'Official' at Last: Faster, faster, faster Marketing

"Many people think the technology revolution in
marketing is about Web sites and interactive
advertising. It’s not. Speed and the customer’s
experience with the brand are the two most important
marketing strategies today."

This is the lead-in to a new study by management consultancy Sapient and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (blogged here). The report, titled The New Marketing-IT Power Partnership, finds that IT and marketing must work more closely together in order to speed innovation and boost the bottom line.

Speed, and customer experience. Hallelujah!

Whether you call it Agile marketing, or Velocity marketing, or just marketing that moves fast enough to notice, it is the future.  And IT's job is to do everything in its power to increase responsiveness and take itself out of the path of the marketing cycle.  Marketers must be able to change programs and campaigns based on the changing needs of our customers, our campaigns will never be as strong or successful as they could be.

Another great quote:

"How does Netflix stay ahead of the curve? They
constantly experiment with how technology can
enhance consumer and partner touch points. In fact,
Netflix makes significant changes to its Web site
every two weeks in order to improve their customers’
experience.

Lets put it more simply.  Your customer, if they have a noteworthy experience with your brand (positive or negative) can publish their opinion in about 5 minutes on a blog, forum, wiki, or review site.  With the current state of IT and Marketing at many large brands, you can publish new information to your own digital media in about 4 weeks to 3 months.

They are running circles around you.

As we're all learning in the age of the Web 2.0, it's all about the customer experience, and we must learn to maintain a site that is as changeable as our customers, and that is as varied as the needs of our various customers.

So I agree, wholeheartedly: Yes, marketing needs to work with IT. If we can understand each other's needs and fears, we will have come a long way. (Perhaps we can even convince them to do away with the holiday lockdown...)

On the other hand, we as marketers need to learn to stand on our own. If our every site need hinges on the ability for IT to work us into their schedules - no matter how closely we work together and how understanding IT has become of our needs - we're still hamstrung. Marketers need the ability to test and to optimize in real time.

This is why we created Offermatica. After building Jcrew, Nike.com, BestBuy.com and about 40 other ecommerce sites, it became clear that no amount of spending on IT was going to solve the problem.  That is why we set out to create a content delivery platform that could move at the speed of marketing and target customers anywhere they went. The holy grail was to eliminate IT from the path of a marketer who had a great idea and wanted to get it in front of a customer fast and learn.

On a final note, the report suggests that marketers be the ones to reach out. It's time to stop working in silos and work as a team.

Comments

[Darren Johnson]

The Sapient guys are on the right track. I work with online marketers at advanced online businesses that still 'sit on their hands' for 6 month site redesigns, holiday 'lockdown', and other manufactured 'static' periods.

The IT fear is real- but must be overcome with proof that empowering marketers on a continuous basis won't adversely impact site performance and free IT to do more interesting/important things than manage the presentation layer.