Software as a Service (SaaS) is now well entrenched. Google broke the Seattle dominance of user apps, and Salesforce.com transformed customer contact. You dont need to run fat applications or download virus laden software anymore. A web ID or mobile number is the ticket to all the computations you will ever need to process for decision making. This is because providers of SaaS have convinced you that its the service you are really interested in, not the fancy application.
Marketing as a Service (MaaS) is built on a similar premise. You have traditionally managed marketing by bringing on a team of researchers and ‘market experts’ to understand your customers in greater depth. Then product managers and marcomm professionals targeted each customer segment based on ‘established’ demographics. Well, in the world of digital identities, all that is set to change. Consider these three paradigms that are driving this change.
Customer Perception: From Gathering Feedback to Observing Behaviour
Gathering customer feedback has always been a researchers raison d’etre. A tempting automation of this has been now implemented - pop up surveys and never ending radio buttons. Now these are fast reaching the end of their shortlived existence. They are impersonal and ineffective. Businesses are realising that it pays faster to invest in observing behaviour instead. Customers vote with their actions. Every customer shows signs of switching off before actually doing so. Are your business antennaes up? What are you doing to observe behaviours of your existing customers?
Market Forces: From Industry Externalities to Customer Events
From Porter’s ‘Five Forces’ to Hamel’s ‘Strategy as Revolution’, the pundits have always professed that grand external or internal forces will transform the fortune of incumbents. Yet, much of attrition faced by businesses today is not from any of these major changes, but the steady opportunism of competition paying more attention to your customer when it matters. As an incumbent, isn’t it equally important to pay attention to individual events affecting your customers as it is to follow market forces - contract anniversaries, birthdays, engineer visits, local emergencies, unusual usage of services. Each of these events are far more important to an individual customer than any of the fat brush market forces predicted for all. And its only whats important to your customer that should be important to you.
Segmentation: From Regional Demographics to Individual Valuegraphics
Your marketing team spent hours debating who was your best customer - Are they Social Grade C1? or should you market to “Esteem Seekers”? The number crunchers made it easier by classifying the entire population into these buckets. A bit more sense prevailed in the B2B world: but even here customers were classed by SIC code or sector. Yes, demographics do matter - but isn’t a ’Settled Suburbian’ that happily subscribes to your Premium Package more valuable than a never-satisfied-penny-pinching ‘Aspiring Single’ on a Basic Plan? The bottom line is that decisions are made by individuals, not by their demographic avatar. Generating a value metric that can be applied to each customer is a great starting point to revamp your marketing approach. Value may not necessarily mean profit generated - ability to influence, potential to upsell, probability to cancel are some other examples of what may drive value.
So whats the relevance to Marketing as a Service?
Here is the premise. Marketing in the new era is really the ability to address these paradigms effectively. Doing so requires:
- A different strategy for every customer
- Generating and maintaining individual valuegraphics
- Measuring behaviour internally and with published external sources
- Engaging on an event trigger in addition to regular calls
- Supporting every real interaction with above information
Analytics for the above need to be generated and offered as a service level to customer facing teams. Maintaining and mining digital identities is critical to be able to attain this service level. This approach brings in the basic question of the structure of the marketing team to provide this service level. The approach is clear, the canvas is blank. The plan needs to address similar concerns that SaaS presented: Security, Privacy, Availability etc. We will explore these considerations in future posts.
Your thoughts and comments welcome.
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