TWINS WIN! TWINS WIN!

Ok, so this morning came a little early after a great night in South Chicago.

Today’s morning keynote was presented by Hunter Hastings, CEO, EMM Group. They’ve designed a methodology and process for organizations to quantify customer engagement. It’s based upon a point system. Email touch might be one point, a web visit another point, an in-person sales sall 10 points, and so on. Their research has shown a correlation between a higher engagement level to actual marketshare.

What the company is essentially attempting to do is build a standard of measurement for engagement that the field of marketing and advertising can agree upon in this digital age. A mature field has standards, and frankly, the digital marketing one has very few.

In his presentation, he substantiated a call I made in last week’s blog for a Department of the Customer, which would be a highly integrated, cross-functional, and collaborative team that bases itself in metrics. (I got a little goose-bumply when said essentially the exact same words as I wrote last week. So I bought a lottery ticket this morning just in case I’m on a lucky streak.)

Hunter explained what many of us in the field have known forever, that “managerialsm” that is dependent upon virtical, siloed organizations really does prevent innovation, slows marketing cycles, and disengages customers. Essentially everything that management wants it prevents by continuing to create and foster organizations that can’t deliver because of legacy org charts and ridiculous interpersonal power plays.

In Hunter’s words, he says that marketing needs to become a “process based organization” rather that an ad hoc, “whimsical” one. There’s a large place for creativity, but not in the place of real metrics, measurement, and accountability.

The winners in this type of market are the following:

- Software companies like Google who has boatloads of customer interaction data.
- New media planning and analytics firms (like Ciceron…nice he thinks we’re in the winning category!)
- Enterprise Marketing Management firms (like EMM Group, I assume)
- Consumers…we’ll have more relevant, personalized relationships with brands, and experience less clutter in the process of consuming media.

I think there’s a long, hard slog ahead of us because we’re talking about gigantic plate shifts in the culture of advertising and brands. At the same time, there’s no time to wait. As I’ve mentioned before, these are organizational development hurdles, not marketing ones. In my opinion, the best place to start is to pull all web site activities out of either marketing or IT, and give the web it’s own integrated department filled with enthusiastic team members who want to know the customer and deliver value to them each and every day.

More in a while…