“Industry only experience” is not a new requirement, of course, and exceptions have always been made for talented candidates. However, in a down economy, it seems industry experience becomes a highly enforced criterion used to close the door on marketing talent.

I am not in Human Resources (HR), so I cannot tell you why it happens (I have my suspicions though). However, I have been a hiring manager and will say industry experience is something I avoid like the plague when reviewing resumes. Why? Because industry experience has absolutely NOTHING to do with the level of experience, talent, drive, problem-solving skills, enthusiasm and passion a candidate has to offer, which should always be the benchmark when hiring. A smart employee can learn any industry. It isn’t rocket science—unless you are handling marketing and PR for NASA.

[Sidebar: Please do not use the ‘regulations excuse.’ Again, a smart employee can learn regulations. An exceptional employee, however, learns them and then figures out how to stay within mandatory regulations without allowing them to chokehold company goals and objectives (Read: Growth).]

According to Executive Staffing Solutions’ latest newsletter, there is good news and bad news when it comes to filling open positions. The good news is that there are many good positions opening up for candidates. The bad news is companies are not recognizing top talent when it comes through the door.

Back to my suspicions. Hiring companies are not recognizing top talent because they have their heads in the proverbial sand when it comes to “industry experience only” being a benefit (something that promotes well-being; an advantage). It is not a benefit, it is a disadvantage that is hurting your customers, employees, and shareholders (or whoever is backing your business financially).

Customers

Customers (whether B2B or B2C) are not in need of the products and services that ‘industry experience only’ people develop. Customers ARE the industry (or market) and they have seen it all already. Unfortunately, inside-out driven product and service innovations often miss the boat when it comes to providing customers with much needed solutions because they usually never take the time to ask the market what they needed (even if that need is as simple as a new pair of jeans. The Gap has learned this lesson).

It doesn’t take industry experience to “break the code” for what customers want. It takes employees with the willingness to step back, listen, understand, and work to aggregate common customer needs (an outside-in perspective) and work towards fulfilling them. Employees with alternative industry experience are often more capable of identifying unfulfilled needs because they don’t look through the same rose-colored glasses. They are the employees that will topple the competition and secure long-term loyalty from customers for an employer. Yes, these employees buck the system, turn their backs on the status quo, and rock the boat. All of the uncomfortable things that the industry experience only mindset made comfortable.

Employees

When companies hire within the industry a certain inbred mindset develops, which leads to complacency. “This is the way we do it.” If the way you have always done it has always worked then why are companies losing market share and revenues or barely holding steady? Sure, learning new techniques, tools, and strategies from outside the industry can be scary, challenging and… make you work harder than you ever have.

Whoever said marketing, PR or communications was easy?

Employees with the same industry experience and backgrounds stifle each other. Energy, creativity and problem-solving occurs when unique backgrounds are brought together.

Shareholders

According to Ranjay Gulati’s latest book, Reorganize for Resilience, “customer-driven companies were significantly more successful than shareholder-driven ones, providing a 36 percent advantage in shareholder returns, compared with their industry median; shareholder-aligned organizations provided only a 17 percent advantage.”

Who wouldn’t want those returns?

Unfortunately, any company that stays with an “industry experience only” mindset won’t be able to deliver because they have already set the precedent for the status quo. In a down economy, more of the same is not the solution. Customers have limited budgets and they are only willing to spend it with companies who fulfill their exact needs and treat them as valuable assets (versus a marketing expense).

Perhaps it is time for a new criterion. “Customer Experienced Only” need apply.

[Image Source: Joseph Paul Haines]

I just received an interesting comment on my “For Hire” post that asked:

“Are there really any leading authorities – aside from published authors – on integrated marketing and communications? There are a lot of self-promoters who claim expertise in what is usually “the obvious”.

This comment, while obviously an attempt to discredit my experience, made me realized that there are probably many marketing professionals out there that have the same misunderstanding and misperception when it comes to understanding the theory and benefits of true integration.

I want to help fix that.

From the dawn of its time, which would be about 1993, when the “Fathers of Integration” Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn wrote The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, integration has always been based in customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven marketing. Unfortunately, marketers conveniently ignored the customer-centric, data-driven part of integration. We’ll get to that in a bit…

What Integrated Marketing Is Not

Integrated marketing is not consistent branding and messaging across tactics alone.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

One of the many challenges that The New Marketing Paradigm attempted to address were silos (other challenges included the lack of customer-centricity, planning, and measurement). Messages and branding from marketing, communications, branding, and PR were consistently out of whack with each other—leaving customers and prospects to put the pieces together themselves. Talk about ineffective.

