Audience attention is fleeting, measured in seconds, not minutes. So how do marketers get off this merry-go-round? What should their true role be? How do they lead their organizations out of the digital wilderness? And how, in fact, do they become more customer-centric when they are still organized around brands and products? In his book “Tilt”, Niraj Dawar, the esteemed Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business school, observes that “marketing, as a discipline, has been in a funk since the demise of mass marketing clipped its ability to move large numbers of customers to buy”. He sees today’s marketers as aspiring technicians “who understand data but not strategy”. He argues that product innovation is not enough – it only results in incessant leapfrogging. His idea: Marketing must go from asking, “How much more of this stuff can we sell?”, to “What else do our customers need?”. Marketing’s new role, he suggests, should be to “take charge of the entire customer relationship”. Marketers today need to give up their channel-based strategic planning processes in favour of delivering value at every stage of the relationship. Instead of “playing a game of R&D roulette”, as Professor Dawar puts it, marketers need to figure out which customer problems the brand is best positioned to solve.

Download for offline listening. Over the past decade design thinking has grown in popularity as a catalyst for innovation. Historically, the design function has always operated on the business perimeter, answering to product management, engineering or marketing. But with today’s intense pressure on businesses to ward off digital disruption, design thinking has taken on a central role in freeing the corporate imagination. Until very recently design thinking was not even taught in business schools. The curriculum has been overwhelmingly devoted to scientific management principles which stresses measurement and process (like Six Sigma, TQM, etc). Design thinking, by contrast, looks at problems from an outside-in perspective: how people experience the world. Applying abductive reasoning, it tries to reframe the problem by factoring in the often emotional and irrational choices made by customers. To think like a designer demands curiosity – insight - free thinking – empathy - and a collaborative spirit: attributes more often found amongst polymaths than technocrats. Design thinking leads to Big Ideas about innovative products, services and business models. But to improve the usability of a product or service, a different design methodology - human-centered design – is applied. Both have their role in meeting the needs of customers. But what’s missing is a more holistic view of the customer relationship – one that takes a broader view of the end-to-end experience. Which is why experience thinking, a new evolving field, fills a critical gap in the innovation process. Experience Thinking looks at what’s important to customers – searches for unmet needs – pinpoints the desired outcomes – and homes in on the ideas that can turn a humdrum experience into one that customers will rave about. It can be thought of as the “corpus callosum” connecting creativity and innovation in order to crack the code on difficult-to-solve problems or come up with truly unique experiences. “When you take a holistic look at how people react and would interact within a set of events at specific points in time, you are implementing Experience Thinking”, writes Tedde van Gelderen in his book Experience Thinking. As the founder and President of the Toronto-based design consultancy Akendi, van Gelderen has worked with a broad range of companies over the past decade, helping them create what he calls “intentional experiences”. His framework divides the design process into four interconnected quadrants: Brand, Content, Product and Service, each with its own goals, techniques and outcomes. Together they form the tapestry of a connected end-to-end experience. Prior to founding Akendi, the Dutch-born van Gelderen worked mostly in the area of user experience design where he applied his post-graduate degree in cognitive psychology, either as a design manager or consultant. Today the company he founded has offices in both Canada and the U.K. and is considered a pioneer in the realm of experience design.

