Does anyone remember the Thomas Guide? At the time is was THE most indispensable accessory in your daily travel kit. If you needed to get from one end of Los Angeles to pretty much anywhere else in California, the trusty Thomas Guide was the only way to get you there. Thankfully we now have things like Apple Maps and Waze that will quite literally tell us where to go because flipping through a coffee-table-size book in your lap while driving in L.A. traffic will un-nerve even the best of us.
The problem had to do with the tools available and the fact that L.A., at the time, was changing / growing / re-shaping itself faster than the map books could keep up with. Good thing for new map sales, bad thing for drivers trying to figure out a large dish of spaghetti highways.
Question – How has your organization been navigating this newly re-formed customer landscape?
Are your teams succeeding at getting from where you were a year ago to where you need to be right now? New data and privacy regulations to contend with, newly-empowered customers with entirely new expectations and tolerances, proliferating technologies purporting to be fix-alls, etc., mean that CMOs, CIOs, and CEOs are dealing with a dramatic shift in the customer paradigm.
Our sense is that there are companies (lots of them) navigating these shifting terrains using what amounts to a Thomas Guide approach. So we began asking people – people who have seen these roads – what they are seeing and how they are leading their companies into and through this new territory. We asked them to be candid and we asked them to be prescriptive, that is, to give guidance with their answers. They were, and they did.
The result is what we’re calling the CxO Report: The Road to Customerization. At its essence, it’s a compiled series of conversations we had with C-level leaders about their trials and victories as they forge new pathways into customer engagement. But we think it’s more than that. Taken as a whole, the CxO Report is a guidebook written for organizations, and the people who run them, to help get you through this new set of spaghetti highways.
In this first edition, we hear from:
- James McDermott, CEO at Lytics on Data & Privacy
- Bernice Grossman, CEO at DMRS Group on Data Architecture
- Jeremy Swift, CEO at Cordial on Customer Data Technology
- David Eldridge, CEO at 3Radical on Customer Engagement
- Ryan Deutsch, Chief Brand Advocate at Persado on Personalization
- Kevin Akeroyd, CEO at Cision on Trust, and
- Tim Suther, Senior VP Data & Insights at Change Healthcare on Transparency
And other’s whose points of view bring context and important signals to the conversation.
You can access the report here.
I’d also like to mention that we’re putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak. We talk a lot about first-party data, getting to know your customers, privacy, data integrity and trust in these pages so we’re deploying a questionnaire – a short “journey” of sorts – along with the report that help us to better know your preferences and needs, and which will help us shape our content accordingly. I would very much appreciate the extra minute or two of your time to go through that for us.
And lastly, it’s important that I acknowledge my co-editor on this report, Michael Fisher, Ed.D., for his efforts and outreach, and our research coordinator and project manager, Linda Vetter. Both of these people have my deepest respect and deserve a really nice glass of wine.
- mg
Photo by Thor Alvis on Unsplash.