Fast forward. Silos still rear their ugly heads (we see social media putting a spotlight on them), but for the most part organizations have gotten smarter about why it is smart to integrate their branding and messaging.

That said, marketing and communications today still seems to be lead by the basic and simple act of integrating tactics to feed the lead generation beast. That mindset presents new challenges. By thinking that tactics have been integrated across channels it’s a job well done, marketers put themselves at risk of wasting precious resources, time, and budget. Why? Because integrated tactics alone do not deliver on*:

• Relevance
• Receptivity
• Response
• Recognition
• Relationship

Without truly knowing who customers are, when they are open to messages, how they prefer to respond, if they relate to the brand, and how they feel about the organization, it is nearly impossible to be targeted. That is where the data-driven part of integration comes to bear. Without outside-in data, “spray and pray” marketing will continue to be prevalent.

Obviously, I am simplifying this to make a point. It would take a book to dive in deeper!

(*To learn more about the Five R’s and the value they deliver, be sure to pick up a copy of IMC, The Next Generation : Five Steps For Delivering Value and Measuring Financial Returns by Don E. Schultz and Heidi Schultz.)

What Integrated Marketing Is

“GE executives described a stagnant GE when Jack Welch took over as CEO in 1981: “[GE is a company] … with its face to the CEO and its ass to the customer.”

I pulled that gem of a quote from Ranjay Gulati’s most excellent book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.

Which direction is your organization facing? Let’s dive in before your backside catches a chill.

IMC: The Next Generation presents eight guiding principles of integration:

1. Become a customer-centric organization
2. Use outside-in planning
3. Focus on the total customer experience
4. Align customer goals with corporate objectives
5. Set customer behavior objectives
6. Treat customers as assets
7. Streamline functional activities
8. Converge marcom activities (this one we get, what about the others?)

The main struggle for product-centric companies when it comes to integrated marketing is the ability to realize customer-centricity and treating customers as assets.

Understanding Customer-Centricity

In Reorganize for Resilience, Gulati observed the following traits of truly customer-centric companies. They:

• Changed the conversation with their customers to one that is more outside-in and focused on how they can help address customer-articulated needs;
• Became problem solvers, not sellers;
• Focused on the set of customer problems they want to solve and are less concerned with the means and more focused on the ends;
• Developed a culture where customer centricity and outside-in behavior is their way of life.

Jay Galbraith describes the same tenets in his book, Designing The Customer-Centric Organization. Customer-centric companies focus on:

• Personalization and customization for the best customer solution
• Strategy supporting the most profitable, loyal customers
• Structure based on customer segments, teams and P&L
• Rewards given to employees who save customer business
• Sales bias on the side of the customer

Integrated Marketing, It’s “The Obvious,” Right?

We hear about the success of the same companies repeatedly. You know who they are: Dell, IBM, Cisco, FedEx, Lafarge, Best Buy, Target, and Southwest. There is a reason for that. The pool of customer-centric companies with truly integrated marketing is more like a puddle.

It has been with purpose for the past year that I have blogged about integration. I truly believe in integration and the value it delivers (how can the evidence be disputed?). As well, I have helped companies with integration in my career and know that it works.

(Note: integration is tough work and it’s not easy to become truly customer-centric, but that isn’t an excuse to move forward with it.)

For those marketers solely guided by revenue generation and shareholder wealth, try this stat on for size:

“…customer-driven companies were significantly more successful than shareholder-driven ones, providing a 36 percent advantage in shareholder returns, compared with their industry median; shareholder-aligned organizations provided only a 17 percent advantage.” – Reorganize for Resilience

Who wouldn’t want those returns?!

Your Job Moving Forward

The next time an agency or consultant is offering integrated marketing be sure to request a plan that is truly integrated (especially the five R’s)  and data-centric and see what you get in response. If it’s  full of tactics that have been “obviously” integrated with lack of regard for much else, you know what to do.

Integrated marketing: it’s the not so “obvious” marketing… after all. (Sort of like the “other white meat.”)

P.S. If you truly want to understand integrated marketing and it’s benefits, pick up the books mentioned in this post along with Kellogg on Integrated Marketing.

[Image Source: hypebeast.com]

Enchant. Enchanting. Enchantment. Words we don’t hear in the business world, but I think that is about to change with Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

Can you recall a time when a stakeholder said your brand was enchanting? If you thought had to think about that question for more than 30 seconds, you are probably not enchanting to your customers, shareholders, partners, community and employees.

