In “Digital Disruption” James McQuivey makes a compelling argument that large organizations should adopt the same tools, platforms, and relationships that start-ups use to upend industry. Common tools of disruption, according to McQuivey, are mobile apps, cloud-based data storage, and software testing subscriptions.

Taking a leaf from McQuivey’s approach, this article asks the question: could a simple customer research tool help the CMO work better with the CIO and CTO?

Two Approaches to Customer Insight Development

I recently met with a CMO from a Wealth Management firm and a product lead (who reported up through the CIO) from a large healthcare company. In order to better run their business they both wanted deeper insight into customer motivation. Yet they took different approaches to achieve their goals:

The Marketing Approach

· Need: Better understand the path prospects take in becoming customers with special attention to social media and smart phone usage

· Approach name: Comms plan, a document that maps spend ratios and marketing tactics to the journey prospects take across a myriad of touchpoints

Pros

o Good data from paid media metrics

o Good insights across standard media channels such as TV, print, and web

o First couple of years the plan has even attempted to integrate the influence of peer recommendations, social media, and mobile behavior

Cons

o Report drafted by the media agency. Strong bias towards paid media

o Big data gaps in the role social media and live channel interactions have on conversion

o Reliance of focus groups vs. potentially more illuminating ethnographies

The Product Approach

· Need: Understand the ‘moments that matter’ for customer before, during, and after a doctor’s visit

· Approach name: Customer Journey Map. A common deliverable in software-driven businesses, a journey map visualizes the story of why, when, and how customers interact with the business.

Pros

o Customer-focused. Researchers study what customers say and, more importantly, do to complete the journey

o Findings often reveal potentially hidden themes such as non-linear pathways and the timeframes between touch points

o The best maps capture both the functional steps in a process AND the emotional state of the audience at each step

Cons

o Potential bias as customers rarely acknowledge the ability for marketing (advertising, DM, and brand management tactics) to influence their actions

A Unified Approach to Customer Insight Development

The ‘customer journey map’ is the tool that could unify the customer research process. It’s already adopted by product teams, UX/UI and tech organizations. The folks who need convincing of its merits are primarily the marketing organizations.

Here are three reasons the CMO should consider ‘customer journey mapping’:

1. More objectivity. Comms planning reinforces marketing’s bias for push tactics. This is a factor of incentives. These plans are usually developed by agencies (creative or media) that rely on paid media implementation for revenue. The more paid media the better. The journey map in contrast reports back what’s important to the customer. The map brings to life all the ways a prospect hears about the company, explores the offering, trials and purchases, consumes the product, and then talks about the experience.

For example, journey map work revealed that buyers of consumer electronics are significantly more influenced by online reviews than by advertising. (See the Jan 2014 HBR magazine, What Marketers Misunderstand About Online Reviews). Armed with the insight the CMO can align more spend and marketing activity on the ‘moments that matters’.

2. More insight. The traditional marketing funnel framework focuses on actions taken by the marketer. It also falsely portrays the journey as clean and linear. As noted above the customer is influenced by many things the marketer may not touch (but should). And the non-linearity of the journey isn’t something to turn a blind eye too.

For example, understanding how often a potential buyer returns to a website (and over what time frame) could significantly enhance the personalization strategy for that site: does the consumer get a different message each time? A different offer based on duration between visits?

Furthermore smartphone usage further muddies the linear framework. Is showrooming top of the funnel or bottom?

3. More data-driven. The best journey maps are rigorously defined by usage data. For start-up disruptors this means testing every new node on the map. For large organizations usage mapping is an opportunity to unearth data gaps as the customer travels between different business functions (marketing, product, live channel, service etc.) Usage data is supplemented in the journey map methodology with survey data—by asking your customers to score their experience along any number of dimensions relevant to your offering.

For example, the CMO could now learn the education content offered on the landing zone clicked too from paid search wasn’t valuable. By this stage in the journey the customer already knew the reasons to shop the category. Rather they now expected reasons to buy from the CMO’s company.

Conclusion

Large scale organizational change doesn’t come easy. But the adoption of a useful tool can sweep through a company practically overnight (see Box’smesmerizing growth). As McQuivey points out there’s nothing stopping large companies using the same tools as their disruptors. The ‘customer journey map’ is one such tool that all CMOs should be actively test driving today.

