100 Days of Leo Burnett, the Midwestern Master of Mascots DAY 67
Here’s today’s Leo:
“In operating a business of our size, it is obvious that we have to be well departmentalized. This does not mean, however, that we have to be channelized.” — Leo Burnett
I think Leo Burnett would be disappointed if he were to see the state of marketing and customer experience today. Not only have we become more channelized, we’re more siloed than ever. As we’ve added new functions, we’ve simply bolted them onto the existing marketing machine, and created specialties, sub-specialties, and sub-sub-specialties. I’m sure there are sub-sub-sub-specialties out there as well 🙂
For example, my teeth grate every time I hear people talk about “digital marketing.” That’s like saying “magazine marketing” or “television marketing.” You don’t express your marketing strategy in terms of channels — you express it in terms of your overall sales objective. And if you’re going to be in this field, you’ve *got* to know all the channels and treat every channel as your children … you’ve gotta love ’em all equally, and you’ve got to make sure you’re paying attention to all of them. You just don’t have the choice to ignore some of your children. Well, you do, but you’d be a really terrible parent … err, marketer … if you did. And that isn’t cool.
The craziest thing which we’re *all* doing is the way we’ve separated marketing and customer service. That is just bananas — we literally have one building (Customer Service) full of people trying to get customers to *stop* talking to us as quickly as possible; and in another building (Marketing) we have a group of people spending millions of dollars to get customers to *start* talking to us. Moreover, the customers who are contacting Customer Service where we’re trying to minimize our TOC (Time On Call) are our *best* customers because the people who are your current customers are your most likely next customers; your most likely referral/WOM resources; and the people who are using the product the most. If it wasn’t so sad it’d actually be funny — it’s like an old silent movie where one character is emptying a bucket and one character is filling the same bucket, over and over again.
One of my favorite start-up CEOs these days is Ragy Thomas, Founder and CEO of Sprinklr — the world’s first end-to-end Customer Experience Management (CXM) system. He likes to say that “Experience is the new Brand,” and I couldn’t agree more. The problem is that we’ve created organizational silos which get in the way of the customer experience. And you can’t just fix it with a tool — you’ve got to actually fix your organization as well.
Ragy did an awesome Skype interview with Michael Krigsman of CXOTalk. Ragy directly addresses the silo issue, and takes a “No Silos” stand as the positioning for Sprinklr. I particularly loved this section (edited for length):
On behalf of anybody inside a large company that deeply cares about their customer, and feels helpless, on behalf of human beings everywhere who feel that way, Sprinklr, today, marks 2017 with war. We’re declaring war on five things: The five enemies that are getting in the way.
Number One: We’re declaring war on disjointed data. I’ve got my Web system. I’ve got my point-of-sale system. But, I don’t know who these human beings are! I don’t know what she’s thinking, or how she’s feeling! But I have all the data! But, it’s not together. Data is disjointed!
Number Two: I’m declaring war on siloed teams. We’ve got to reorganize around the customer. You’ve got to make people feel like they walked through the front door inside the store, and everyone’s coming around. “Hey, Linda! How are you?”
Number Three: I’m declaring war on disparate processes. Processes that are not aligned around the customer.
Number Four: I’m declaring war on point solution tools. Tools that do one thing.
Number Five: I’m declaring war on un-intelligent technology. That’s why you can’t scale.
What we see is a world where brands that care about their customers are able to provide delightful experiences every time. That’s what we care about! That’s the dream that Sprinklr was founded upon.
#madmen #advertising @LeoBurnett #LeoBurnett @RagyThomas #nosilos #unenterprise