Download for offline listening. Ever since the earliest ads began appearing in newspapers at the start of the 19th century, advertising has been tolerated by most people as a credible source of information on products and services. But in recent years, as digital advertising has steadily grown to account for one third of total ad spending, public trust and favourability has declined sharply. Most people now feel bombarded by interruptive digital ads, creeped out by ad retargeting and resentful at the constant intrusiveness. According to Forrester Research, just 21% of the online population still believe ads are a good way to learn about new products1. Everyone else feels preyed upon, knowing their online activity is being shared by ad networks across the web. Advertisers, for their part, aren’t feeling they’re getting their money’s worth. The world’s biggest ad spender, P&G, had harsh words for the industry a couple of years ago, accusing it of waste and fraudulent practices, upset that as little as 25% of money spent on digital ads was reaching its intended audience. The world’s second biggest advertiser, Unilever, has called the web a “digital swamp”. Its former CMO, Keith Weed, recently said, “Without trust, advertising has no future”. That’s why the web has reached a “tipping point”, according to its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who favours a total reboot. The problem, of course, is that the web’s commercial model revolves entirely around brands spending money on ads, these days mostly through programmatic advertising. Almost all of the digital display dollars are being soaked up by the duopoly of Google and Facebook, and now Amazon has entered the ring, its sights set on attracting a hefty slice of that spending. That leaves the rest of the digital publishing industry fighting over a shrinking pool of ad dollars, forcing them to consider adopting a subscription model just to stay in business. Today thousands of ad tech companies feast on US$235 billion in online ad spending2. Consumers have responded by installing ad blockers, with one quarter of US Internet users now blocking ads3. The adtech industry has been trying to clean up its act, but until they give people a better reason to view and click on ads, a day of reckoning is coming. As the chief strategy officer for Toronto, Ont.-based Acuity Ads, Seraj Bharwani recognizes the urgency to rethink the current ad-based model. He was one of the founding members of Digitas in the nascent days of the web and over the years he’s helped shape the digital strategies for many top consumer brands, among them American Express, P&G and AT&T. In this interview he shares his perspective on the past and future of digital advertising, as well as his ideas for industry reform. I started by asking him about his experience in those formative years in the mid-90s when people were still scratching their heads about what the web was really all about. 1. Forrester Data Consumer Technographics North American Online Benchmark Survey, 2016. 2. AdAge Fact Pact 2019 3. eMarketer, “Demanding a Better Ad Experience”, Dec.2018.

Download for offline listening. In 1993, AT&T launched a marketing campaign called “You Will”. In a series of memorable TV ads, it depicted future applications of technology that turned out to be eerily accurate. Each commercial showcased a different product innovation AT&T had been working on. “Have you ever had an assistant who lived in your Computer?”, one commercial asks. Another begins by wondering, “Have you ever gotten a phone call on your wrist?”. Each commercial ended with the signoff: “You will”. Almost all the scenarios, from videoconferencing to self-service kiosks to video on demand, eventually came true (just not attributable to AT&T, the one prediction it fumbled). It was a time of technological optimism when the interactive future seemed excitingly close. That year the World Wide Web had become freely available to the public at large. Services like Prodigy and Compuserve were already offering online subscribers dial-up access to a broad range of networked services. U.S. Vice President Al Gore earned notoriety heralding the “information superhighway”. And the launch of the Mosaic browser ignited the digitization of commerce. This revolution in communications technology gave hope to marketers agonizing over the decline of mass media. And that year they found inspiration in a book called “The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time” written by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Just like the AT&T campaign, the book imagined what the near future might look like due to rapid technological change, specifically the rise of individually addressable media. Intended as a “guidebook for competing in the 1:1 future”, the book argued that marketing would need to “put customers first” to succeed and that would only be possible by building “the deepest, most trusting relationships” with customers. A giant best-seller at the time, the book made “one-to-one” marketing the buzzword of the decade. Soon after, Peppers and Rogers parlayed their fame into a major consultancy business. Their names became synonymous with the rise of interactive marketing. Today, a quarter century later, the future has finally caught up with many of their predictions. Peppers and Rogers belong to the pantheon of visionary marketers who laid the groundwork for the widespread adoption of relationship marketing principles and practices. Don Peppers remains an ardent proponent of putting customers first, continuing to address marketing audiences everywhere on its importance. Notwithstanding the immense strides made in technology, Peppers says that improving the customer experience “represents an immense problem to solve” for most businesses. And while many of his original ideas have become mainstream, Peppers recognizes that many businesses are still struggling to fully catch up to the one-to-one future he envisioned a quarter century ago. We started by asking if he and Martha had taken time to celebrate the 25th publishing anniversary of the book.