For more on journey mapping aimed at marketers: Customer Journey Mapping: 10 Tips For Beginners

Photo credit: http://bit.ly/1jt85WS

Fidelity has a big branding problem. They struggle to stand out. They are stuck promoting tiny differences across too many product and services. They haven’t had a brand spark since Peter Lynch drove sales and love back in the 90s. So where do they find the next Peter Lynch?

The answer is found in the one thing Fidelity has no else has: unique scale. 

Fidelity has over 20 million customers. They have thousands customers of every age, income level, goal orientation, investing approach and so on.  To stand out from the pack and drive sustainable competitive advantage, Fidelity needs to capture, analyze, and disseminate the data on these customers in game changing ways.

The holy grail of financial services marketing is performance—if a firm can tell a differentiated performance story that firm will win. Indeed it’s on the back Peter Lynch’s remarkable performance run that Fidelity is where it is today.

So what if I could go onto Fidelity.com and enter any number of variables I liked, the more the better.  My age. My income. My time horizon. My goals. And so on. And what came back wasn’t cookie cutter guidance but rather actual and real portfolios of investors who look like me and who were beating an easily understood performance and risk benchmark.  I could then model my investment approach on these winning approaches.

Given the size of the customer base there has to be thousands of individual customers who are doing well. The opportunity then is to shift the definition of performance from something the financial firms alone control (through individual fund manager savvy) to an attribute shared and owned by the customer base. The value of this approach would be significant:

• It tells a powerful and real performance story. This is a performance story rarely told today. It’s a story of real customer outcome. Today, the industry only tells performance stories, if they have them to tell, at the individual investment product level. But who cares if an individual fund outperforms. What matters is performance for a diversified mix of investments for someone who looks like me.
• It tells a relevance story. The shared portfolios are only shown because of the variables that are important and relevant to each individual investor. And its scale that makes this work. Only with size and scale can the success stories emerge across complex, relevance-defining search criteria.
• It tells an authenticity story. These portfolios aren’t made up. They aren’t fluffy advertising promises. They are factual demonstrations of the very real value existing customers are deriving from the firm.
• It tells a partnership story. The enabling financial firm is simply making customer success transparent. That success, however, is as much about the smarts of the individual investor as it is about the smarts of the financial firm itself.   
• It tells a story of accumulative value. The power of finding value in your customer’s network is that the more customers you have the more value there is to unlock. And the harder it becomes for a competitor to take the same path.

Clearly this strategy isn’t devoid of executional challenges. Privacy and compliance issues would not be insignificant.  Similarly the bold firm that adopted this strategy would need to test its way from prototype through beta to capture consumer feedback on positioning. But these challenges are surmountable. Indeed if Fidelity simply redirected just a hundredth of the resources that go into finding competitive advantage in product R&D there’d be a luxury of staff and funding.

So there we are—a bold idea to unlock the value of scale and size for a company struggling to differentiate. The strategic framework for this idea was pulled from the wonderful new book, Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers by Niraj Dawar.

Image from: http://www.givesmart.org

NEXT: Creative Strategy: What if the Container Store Helped You Organize Your Investments?

Saving and investing comparison tool first designed as a phone experience. Engagement success lead to creation of a desktop experience. Similarly, the couples quiz is designed to be shared from phone to phone.

Mobile optimized, prospect-oriented version of Fidelity.com. Prototyped, tested, and created live site in 90 days. Designed for mobile search and display journeys. Site doubled conversion against non-optimized experience. See live project.

Goal: Demonstrate free ATM access benefit in new ways. Placed a fish eye camera in an ATM. Gave folks the option of paying the ATM fee or getting their cash out for free by doing a dance. Captured the dancing on film. As preroll, videos drove 200% higher engagement & conversion. Team has since created over ten of these.

Our crowdsourced video, “A Better Way”, won the SWSX MOFILMs film competition, beating entries from GM, Coke, and others. With leading digital agency Firstborn, created a brand-defining video about a life truly well lived. Video was a MediaPost Top 10 video of 2012 and has been viewed over million times in multiple formats.