Our first ever PostFunnel Forum, held in late March, turned out to be a big accomplishment for us. As all marketers know, there are many ways to measure success. With this being the first of its kind, the one that will set the tone and determine the need and likelihood to have more of these events in the future – we measured its success by a very old and naïve method: the amount of great feedback we received from our guests and panelists (Which may or may not have been effected by the open bar).
The topic for the whole evening centred around today’s customers, their rising expectations, and what brands can do to accommodate these hopes Consumer habits have significantly changed over the past decade. Online shopping, mobile, gens Y and Z, Facebook, Amazon, GDPR and many more modern phenomena, have simply changed the world as we knew it, creating a new kind of customer – One who doesn’t tolerate irrelevant marketing.
Today, having best-in-class products isn’t enough anymore, and the value that brands deliver to their customers goes far beyond the product itself. Brands have been building marketing strategies around their products for decades, and this approach no longer works. The 4 Ps have changed to the 4 Cs – Customer value, Cost, Convenience and Communication. Many brands have vanished after failing to shift from product centricity to customer centricity.
“Straddle the data with the creativity”
As you can imagine, the phrase that was repeatedly overheard, on and off stage, was customer-centric. Our guests and panelists talked about the move their companies made from being a product-centric company to a customer-centric one, focusing on ways and tips to tailor the purchasing or the playing experiences to customers and players.
Nina Dietrich, Director of Owned Channels at Culture Trip, looked at the new evolved marketer of modern times: “It’s not easy to talk to a data scientist and understand their recommendations. Being able to hold your own conversation about likelihood of purchases or different inputs into a model, is not the same as designing the right color scheme for a campaign. I don’t want to insult anyone who is great at creative marketing, there’s a definite need for that, but putting that together – being able to straddle both the data side of things and the creative side of things, that’s something really special”.
Katie O’Leary, Head of UK Marketing at Hibob, shared her thoughts about how the marketing realm have developed in recent years: “The definition of what marketing is and its meaning for a business have changed so much from five years ago, even two years ago. So, if I’m looking on the way I’m recruiting a team member now or doing an interview, I definitely changed what I’m looking for – the buzzwords are different, I don’t look for somebody who’ll be really fast uploading web content for example, for sure, I’d rather hear the word customer centricity, I need to hear the word data and I don’t ever like it when people separate digital and offline marketing anymore, cause there’s no separation, everything links back to the same place”.
Paris Anatolitis, Casino Marketing Director at GVC Group, gave us this informative answer when discussing the need to go customer-centric: “What we are trying to do is have this combination of skills, that go back to consuming data and understanding the analytical side, but also understanding the customer, in our case, players. In my team I try to have people who experiment with the product themselves, they understand what it feels like from the players’ side, only then you can truly walk in your customer’s shoes. You understand then the product from a different perspective. In reality, if you want to be customer-centric, this is what you need to do”.
See you on our next PostFunnel Forum
We’d like to take this additional opportunity to thank our panelists and many CRM experts who helped turn PostFunnel Forum into a real fruitful evening for all of us. We look forward for our next PostFunnel Forums and hope to see many familiar and newly joined faces. The schedule will be published on PostFunnel in the following weeks, and you are more than welcome to check our variety of pieces and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, to help us spread the gospel of data-based retention marketing.
