Editorial
The Gist
- Historical marketing simplicity. Early advertising methods were straightforward, relying on print media and local reach.
- Modern challenges emerge. Transition to digital has complicated brand consistency across multiple platforms.
- Chief customer officer role crucial. Integrating CCO in leadership enhances customer experience across all channels.
Do you remember early advertisements? Perhaps it is a catchy commercial or printed advertisement.
There is one that recently caught my attention. There is a bronze printing plate that was used to print an advertisement for the Liu Family Needle Shop in Jinan, China. A simple design, a white rabbit holding a needle in the center. Why is that unique? This plate dates to somewhere around the 11th century and is considered to be the first documented printed advertising medium.
Hang with me while we go through some media marketing and advertising history, and then we’ll discuss why you need a chief customer officer.
Old-School Marketing: Simple but Effective
Marketing used to be easy. Pick the right magazine or television show, write a memorable advertisement and publish. Generally the products were available in a local location unless it happened to be a mail-order product. The journey from awareness to purchase was fairly simple. Simple enough that a simple print advertisement produced through a bronze printing plate was generally enough to sustain a family business as well as a large enterprise.
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Radio to TV: Evolution of Media Reach
Fast-forward to nine centuries later, and the process was still almost the same until a new medium — radio — was introduced. A brand could reach thousands of households simultaneously with a captivated audience. Not only was the family eager to listen to the show, the advertisements also represented entertainment.
Then along came television. After some time, this media outlet leveraged network coverage to broadcast messages at a national level. This also required a more consistent brand message to let consumers and customers know what to expect from the brand. Nationally, it was a blended message to allow for locally advocacy by loyal customers.
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Modern Branding: Diverse Media, Diverse Audiences
Times were certainly different just 50 years later. Awareness of a brand could come from any of the legacy media platforms as well as brand websites, online advertising and social media. Never mind that each social media outlet can have an entirely different viewing demographic from one another in addition to the primary content served to the user between text, images, audio and video.
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Buying Options Expand: From Online to On-Demand
Beyond the awareness, take a look at the purchasing opportunities for the consumer. There are the traditional physical locations, but there are now varied ways to “get” your product. From online ordering, online-to-pickup, pop-up locations and even same-day delivery using various apps or online stores. Even a motor vehicle purchase with a trade-in can be done without leaving your home.
Related Article: 3 Ingredients of Effective Customer Experience Leadership
Lawsuit Highlights Risks in Multichannel Retailing
The convenience of having all these outlets can, at times, be superseded by the loss of control of the brand image and the experience. It is at the heart of a recent lawsuit against a popular food delivery app company that lists several local restaurants as options without permission. The restaurant owners contest that the experience is diminished because the app company and the delivery driver do not properly present the brand — and the food — according to its standards.
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Ecommerce Shift Challenges Traditional Retail Giants
With even that simple story in mind, consider how a large enterprise might find similar challenges. I recall in the early days of the world wide web, a brand's website was managed by an IT team, maybe with some input from marketing. Very little input coming from operations and customer care.
As online-focused ecommerce companies started eating away at the revenue of these established brick and mortar brands, the traditional brands hastily responded. The response was clunky at best. Regional price differences were not accounted for, and if something was purchased online it could not be returned in the store were some of the most notable concerns that customers had with the new “blended” experience. Instead of recovering revenue, brands continued to lose traction, and profitability sank lower as the operations were not set up for a delivery business.
Marketing Misstep Leads to Major Beer Boycott
Today, businesses continue to be siloed, and the challenge is greater than ever. A marketing effort by a large beer manufacturer to target a newer and younger demographic through their preferred social media outlet failed miserably because the message did not connect with the broader demographic, which resulted in a boycott that displaced it as the No. 1 selling beer in America.
Unified Brand Strategy Key in Diverse Market Landscape
As brands navigate the current landscape of outlets, and the new ones that will come along, it will be very important that the blended experience meet the expectations of loyal customers while enticing a new set of customers to the brands — with a consistent message, purchase process and acquisition of goods. Each journey — for all customer personas — should be assessed with metrics that can measure the customer experience and reliably predict future behavior all from one atlas that even a siloed management team can read and quickly assess needs for the brand and the experience journey.
CCO Role Critical for Consistent Cross-Channel Marketing
It is no longer enough to have the chief marketing officer, chief operating officer and a chief financial officer looking at the independent processes. Rather, what’s needed is a chief customer officer (CCO) that bands them all together — so the print advertisement has the same experience as the viral marketing video — driving loyal and new customers toward a purchase.
Chief Customer Officer Drives Success Across Industries
Very successful companies from a variety of industries have leveraged the role of the CCO to become even more successful. Whether it is a business-to-consumer (B2C) brand like United Airlines, or B2B/B2B2C like Sodexo, or even consumer packaged goods brands like General Mills, the importance of this role will continue to increase to keep a consistent positive blended experience for customers.
CCO Role Expands Beyond Metrics to Enhance CX
Traditional definitions of the CCO have the role focused on metrics such as metrics for defining the relationship (whether internally or externally measured) and using cross-company data to push accountability.
However, there are three areas that a chief customer officer should be accountable for that do not include measurement and key performance indicators:
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Developing processes that enable and empower employees to consistently serve the customer across all journey touchpoints.
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Building on employee interactions, the CCO should be responsible for the employee experience measurement and action plans.
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Leveraging the role on the senior leadership team to break down process and policy silos that create friction in the customer experience.
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Final Thoughts
By including these important responsibilities beyond metrics, the role of the chief customer officer will have the best opportunity to ensure customer satisfaction across the blended experience.
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