I know what you’re thinking… No one uses that word, so your question is pointless. Okay. Let me re-ask it another way. When was the last time your stakeholders compared your brand to Apple or Zappos?

Need more time to think on that or do you know the answer?

What is Enchantment, When Is It Necessary & How Do We Achieve It?

According to Guy, “enchantment [is] the process of delighting people with a product, service, organization or idea. The outcome of enchantment is voluntary and long-lasting support that is mutually beneficial.”

If that sounds like something you want for your brand, Enchantment will get you there but only if you take it seriously, roll up your sleeves and get down to business. Being enchanting is not easy, even if Apple and Zappos make it appear so.

What could possibly make enchantment necessary? Isn’t it enough to sell a good product or service? Not always, unfortunately.

You need to be enchanting when you are:

• Aspiring to lofty, idealistic goals
• Making difficult, infrequent decisions
• Overcoming entrenched habits
• Defying a crowd
• Proceeding despite delayed or nonexistent feedback

Now that you are hopefully enchanted, here’s what you need to learn to achieve enchantment:

• Why Enchantment
• How to Achieve Likability
• How to Achieve Trustworthiness
• How to Prepare
• How to Launch
• How to Overcome Resistance
• How to Make Enchantment Endure
• How to Use Push Technology
• How to Use Pull Technology
• How to Enchant Your Employees
• How to Enchant Your Boss
• How to Resist Enchantment

(Click here to see a larger version of the infographic.)

What I Loved About Enchantment

It’s rare that a business book grabs me to the point where I have a hard time putting it down. There are a few from 2010 that come to mind, like: Switch, Rework, and Confessions of a Public Speaker. What makes these books stand out is not only the writing style, but the outside-in advice they offer. That is they challenge you to understand how others see and relate to you or your organization and how to change what isn’t working. Enchantment falls into this category.

I won’t give it all away, but I’d like to share some of my favorite pieces of advice or one-liners with you (trust me when I tell you there are many dog-eared and highlighted pages). These are all direct quotes from the book:

• Embrace the nobodies (I couldn’t agree with this philosophy more!)
• Give up the illusion of control
• Be a mensch
• Everyone is passionate about something. It’s your job to find out what it is.
• When people believe, they want to help out, and it’s your responsibility to enable them as much as they can.
• The power of social acceptance should make you skeptical (though not necessarily cynical) about the wisdom of the crowd.
• Customers showed Apple this market [desktop publishing]—it wasn’t our Cupertino-centric wisdom or insights. It was their local wisdom. (If I had not read this book, I would have gone on thinking Apple was not customer-centric. Turns out that they are, they do listen in their own way.)

Guy Kawasaki Has Enchanted Me

I first met Guy in 2008. No one was talking to me on Twitter (Don’t believe me? Read The Twitter Monologue), so I hopped over to Plurk and that’s where I bumped into Guy. He was testing out Plurk for Alltop and one day a bunch of us sort of got into a discussion around whether or not his dropping links was spam.

Guy told me that he was like “my delicious guy”— how darn funny is that?!

I defended Guy because I truly felt that he was a marketer who was not buying into social media hype and all of the “rules” that people were trying to enforce upon us. I appreciated his fortitude and testing (heck, I am a marketer after all).

What happened next I will always be thankful for and will never forget. The day after the discussion, I was checking my blog traffic and saw traffic coming from Alltop! Guy had added my fledgling blog to Alltop (it’s not easy to get added to Alltop). Then in 2009 we missed each other at SES NY by a few hours (we were both speaking, Guy was the Keynote), but I was told that he had asked for me. See why I am enchanted? Even though we’ve never met in person (but have had offline exchanges), Guy has helped me without my asking for it and now I am doing the same for him. That is what happens when a person, cause, brand, or organization is truly enchanting…you just can’t help but want to help them.

Final Thought

Was this book about persuasion and influence? Yep, it sure is, but I was too enchanted to tell (the down-right humanness and humor of this book will grab you!). And that’s the point. If you are outright seeking to influence and persuade people or to piggy back on people’s perceived influence, it will back fire. Try being enchanting instead.

[Disclosure: I received a free copy of Enchantment from Guy. However, it is a book that I would have purchased for myself. It's also a book that I think should be mandatory reading for all corporate employees...Can you imagine an enchanting workplace?]

[Image Source: Guy Kawasaki]

“No company will tell you, ‘I don’t want to be customer centric,’ but do you know the difference between taking an inside-out versus an outside-in approach?”

