Be agile and adept or go broke – Jodie Sangster at Acxiom Sydney breakfast

ADMA chief Jodie Sangster outlined the grim outlook for businesses that do not adapt to the market’s changing media behaviour, saying that in the future there will be two types of companies – those that are agile and adapt, and those that go out of business, in a talk she delivered at the Acxiom What’s Now What’s Next Breakfast, Sydney.

Sangster focused on the global marketing trends around the importance of customer-centric strategies for her presentation at the breakfast and made particular reference to the importance of adopting a customer-centric approach to marketing.

Acxiom CEO Warren Billington agreed, saying that marketers will fail if they do not incorporate customer-centric strategies into their multi-channel campaigns.

The inaugural breakfast was designed to introduce marketing companies to the changing face of the industry and the importance of customer-centric strategies through the use of sophisticated data analytics.

“It was encouraging to see that the leading industry body was stressing so much importance on the requirement to have strong customer intelligence and applying that to the success of your organisation,” said Billington.

Billington cautioned marketers that in the US, $112 billion (US) worth of advertising and 80 percent of online advertising is wasted annually because businesses are not properly incorporating customer data into truly multi-channel, customer-centric campaign strategies.

“Most business is still structured in silos; in operational and organisational silos that [don’t] lend themselves to effective customer integration,” said Billington. They…are not taking into account the entire customer journey, and to be successful with a customer-centric strategy, you need to have 360˚ view of your customers and be able to track and understand that behaviour across every channel.”

One of the key areas for discussion during the breakfast was the changing face of marketing ‘in the era of customer-centricity.’ “Marketers need to adapt to a new marketing environment,” said Billington. “There is a significant transformation taking place in marketing, and brands need to take a more customer-centric approach.”

While Billington conceded that the technology behind data analytics and management can seem confusing, he stressed that for businesses to properly tap into the huge potential lurking behind the available customer data, the have to “look at restructuring more effectively so they can understand how to impact on the entire customer life-cycle process.”

Currently, said Billington, many marketers are adopting traditional marketing methodology while not taking into account this marketing transformation, and the changes in consumer engagement. He added that “there are a number of stumbling blocks that are restricting marketers from turning data into insights: the complexity of the amount of data that is around, cross-channel, and the complexity of integrating that into a business operation. Lots of businesses are clearly still not operationalising their data effectively.”

Fortunately, according to Billington, with Acxiom’s help businesses can make immediate changes to their marketing strategies.

“It’s important to take a step back and say what can I do today?” said Billington. “This shouldn’t be considered as a long-term vision requiring a huge investment. Most of our clients will develop a roadmap to take them on that journey from 12 to 36 months.”