Download for offline listening. Businesses are “drowning in data but starving for insight”, as the saying goes, and that problem is about to get worse. As society becomes increasingly connected, marketers are facing a rising tide of digital interactions. Somewhere inside that massive pool of data are the answers to questions marketers haven’t even thought to ask – yet are essential to creating a better customer experience. Relief is on the way in the form of artificial intelligence. The capability to skip right to the answers without even forming the questions will be the salvation of marketers, who until now have had to rely on their own made-up rules or overworked data scientists. With AI, the analytical load shifts to machine learning algorithms that will help marketers reach the promised land of hyper-personalization. The first wave of commercial AI solutions has already made landfall. AI is being used today to improve audience targeting for programmatic media buying; make dynamic content and product recommendations; and drive demand-level pricing. Most of the major marketing automation and CRM vendors have already integrated AI capabilities into their platforms (like Salesforce’s Einstein). Companies also have the option of outsourcing the analytical work to software-as-a-service platform providers who will help them benefit from the technology immediately. One of those SaaS providers is Toronto-based Daisy Intelligence founded by CEO Gary Saarenvirta. The company, which specializes in retail merchandising solutions and insurance fraud detection, was recently awarded the first-place prize at the 2018 Elevate AI Pitch competition in a tough field of 16 start-ups. The “deep learning” platform developed by Daisy Intelligence can ingest a massive amount of SKU-level transactional data and through its self-learning algorithms determine the best product price points; adjust the promotional mix to minimize cannibalization; identify optimal store locations and layout, and much more, saving merchandisers from needing to figure it out themselves. All the retailer needs to do is turn over as much sales history as possible, and let the platform perform its magic. “Deep learning” is very much like magic because no one can ever say how it arrives at the answers it comes up with. Known as a “convolutionary neural network”, the idea was first conceived by Toronto computer math wizard Geoffrey Hinton in 1986. Since that time advancements in GPU computing has allowed “deep learning” to grab the pole position in the AI race, much to the excitement – and sometimes dread – of futurists who imagine a world where machines are smarter than humans. Remember Elon Musk’s dire warning that AI would “summon the demon”? For the time being, AI evangelists like Gary Saarenvirta are proving that “deep learning” offers clear advantages over traditional approaches to data mining and analysis, both in speed and precision. And he should know: Gary ran the analytics practice at Loyalty Consulting Group for years, and once led IBM’s analytics and data warehousing practice areas. He’s also a trained rocket scientist, having entered the workforce with an aerospace engineering degree. But today Gary’s focus is much more grounded in making AI an indispensable tool for data-driven businesses. He explains why in this “deep learning” interview which started with the genesis of the company’s name.

Download for offline listening. In 1983 a Professor at Texas A&M University by the name of Leonard Berry coined the term “relationship marketing” in a paper he presented at an American Marketing Association event. His basic premise: businesses should focus more on serving existing customers. Now as obvious as that may sound, it seemed heretical in an era dominated by mass advertising. Berry never actually thought his paper was “any kind of breakthrough”; he just figured it was “foolish”, as he put it, that marketing only thought about winning new customers, rarely about retaining them. Yet at the time his argument was so far out of the mainstream that nearly a decade went by before marketers warmed to the idea. What happened to revive interest was the unraveling of the mass market by the late 1980s. Relationship marketing was deemed by academics to be the antidote to audience fragmentation. Their endorsement led to countless books, papers, conferences, along with a dedicated scholarly journal. But with the rapid adoption of CRM technology in the early 1990s the definition became muddled. Did CRM now mean “customer relationship management”, as in automated after-sale support and service, or “customer relationship marketing”, as in data-driven one-to-one marketing? The idea that relationship marketing simply meant giving customers the attention they deserve was overtaken by the fixation with technology, to the dismay of early proponents. One of the earliest proponents was Jagdish Sheth, the esteemed Professor of Marketing at Emory University. Last year in a paper he authored called “Revitalizing Relationship Marketing”, Professor Sheth ruefully observed, “The focus on ‘relationship’ in RM got relegated to ‘marketing’.” He wrote that relationship marketing was suffering from an “identity crisis” and that marketers needed to stop treating customers as “ID numbers”. For relationship marketing to mature into a higher order business strategy, he suggested, marketing must shift toward “bonding with customers on an emotional plane”, where “the brand itself acts as a moral compass”, seeking to win a greater “share of heart”. Professor Sheth favours a new “purpose-driven relationship” where customers feel connected to a brand based on shared values. He reasons that people today are drawn to brands offering a “transcendent” experience, a theory he first advanced twelve years ago in a book called ‘Firms of Endearment”. This more humanistic definition of relationship marketing shares many of the same thematic overtones as the brand purpose movement which is all about businesses making the world a better place. The convergence of relationship marketing and brand purpose might end up becoming a whole new branch of academic study. And there is no one more qualified to lead that conversation than Jagdish Sheth, given his renowned scholarly work over the years, his many accolades and awards, and his widely acknowledged contribution to the advancement of marketing theory and practice. We started our conversation by considering whether marketers needed to hit the reset button and forget everything they ever learned.