-Ranjay Gulati

Most companies (small to Fortune 500 and everything in between) are not customer-centric—even if they think they might be (market-oriented or customer-focused isn’t the same, but they are a great start!). Driven by revenue generation, product and service development (i.e. profit centers) usually takes the lead and determines the hierarchy, culture and power within the organization. While products and services may be innovative, creative, and useful often the complete inward focus creates a fundamental disconnect between function and actually solving a customer’s challenges—from the customer’s perspective—and therefore companies only gain a temporary brand loyalty foothold. It’s why products and services (whether B2B or B2C) continue to face the challenge of commoditization. Even if customers force fit a product or service that alleviates short-term pain, there is still the hurdle of solving long-term challenges. If they are not focused on or solved, the next company that comes along with a solution and complete focus on achieving loyalty will win. Because companies focus on short-term gains, they lose 50% of their customers every five years or so. Ironically, it is more costly to acquire new customers than it is to make existing customers satisfied.

Breaking the Cycle

There is a reason why companies are not customer-centric. It is an operational practice, which can be  difficult, challenging and downright painful especially considering it requires a hard look at what—and who—is wrong when it comes to focusing on the customer. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, however. There are examples of B2C and B2B companies that get it like Zappos, Southwest, Target, Best Buy, Carnival Cruise Lines, Cisco, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Lafarge.

So then, how does one break the cycle of being solely hierarchical and product-driven?

First, it is important to understand that customers have gained control of the market place and recognizing that they are not willing to settle for the status quo. It is from that perspective I will share methodologies from the leading experts in customer-centricity.

IMC Value Add – Don Schultz & Heidi Schultz

Don Schultz, the Father of IMC, has been my marketing guide for over 15 years. Everything I know about IMC I have learned from Don’s books (along with implementing, testing, etc.). IMC focuses on becoming customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven. As found in IMC, The Next Generation : Five Steps For Delivering Value and Measuring Financial Returns¹, the “Five R’s” of IMC help companies to focus on reversing the traditional notion of value. That is, the customer determines what is valuable, not the company (not great news for fans of value prop creation).

• Relevance:  Developing products and services that meet customer  wants and needs
• Receptivity:  Reaching customers when they are most receptive, but more importantly in a manner that they want to be communicated with (This requires a company to be open to new ideas, concepts and methods of doing business)
• Response: Can customers response to a company and its offerings in an easy manner at every point of contact (This requires employees to sense, adapt and answer the needs/wants of customers)
• Recognition: Understanding important points of contact (data) that a customer has made within the organization (people, websites, 1-800s, etc.) and connecting the dots of their actions (This requires a company to stand apart from the competition from the start)
• Relationship: Comprehending that customers create the relationship, not the company and specifically not the marketers

NOTE 1: Click on this Google Books link for a graphic and more detail. Or, just buy the book. Bonus: ROI Formula!

NOTE 2: I share the 5 R’s in all of my IMC presentations, so you may have seen them there, too.

The Star Model – Jay Galbraith

I have been a long-time fan of Jay Galbraith, the driver behind organization design and customer-centric organizational strategy and management. Jay’s focus has been on helping companies understand that they: A) no longer have control over the customer;  B) need to understand each customer wants to do business in a different manner;  C) need to interact with customers and D) expand offerings to meet customer needs. Well, that and much more!  Jay is best known for The Star Model, a design framework used to determine new organizational strategies.

The Star Model has five areas:

• Strategy: Determines the new direction and includes goals, objectives, values, etc.
• Structure: Establishes the location of decision making power (including specialization, shape, distribution of power and departmentalization) and is based on the Strategy
• Processes: Channels the flow of information and decision making across the organization as an operational guide
• Reward Systems: Influences the motivation employee actions so that their goals are aligned with the overarching goal of the company
• People: Directs the hiring of employees in order to achieve the strategy and fit the structure of the organization

The Five Levers – Ranjay Gulati

Ranjay Gulati is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and author of Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Gulati hit the nail on the head when he wrote “enterprises talk the customer talk while failing consistently to walk the customer walk.”¹ To help organizations get to a point where they are customer-centric, flexible and resilient (to economic downturn), Gulati shares five key levers (I talk about them frequently in my IMC presentations):

• Coordination: connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses
• Cooperation: align all employees around the shared goals of customer solutions
• Clout: redistribute power to “bridge builders” and customer champions
• Capability: develop employees’ skills at tackling changing customer needs
• Connection: blend your offerings with partners to provide unique customer solutions

Choosing an Outside-In Focus

What do all of these models/methodologies focus on? Well, they certainly aren’t about giving up strategy, planning, processes (for all of you Six Sigma fans out there) or revenues—if that’s your concern. In fact, customer-centricity is about increasing value and revenues in a reciprocal manner. The first step is for companies to choose to have an outside-in focus, which is akin to admitting there might be a problem. Often an internal audit (hire professional help here) will help to determine next steps and the selection of a methodology that works best to support overall objectives while satisfying customers.

