Takeaways from IBM’s State of Marketing survey

According to IBM, “in the United States alone, roughly US$83 billion is lost each year as a result of poor customer experiences. That’s more than the revenue for the entire U.S. e-commerce retail sector. Many businesses have yet to unlock the potential of information, technology and customer engagement to stem these losses.”

IBM’s statement might seem like a harsh critique for marketers – especially for those businesses that have invested in and are embracing marketing technology. But the fact of the matter is that there's a lot that can be learned from those businesses that are leading the charge. For example, IBM pinpointed the three characteristics that model marketing businesses have in common: 

1. They know customer context and integrate accordingly – The best marketers not only understand the context of customer interactions, but also put integrated capabilities in place to take action based on that knowledge. As a result, they’re more flexible and responsive to fast-shifting expectations and circumstances.
2. They act on insights systematically – Leaders make better use of technology to develop customer insights and act on them in a consistent, systematic and in many cases automatic manner.
3. They take a broader view of the customer experience – Forward-thinking marketers understand in detail the full scope and nature of their engagement with customers. They use rigorous measurement to guide their actions and build customer relationships that grow and strengthen over time.   

To gather this insight, IBM surveyed more than 500 marketers across 15 industries. And then, IBM compared their responses with the publically available financial information for their respective companies. In doing so, IBM was able to conclude that:

• Leading marketers outperform all other marketers by 1.8 times when it comes to gross profit.
• Leading marketers outperform all other marketers by 3.4 times when it comes to net income.
• Leading marketers outperform all other marketers by 2.4 times when it comes to stock price.

To drive these impressive performance rates, leading marketers were found to engage in some critical marketing activities more than their peers. These marketing activities included:

• Adjusting real-time offers based on context
• Using optimization technology across all channels
• Integrating inbound/outbound and online/offline
• Conducting root-cause analysis of customer insight
• Applying advanced analytics to determine media spend
• Detecting transaction struggles and taking action
• Tracking commitments from service interactions
• Identifying/remedying execution gaps in brand promise
• Tracking customer lifetime value

The thing to remember in regard to IBM’s survey results is that many companies have a lot of these elements in place. The differentiator is that the marketing leaders – the companies who are financially outperforming their peers – are taking it to the next level with technology.    

To learn more about the survey and get a comprehensive overview of the bulleted items above, IBM prepared a white paper titled, “How marketing is taking charge: leading the customer experience.” To learn more about how technology is driving marketing successes day in and day, stay tuned to the NetSphere Strategies blog.