Customer-Centric Marketing: Build Relationships, Create Advocates, and Influence Your Customers

CHAPTER TWO

CARPE DIEM

The CMO Dilemma

FOR THE LAST 24 YEARS, I HAVE BEEN A MEMBER OF MAAW (Marketing Agencies Association Worldwide). This worldwide peer-to-peer group of independent marketing communications executives comes together twice yearly to share knowledge, ideas, and innovations. We also invite thought-provoking and trendsetting guest speakers from around the world to come join us.

I recently traveled to New York to attend a conference where one of our guest speakers was Paul Stoddart, head of advertising, strategic and competitive projects for Microsoft. Paul spoke about a new initiative he was leading there called Agile Marketing.

Agile Marketing takes a data-centric insight approach to fuel rapid development, experimentation, and optimization at the company. This same approach is also used as the basis for a new way of operating with their agencies.

It's built on a customer-responsive model for creative, production, and media that enables concept-to-market execution across all channels in as little as 14 days. It simply strips away all bureaucracy and focuses on being quick and agile in responding to data insights. It may sound incredible, but this small, flexible 15-person Microsoft team, along with its small and agile agency, delivers full-channel campaigns in a matter of days, versus what used to take Microsoft months to achieve. This concept is best illustrated ...