Realistically, however, I don’t see customer-centric becoming the norm. There are too many egotistical, insecure and arrogant people running around corporations for that to happen (am I wrong?). It really takes strong leadership, a willingness to be open-minded and wrong, and a drive to be the best (from a customer perspective) to flip an organization’s focus from inside-out to outside-in.

What do you think? Where is your company’s focus today? Do you think reorganizing around customers realistic?

If you are of the belief that “customers don’t know what they want” and it is a company’s role to determine what the market needs, how would you address being customer-driven?

____________

¹ Don Schultz, Heidi Schultz, IMC, The Next Generation : Five Steps For Delivering Value and Measuring Financial Returns (McGraw-Hill, 2003), 120-122.

² Ranjay Gulati, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business (Harvard Business Press, 2010), 4.

[Image Source: Elizabeth Thomsen]

“Unengaged Employees Don’t Create Engaged Customers” - Bruce Temkin

For the past week I have spent considerable thought on how and why marketing is broken (more on that later this week) and why it’s imperative to understand the challenges so that we, as marketing and communications employees, can fix what ails business today. Many businesses and their employees often have misperceived notions that they know what is best for their customers, even when case study after case study show why that philosophy is broken. In reality what they think is best for their customers is really just a short-term plan for what is best for them—their bottom line. Then, there are companies that truly understand why customers need to be at the center of their organization and they use that philosophy steadfastly to prosper year-after-year. Do these companies possess a magic bullet? Of course not. They succeed because they plan to provide the best customer experience—repeatedly. And that planning starts with their employees.

Customer Experience Snack: Is your trusting cup half full, or half empty? Why believing your employees fuels your prosperity engine.

“Wegmans trusts their employees because they select them with diligence and with clear success factors in mind.  Then they prepare them for success – so that they can trust both their judgment and the skills that Wegmans has to develop. To enable employee belief, Wegmans invests up to 40 hours a year per person in training and career development.  This enables this company to “throw out the rule book” and believe in employees’ ability to make judgment calls that are right for each customized customer situation.  The only “rule” there:  ‘No customer can walk away unhappy.’”

“Employees love this kind of environment—and their numbers show it. Within their industry, Wegmans has dramatically lower employee turnover rates, higher operating margins and 50% higher sales per square foot.”

(I can tell you as a Wegmans customer this philosophy has made me come to love food shopping! Seriously.)

Customer Experience Matters: The 6 Laws of Customer Experience (eBook)

“…While you can make some customers happy through brute force, you cannot sustain great customer experience unless your employees are bought-in to what you’re doing and are aligned with the effort. If employees have low morale, then getting them to “wow” customers will be nearly impossible.”

“Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees.”(as quoted from the Harvard Business Review).

Customer Think: The Customer Experience Planning Gap

“Management may plan one thing but different employees approach issues differently.”

“What businesses fail to understand is that a deliberate and consistent Customer Experience is the only way to customer loyalty and advocacy. Let’s say that people are generally satisfied with one company but know that the experience depends upon who they are going to meet there. Will they recommend it to someone?! No, because they will put their name to it only if they have seen consistent excellence not that there is a 70% chance of a good service.”

Beyond Philosophy: Lessons from the Milgram Experiment

“The purpose of the experiment is to show how people will adhere authority, follow orders and give a lethal electric shock to a person despite being able to hear their excruciating screams. What has this got to do with the Customer Experience? We know the subconscious experience is very powerful in a Customer Experience.”

“From a leadership perspective, you need to consider how you act, behave and are perceived… If you are a leader are you sending out subconscious signals to your employees so they don’t tell you want they really think? If you are an employee do you have the courage of your convictions to tell the truth.

A few challenges for you to mull over….

• What are the subconscious signals you are giving to your Customers?
• What could you do to provide a great Customer Experience?
• Are you really listening [to]  the people that know what is going on?
• Are you speaking out about what is right and wrong with your Customer Experience or just following the herd?”

Happy reading and watching!

[Image: getgreenliving.com]