The Digital Marketer

Ten New Skills You Must Learn to Stay Relevant and Customer-Centric

Larry Weber

Lisa Leslie Henderson

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover image: ©iStockphoto / Atropat

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2014 by Larry Weber. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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To our respective families, for their unwavering support and enthusiasm.

—LW and LJLH

Writing a book evokes profound appreciation. Like jazz musicians that improvise on established compositions to create new melodies, we are grateful to the many who took the time to share their thoughts and experiences with us, further developing our initial observations into themes, and ultimately chapters. If there is music among these pages, it is due to their generosity.

Multiple business leaders, academics, and specialists contributed to the building of The Digital Marketer's melody and supportive harmonies. Mark Fuller (Rosc Global), Len Schlesinger (Harvard Business School), Sally Ourieff (Translational Consulting), Saul Kaplan (Business Innovation Factory), Rick Kash (Nielsen), Scott Epskamp (Leapfrog Online), Diane Hessan (Communispace), Scott Russell (Sparks Grove), Robin Frank (beep beep media), Dan Fukushima (Sparks Grove), Scott Neslin (Tuck School of Business), Peter Henderson (ShapeUp), Elizabeth Zaldastini Napier (Tuck School of Business), Josh McCall (Jack Morton Worldwide), Rodrigo Martinez (IDEO), B J Fogg (Stanford University), Becky Bermont (Creative Leadership), Alan Trefler (Pegasystems), Torrence Boone (Google), Debi Kleiman (MITX), Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab), J P Maheu (Bluefin Labs/Twitter), Wendy Murphy (Babson College), John Maeda (Rhode Island School of Design), Sanjay Dholakia (Marketo), R. Michael Hendrix (IDEO), Scott Ludwig (Skyword), Brian Babineau (Arnold Worldwide), and George Colony (Forrester Research) have all quite generously shared their time and insight.

We are, as always, indebted to Jill Kneerim, Larry's literary agent who heard the melody in this book, and for Richard Narramore, our editor at John Wiley & Sons, who enthusiastically agreed to publish it. Where would we be without Tiffany Colón, our editorial assistant at Wiley, who, like a metronome, kept us on task and on time, and Lauren Freestone, our production editor, who pulled multiple parts and myriad notes together into one score.

Producing a book takes a tremendous amount of planning and coordination. Heartfelt thanks to Nancy Provost, Larry's trusted executive assistant, and Ginger Ludwig for their orchestration of details, despite their already full agendas, and to Kevin Green at Racepoint Global for his keen insight and creativity that consistently breaks new ground.

Finally, a standing ovation to our respective families. We are always grateful for your accompaniment.

PR professionals in the technology world are typically gentle, political animals, subtly and quietly steering their clients' offerings into the most flattering light. Then there is Larry Weber. I distinctly remember our first interaction when he brought a client to the old Forrester offices in Harvard Square. No subtlety. No calm nudging. No backroom whispering. It was an all-out, high-volume, lean-in, Fight Club, Oxford debate—with Larry passionately advocating for his client and deftly challenging the best arguments of the assembled know-it-all Forrester analysts. It was the first time that I had seen someone from the vendor PR world construct complex and compelling ideas about the future and how markets would transform. This guy was clearly an original thinker.

All of Larry's idea-centric passion and sense of the future shoot out of this volume—The Digital Marketer. It's a book with impeccable timing. Why?

Because we are entering what Forrester calls the age of the customer—a 20-year business cycle in which the most successful enterprises will reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers. Customers will take power from institutions (especially companies) through their access to precise pricing, social voice, and ability to buy anything, from anywhere, from anyone, at any time.

The only way for companies to create a sustainable advantage in the future will be by constructing superior experiences that can win, retain, and serve the newly demanding customer.

And much of that experience will rest on digital. In the future, all companies will be software companies.

To stay relevant in the age of the customer, marketing leaders must be able to adapt to—and exploit—the four market imperatives that are driving the rise of the empowered customer. They must be able to:

• Transform customer experiences. Companies must make substantive investments in customer experience to build relationships and amplify fans. In short, companies must transform to become customer-obsessed enterprises. Customer obsession focuses strategy, energy, and budget on processes that enhance knowledge of and engagement with customers—and prioritizes them over maintaining traditional (and crumbling) competitive barriers. Marketing leaders must lead the customer-obsessed journey up, down, and across the company.
• Become digital disruptors. Digital has unleashed intense and rapid waves of innovation. Disruption requires agility that marketing isn't typically known for, with shorter development cycles and fewer organizational silos. Disruptors spread digital skills and a digital mind-set across strategy and operations, not just marketing or technology. To stand out, you must break your old patterns of doing business to make your customer's life easier. This won't be easy—patterns of work and behavior are difficult to break.
• Embrace the mobile mind shift. Mobility has trained people to expect any information or service to be available to them at their moment of need. Context—knowing real-time customer situations, attitudes, preferences, and desires—is key, as is being able to respond to those customer desires at high speed. Few digital strategists have a grasp of just-in-time service, but that's where the mobile battle will be fought.
• Turn big data into business insights. Developing true customer insight requires a significant overhaul of your analytics. Marketers need insight across the entire customer life cycle to help grow existing relationships and predict future behavior. Big customer data will be the gasoline that powers all future marketing campaigns.

The age of the customer is demanding a transformation of thought—and herein lays the problem: Only a small minority of marketing executives have any inkling of how they will have to organize and think and perform in the new age. While marketing will take on a new level of importance (one could argue paramount importance), the great majority of marketers are unprepared for the challenge.

Luckily for us and for them, Larry and his coauthor, Lisa Leslie Henderson, have arrived at just the right time with just the right book. The Digital Marketer will serve to direct this generation of executives on the task of retooling. From his 10 essential skills to his specific directions for how to build customer experience to his clear explanation of complex technologies like big data, Larry and Lisa present marketers with a manual for survival and success. And The Digital Marketer's intriguing examples, references to other experts, and guidance on where to find additional resources extend this book's value beyond its pages.

Forrester has invested much time and energy in researching this tectonic shift in the business environment. We firmly believe in the potential of the age of the customer—or Customer-Centric Era—to reshape how both marketers and technologists define their jobs and the legacies they will leave.

For our clients and the world at large, I am very glad that Larry and Lisa have endeavored to shape and teach the next generation of marketers—a group that will face a series of challenges that did not apply just a few short years ago. No other profession is living through more change, but no other work is more exciting, vibrant, and important than that of the digital marketer.

And now that new generation of marketer has teachers.

—George F. Colony
Chairman and CEO
Forrester Research, Inc.
www.forrester.com