I attended the Forrester CX Summit in San Francisco last week and walked away with a lot of inspiration. The theme was “Digital Disruption”, and while most of the content focused on disruptive customer experiences, the concept of disruption itself is near and dear to us at Beckon. Our customers are often champions of disruption in their own organizations spearheading new ways of doing business by putting data and measurement at the heart of their marketing engines.
So, I was particularly interested in what Evelyn Huang, Head of Design Thinking and Strategy for Capital One Labs had to say about spreading a mindset of “design thinking”. For Beckon and our customers, it’s a performance-driven mentality we aim to spread, but Ms. Wong’s advice turns out to be applicable for spreading any new way of thinking. Here are a few of her ideas that struck me as particularly relevant for what our own customers are often trying to do—institute a data-driven culture in their business:
“Go for low hanging fruit, establish early success and build from there.” This one rang very familiar. At Beckon, we often coach our customers to begin their foray into marketing performance measurement by focusing on five or six channels instead of all twenty-something. Yes, we, too, have found that early success matters when driving change. Especially for an organization that has had no history of integrated marketing reporting, we agree that it’s a best practice to start small and build from there.
“Develop a footprint—spread a mindset.” When you develop a footprint, you set up a center of excellence around the practice, scale it and spread it across the function. When you develop a mindset, you’re spreading something across the entire organization. This philosophy immediately put Juan Silvera to mind—Managing Director of Digital Marketing at Union Bank and a Beckon customer. In a terrific webcast he did with us, Marketing Performance Storytelling, he talks about this very thing—building a data-driven, measurement-based culture by spreading a simple mindset: performance.
“Rather than differentiate your strategy from others in the business, find common ground.” While a marketing measurement platform like Beckon is very differentiated from say a BI tool, it also makes very good sense to position an investment in marketing measurement technology as a complement to existing BI tools. We are, after all, in pursuit of the same goals—improving business performance. This piece of advice brought to mind another Beckon webcast, The Future of Marketing Performance Measurement. In particular, this slide:
When advocating for investments in functionally-specific tools, position them as complements to existing systems, not replacements. Promote inclusiveness—clearly there’s room for everyone in this picture.
“Host a workshop to promote and provide education around the new mindset.” Once again, this advice put our customer at Union Bank to mind. Once investments in performance measurement tools and processes were in place, the marketing team hosted Digital Day in which Union Bank marketers and marketing technology vendors came together to discuss their various programs and capabilities. Once the team created a performance-based culture, they then propagated it. More than 100 people across five lines of business attended.
Thanks, Ms. Huang for the great advice on how to spearhead disruption—any kind of disruption. These are strategies we see our own customers embrace and champion every day. Some may call this advice “brand new wine in and old bottle”, but I happen to be a sucker for timeless advice told in a new way. Thanks again!