Agatha Christie once wrote that instinct “is a marvellous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.” But the late writer wasn’t talking about marketers.
Woodson Martin, the chief marketing officer of Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, says marketers should do the opposite and ignore their instincts because when it comes to mass versus personal, their instincts are leading them astray.
“If we think about the history of marketing for a minute, we can think about mass communication where it was really just one directional,” Martin told B&T during the company’s Global Media Day in San Francisco last week.
“Now we are moving to this world where we need to be thinking ‘what is the experience of the individual customer across all these touch points and how are we creating that journey’.
“Our instincts quite often will take us back to mass communication. We just know how to do it better, marketers do, and the world does.”
But demand for personalisation is increasing and innovative start-ups are forcing companies to re-think their approach, Martin said.
Martin believes the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) is changing dramatically.
“Increasingly CEOs are holding the marketers and their CMOs accountable to that customer experience and thinking not just narrowly about the role of marketing as driving revenue or awareness but really thinking about how are we architecting the entire customer experience,” Martin said.
“How are we delivering service so well it is marketing and how are we delivering marketing so well it is a service.”
Martin was speaking to B&T at Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud’s Global Media Day in San Francisco last week where the next generation of the company’s customer journey management platform, Journey Builder, was builder.
More information on the updates can be found here.
Jessica Kennedy was a guest of Salesforce in San Francisco.