Download for offline listening. Customer analytics has come a long way since banks first started building Customer Information Files in the 1990s. “CIFs”, as they were called, were the primitive forerunner to what we now call “data lakes”. Just getting access to data was the main barrier back then – closely rivalled by the suspect quality of the contact data. Today the biggest analytical challenge for banks isn’t the limitations of technology: it’s embedding data-driven decision-making into the operational DNA of the bank. Most banks still limit their analytical muscle to product cross-selling, risk management and fraud detection. But as banks face stiffening competition from fintech interlopers, eager to capitalize on the mass migration of customers toward web and mobile banking, they can see the smoke signals: either they make it easier for customers to do business with them across multiple touchpoints, or they face the likelihood of losing them to less costly providers. Lori Bieda, who heads up the Analytical Centre of Excellence at Bank of Montreal, believes that banks can only succeed if they master the science of journey analytics. People crave both the convenience of online banking and personal attention from their local branch. They expect to be able to easily open an account, apply for a loan, pay a bill, cash a cheque, or monitor their investments using any channel or device of their choice, at any time. Identifying the breakpoints in that experience – where the journey is interrupted or disconnected due to faulty wiring - is crucial to customer loyalty and retention. “I’m a huge advocate of journey analytics”, she says. Lori’s mandate stretches far beyond journey optimization. She’s also focused on cultivating a data culture at the bank: one where analytical literacy and data fluency are found at all levels of the company, not simply concentrated in a “genius” pool of data scientists. Which explains her missionary work on the speaking circuit. She’s an eloquent ambassador of analytics, promoting it as a strategic tool for converting insight into business outcomes, whether that’s higher satisfaction scores or attrition reduction or simply increasing the average number of accounts. But realizing the full value of analytics, according to Lori, means looking at many different types of data horizontally – events, click paths, transactions, interactions – to isolate the moments that make or break an experience. With a wealth of experience in the analytical field – from her formative years at the database marketing agency Rapp Collins to heading up Client Insight at both CIBC and TD to serving as Executive Lead of Customer Intelligence at SAS – Lori has the rare ability to connect data science to business strategy. In short, she is the ultimate business translator, as she demonstrates in this insightful (excuse the pun) interview.

Download for offline listening. His book "Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control", first published in 1967, ranks amongst the most influential, and enduring, business textbooks of all time. Now in its 16th edition (retitled "Principles of Marketing"), it remains the most authoritative guide to the practice of marketing ever written. Other textbooks come and go with the passage of time. But Philip Kotler’s tome has stood the test of time, in part because it continues to challenge marketing orthodoxy. Half a century ago marketing played a relatively minor role in influencing business strategy. But Kotler, a trained economist, understood that the growth rate of a company was dictated by much more than simply product and price: it depended on the medley of go-to-market strategies that drove demand (what is commonly referred to as the 4Ps of the marketing mix). Since then, each new edition of his ground-breaking work has reflected the current state of the profession, keeping it as relevant as ever, even to a generation of digital natives raised on social media. His latest (co-authored) book, Marketing 4.0, addresses even more directly the need to transform marketing practices, calling for a more humanistic model, where the goal is to move customers from awareness to advocacy by connecting more closely with their values and needs. "Marketing’s job today is to sell materialism and consumption," he writes. "Tomorrow’s marketing will be markedly different." Today Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His reputation as the "Father of Modern Marketing" was earned through his prolific writing, extensive speaking engagements around the world, and the many blue-chip companies he has advised over the years. The American Marketing Association calls him "the most influential marketer of all time". In this charming and insightful interview, Professor Kotler generously shares his perspective on the current state of marketing and the future role it will play in shaping a better world.