Voice of The Customer

Forrester have just issues a very interesting paper called ‘The Connected Agency’ which encourages marketers to partner with an agency that listens instead of shouting.What they are saying resonates deeply with what we believe and have been saying for some time now. Here is the exec summary “Today’s agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them. “So how do agencies make the shift? The first step is connecting parts of the agency that have never previously connected, that is, if your agency has the appropriate capabilities and can facilitate the connections. And by these connections I don’t mean media neutrality.  It is embarrassing to see agencies attempting to embrace a ‘media neutral perspective’ when the game has changed completely. This is thinking straight out of the 90s. You may laugh but you still see this happening. If you are a client and your agency pitches you this way then I would consider dismissing them immediately. The point they are missing completely is that it is about the customer and connecting up their experiences rather than how you would push out messages to them in all channels. That thinking is simply all upside down.So how do we connect the experience? By connecting data sets. Agency expertise has always tended to be siloed so things really become interesting when you connect media behavior with front end data for segmentation and predictive modeling with back end website analytics. Suddenly a different picture starts to form. Tracking value from engagement and pull activity becomes a reality and you can start to monetize what previously looked like disparate customer behavior.That is not to say we have it all figured out but the dust is settling rapidly and we feel that we now can start to apply a very traditional test, measure and learn approach to pull marketing. Over the next year you will see more social media marketing measurement moving from word of mouth pass through to actual impact to the bottom line.