At the heart of all great businesses are domain experts who are excellent at execution. Regardless of whether the business remains highly analog (increasingly rare in today’s marketplace) or is the latest emerging digital start-up domain expertise and execution wins over technology disruption alone.
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In this week’s episode of SearchChat, we interview Mark Schaefer, co-host of Marketing Companion Podcast, on what it means to make companies more human. What does he reveal? That the needs and expectations of our customers are seriously far off from where companies think they are.
I had a conversation several weeks ago with a large data company, discussing behavior based personalization. The VP of Marketing heard me out for a few minutes, and then said “Woah, wait a minute. So it’s personalization? I already have that.”
So I said “Oh, how’s that going? What are you seeing?”
And he said, “Well, we haven’t turned it on yet.”
There’s an old joke about two guys walking through the woods. All of a sudden they see a bear, and the bear starts moving towards them. The first guy sits down, pulls a pair of running shoes out of his backpack and slides them on. The second guy says, “What are you doing? You’re not going to outrun that bear.” And the first guy says, “I don’t have to outrun that bear. I just have to outrun you.”
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Steve and I spent time together recently at both a Red Sox game but more importantly, at MarTech East in Boston. The shift in conversation was wildly fascinating: the focus seemed to be personalization, privacy, and security.
In high stakes competitive chess, there’s a gaming style called “Freestyle” which is just as “ditch-the-rulebook” as it sounds. The best players are called “centaurs” and although these particular centaurs aren’t half-human/half-horse, their makeup runs along the same logic.
I thought I’d just capture a few thoughts on MarTech East 2019. This summary isn’t representative of the conference, it’s representative of my experience at the conference.
This was my first MarTech East. It was an excellent conference for practitioners of marketing technology arts. Kudos to Scott Brinker and the Third Door Media team. The following are my key takeaways from the conversations that I had with presenters, attendees, and vendors.
I was at the Marketing Analytics Summit a few weeks back, and talked to a lot of people who felt that:
The eternal struggle for marketers seems to be connecting marketing actions to business results. But this can’t be a reason to give up on analytics.
Last week I was asked what the biggest opportunities and gaps are in the MarTech stack. It’s an interesting question when one considers all the technology that’s available in the market. While I could opine on features and functions that I’d like to see, what really bugs me is the fact that so much of the overarching promise of marketing technology remains unfulfilled.