In my work over the last two decades as a CEO and a business
leader of some of the world’s most sophisticated data and analytics companies,
I have gotten to watch something very special happen. I have seen the
transformation of the marketing discipline within organizations. Simply put, marketing organizations have
become scientific.
This paradigm shift of marketing from art form to a science
has many parallels to the changes that the manufacturing disciplines within
businesses went through in the ‘90’s.
For a group of business professionals (marketers) who like
to quote John Wannamaker’s famous retort, “Half my advertising is wasted, I
just don’t know which half,” this transformation is greatly overdue. In 2012 alone, that number of “wasted
advertising” was in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Marketing’s available technology, data and methods have
undergone a consonant proliferation.
From the early days of e-commerce, marketers witnessed an
emergence of anonymous click-stream data about user behaviors which gave them
insights in minutes that historically took qualitative focus groups months to
yield.
We marketers were greatly unprepared to assemble or
understand these data streams about customers.
Anytime humans have experienced this type of renaissance of
information, it takes the work of pioneering individuals to show us the way
forward. In the same way that physicists
gave us explanations to gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, Dr.
Kumar has given us fundamental explanations of the marketing discipline.
In typical fashion, VK has returned tour de force to provide
us marketing practitioners our equivalent of Grand Unified Theory. In this latest work “Profitable Customer
Engagement” he links a customer’s individual value with their referrals,
influence and knowledge and ties that to the effects on brand and shareholder
value. This provides a holistic
framework that can be applied at the center of your marketing strategy.
The foundations established by his work in 2008 “Managing Customers for Profits” gave us
practitioners the tools required to put Customer Lifetime Value at the center
of our marketing strategy. With these
tools, I have been able to help leadership of many of the world’s greatest
brands around the globe explain to their CEO’s, CFO’s and Board of Directors
why investing in a customer centered strategy was important.
Based on Dr. Kumar’s pioneering work, I was able to
demonstrate to European mobile handset manufacturer that minute improvements in
consumer engagement were worth nearing a half of a billion euro of additional
sales in just a three-year time frame.
In this book, Dr. Kumar takes his work in Customer Lifetime
Value to the next level, giving us even greater accuracy and predictive power. VK then expanded on this substratum with his
more recent scientific works, allowing us to understand and accurately measure
the new phenomenon of influencers and referrals in a way that links to the
bottom line.
The addition of Customer Influencer Value and Customer Referral
Value provide us with the mechanics to accurately quantify our social media
efforts.
With Customer Knowledge Value being added to the framework,
we can now understand how to link voice of the customer initiatives to the
critical research phase of product development.
As consumer demands of products and services rapidly increases, the expectation
for turn times and new releases rapidly decreases. The ability to link investments in this area
to a more holistic customer engagement strategy has been tremendously important
in my work implementing marketing strategies.
I’m looking forward to leveraging this work to set the
vision and strategy of many of the worlds best brands in the years to come.
Congratulations and keep up the je ne sais quoi VK!
J Patrick
Bewley, Big Data and Analytics Entrepreneur
jpbewley@post.harvard.edu
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