can iterate right alongside each other, as they evolve the product and brand ever more closely to the customer's ideal. And, perhaps most importantly, they are in lockstep when it comes to delivering a consistent and great user experience.
In fact, Tesla extended its development approach to marketing, which turns out to be a critical first step on the road to modern marketing. As you'd expect, Tesla established a community early on; it is listening to customers and addressing product concerns in a public way. Such transparency is at the heart of an adaptive approach.
Tesla stands in contrast to Comcast along many dimensions: industry, age, size, and competitive profile. But the most important dimension in which the two companies differ is internal alignment. Comcast is not old in years, but it is in terms of its innovation and marketing practices. Upstart companies with agility – those that can adopt contemporary approaches out of the gate – are driving Comcast's customers to “cut the cord.” To maintain its historic growth rate, it must change more than the way it develops new services; it must develop them in lockstep with marketing.
For the marketing group, modernization has major implications for two areas: (1) marketing practices and (2) the platforms and technology that support those practices. Of course, these implications are intertwined and can't be understood independently. What we'll discover, as with Tesla, is that the practices that Comcast needs to adopt are actually derived from those used by product development. Marketing must follow development's example to facilitate this transformation.
The processes that development organizations employ to develop products or services have, of course, evolved over the years. Traditionally, they started with the business requirements document, which would then go to design. Once designed, the product would get thrown over the fence to development, where it would undergo many stages of revision. Finally, it would be tested for release. Throughout the process, the product would be handled by a handful of separate teams. The product owner, or business lead, might not have checked in on the process until nearly the end of the project.
Over the past 15 years or so, as the pace of innovation has accelerated, and product development cycles have been compressed, this traditional approach has become increasingly impractical. This is because the old way attempts to predict what the end state of the product will be, whereas the new way adapts the product or service direction to customer feedback along the way. Though both approaches include the same steps (e.g., design, development, testing), the predictive approach measures twice and cuts once, whereas the adaptive approach is constantly measuring while making many small cuts.
Agile (the dominant adaptive approach to building software) is optimal for contexts where you can't predict what you'll need to build but where time-to-value is of the essence. Popularized by start-ups that needed to be able to pivot quickly as they zeroed in on the right product/market fit, Agile has become solidly mainstream, implemented at some of the biggest technology companies in the world (including Oracle). It's been critically important for big companies, where a rapid response to market changes is invariably a tougher undertaking.
So what does all this have to do with marketing?
Most marketers have not experienced Agile first hand. This isn't surprising; marketers haven't traditionally cared much about how things worked under the hood, as long as they worked. That was IT's job.
Good marketing has always required having a deep understanding of how the company's products and services are purchased and used. But that's no longer enough. We must also understand how these products and services are developed. This is because marketing needs to actively collaborate on the development of products and services. For one thing, the adaptive approaches to development depend on constant feedback from customers to support iteration. Marketers, as the stewards of the brand's community, are perfectly positioned to act as a feedback conduit between the customer and the product development organization. As such, marketers have the potential to play a more effective, more strategic role in facilitating the product/market fit. Indeed, Tesla is attempting just that, albeit in a rudimentary way: The company's community forums call for direct feedback with posts whose subject lines read “TESLA WANTS FEEDBACK ON ANY POOR (OR GREAT!) CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES” (their caps).1
There's another reason why marketing needs to understand product development: The technology required to execute modern marketing is a service in its own right. In other words, marketers must act as the product owner as they integrate a range of marketing technologies and build out their platforms. Such platforms will have to deliver consistent and great customer experiences. And that's important because customer experience is quickly becoming the battleground on which companies compete. A recent Gartner survey of marketing leaders found that 89 percent of companies “plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016.” Yet “fewer than half of companies surveyed rate their customer experience as exceptional today.”2 This seems overly optimistic (not to mention somewhat characteristic of self-reported data), although it does support the general trend of viewing the customer experience as the foundation of competitive advantage.
Clearly there's a chasm between the aspiration and the reality. Following traditional approaches, marketers would plan to take a year designing and building a bridge to cross that chasm. But because the marketing technology landscape is so complex and is evolving so rapidly, the far side of the chasm will have moved by the time the marketer gets there. That's why adaptive approaches are so essential. Adopting an adaptive approach has become an imperative for marketers who aspire to become stewards of the customer experience.
Chapter 2
The Modern Marketer's Challenge
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. 3
Marketing leaders today face enormous possibilities – and an enormous challenge. Thanks to the rich troves of data now available to them, they see the opportunity to compete on the basis of personalized customer experiences. But they also inhabit a marketing technology landscape that is complex, fragmented, rapidly evolving – in short, overwhelming. This landscape is replete with overlapping technologies, integration challenges, data fragmentation, and technology management that borders on the labyrinthine. Just search for Scott Brinker's marketing technology landscape infographic to see one person's attempt to bring some order to this dizzyingly complex picture. But be prepared to zoom in deep to this almost comically dense graphic. As helpful as it is, it doesn't at all capture the integration points between the technologies.
What the vast breadth of technologies in this cluttered field tells us is that investors have fully bought into the notion that marketing technology can make better customer experiences possible, and will thus drive competition in the future. Indeed, powerful solutions are emerging, solutions that allow us to understand our customers (and potential customers) like never before. Insights from Big Data make it possible, for instance, for Facebook to know when a user is likely to exit a romantic relationship, in many cases before they actually do.4 That's an extreme example, to be sure. But the point is that these technologies help us better understand our customers so we can serve them better and build stronger relationships with them. Among these technologies, to name just a handful:
• Web technologies that allow us to track people across the web and to understand browsing behavior.
• Social technologies that let us measure influence and understand who is driving the conversation on specific topics.
• Advertising technologies that enable us to test messaging and understand which messages resonate most with which market segments.
Tesla Motors forums/community website, “TESLA WANTS FEEDBACK ON ANY POOR (OR GREAT!) CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES,” Nick Howe, November 7, 2012, http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/tesla-wants-feedback-any-poor-or-great-customer-experiences.
Gartner website, Jake Sorofman and Laura McLellan, “Gartner Survey Finds Importance of Customer Experience on the Rise – Marketing Is on the Hook,” https://www.gartner.com/doc/2857722/gartner-survey-finds-importance-customer.
Peter Drucker, “Innovation and Entrepreneurship.”
Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg, “Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook,” Proceedings from the 17th Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, February 2014, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6753v1.pdf.
