Who should manage your relationship?

Marketing Week, September 17, 2009

Business Viewpoint

Vanessa Cohen, partner, Prophet

CRM should be seen as an advantageous tool to keep hold of customers and ensure that they remain loyal to a brand, but more often than not it suffers due to a major disconnect between the people managing the brands and those that run the CRM.

It seems obvious, but by bringing the two together in a suitable way, brands will have a disctinct advantage over their competitors, provided they use the insight they gather correctly and sent out relevant, targeted and personalised communications.

The core to achieving this is making sure that every single person in a company is aware of exactly what their brand stands for. It has to be throughout the business, so that even the data experts who are looking at how to communicate to customers, are thinking about the brand, and not just how best to mine the data. It starts with the fundamentals of knowing what constitutes a brand – what do people think about you? How do they interact with you? This is affected by everything that you do and say and how you choose to do and say this.

One of the distinct problems of brands choosing to outsource their CRM is they risk making everything seem campaign focussed and can be seen to be forgetting about what actually matters – the way their customers perceive them and the way those customers will choose to interact with them as a result of that.

Brands have to take some sort of control and hold on to their values, so that in every form of engagement, those ideals are clearly visible and easy to digest. It’s about touching base with customer sentiments without being generic and without seeming out of touch. It can’t be exaggerated and it can’t be in your face; it has to be as close to triggering a positive reaction as it can possibly be,.

This is far from the norm at the moment. Too often, the CRM experts, usually in IT departments, forget about the brand values altogether and create very generic segments of audiences that lack the personalisation that it needs to succeed.

It can’t be guess work and vague experimentation. CRM has to shape views and opinions, so the disconnect that exists is pulled back together across all parts of a brand’s strategy and reaches out across all touchpoints. Ideally, this means pulling everything together internally, possibly using external help to get that started.

We are beginning to see this with the role of chief marketing officer becoming a more involved position, taking a holistic view and aligning teams to share the same brand concepts.

The push towards going beyond mere advertising is admirable, and if done correctly, CRM can certainly be a great vehicle for developing emotional engagement in ways brands couldn’t do before. However, if the disconnect that exists across most brands at the moment continues, then I fear it won’t be long before brands give up on CRM and begin to look for a suitable exit strategy.

Vanessa Cohen was speaking ahead of the European Chief Marketing Officer Conference which takes place in Zurich on October 1, sponsored by Prophet.