Customer-Centric Intelligence the New Smart Way

It’s become very much a truism in the marketing world that consumers (your colleagues included) are leading busier, more complicated lives than ever before.  The opportunities for them to consume products, services, and especially yours and your competitors’ brands have never been so numerous and multi-faceted.  Yet despite the rapidly-increasing ability for people to customise their product and media consumption habits, they are also reporting increased cynicism and media wear-out.  How can it be that consumers are becoming less brand loyal, when marketers have never had it so good when it comes to mass customisation and customer insights?  Surely the opposite should be occurring?

These are questions increasingly being asked in some of the more cutting-edge markets overseas.  Because, in the wider scope of things, marketers are having to manage an increasingly wide range of marketing and product-development activities - added to the traditional media mix, we now have such tactics as search engine marketing, CRM, website traffic analysis, email newsletters, text-promotions, event-associations, product placements, viral marketing and so on, not to mention brand-extensions of brand-extensions ad nauseum - all making the truly integrated and powerful marketing, product and branding mix that much harder to achieve, despite the improved returns which are promised should all the elements of the mix be more effectively managed. 

As a market researcher who mostly analyses consumer desires and behaviours, the gap is very clear – on one hand, we have consumers interacting with brands in more ways than ever before, and on the other hand, we have the marketers who are struggling to provide for these consumers in a consistent, coherent and integrated manner.  The problems faced by marketers in achieving such marketing nirvana are of course quite varied – they can lie in the most mundane areas of supply-chain management or HR, or revolve around the traditional media-mix problems such as the above and below-the-line mix.

Solving these problems has in the past typically reflected the nature of the problems themselves – i.e. though the use of specialised staff or consultants, all generally looking at “their” area of expertise, but not the unified whole.  Results, not unexpectedly, have been equally narrowly-focused, leaving marketers no closer to having a unified perspective of the overall operation and its potential. Coupled with the need to keep customer preferences and behaviours at the forefront of any strategy, and it becomes clear that a different approach is required if marketers are to ever realistically understand and manage the process to its greatest potential.

This approach has been dubbed “Business Intelligence” in the overseas business community, a name which unfortunately inherits the IT connotations where this term has been used for much longer.  We prefer the term "Customer-Centric Intelligence", which emphasises the core focus which should not be lost at any cost.  Business strategies using the Customer-Centric Intelligence approach most effectively will use independent, external help, in the form of specialist agencies or collectives which combine all the required skillsets to provide a plan which incorporates all the key elements – industry and consumer analysis, branding, marketing and advertising, fulfilment and implementation – in order to develop a plan which will work for all the parties concerned – a plan which works for the consumer, the brand, and the marketer, and which does not fall down along the way due to classic organisational failures, oversights or inefficiencies.

The benefits of using such external Customer-Centric Intelligence services is that such “outsiders” do not look at things through your daily clutter, they can take in the overview and issues more clearly, and in doing so, can see what’s missing; what’s working well; and what needs to be changed.  It may be something as singular as implementing a comprehensive data-management strategy, or, more complex, developing whole new customer-brand interaction points based upon some relevant market research.  In addition, good Customer-Centric Intelligence practitioners will have skill-sets that are deep enough to provide assistance wherever required, yet also the nous and the sensitivity required to recognise where a client’s internal resources are the preferred option. 

In sum, Customer-Centric Intelligence looks set to become one of the most exciting developments in marketing in recent years – far more so than the narrowly focussed advances of late, such as the popularising of the internet, text-promotions, etc.  Customer-Centric Intelligence has the potential to take some smart companies a long way, in a comparatively short time.  The key is going to be knowing where to find such business partners, partners who know enough about business management, marketing, branding, technology and the consumer, to see “the big picture” and change it from tired sepia to glorious technicolour.

Customer-Centric Intelligence in Marketing Magazine

The Customer-Centric Intelligence series in the National Business Review