This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"IT professionals must begin to think like marketers. Marketing is the corporate function responsible for understanding and interpreting changes in the marketplace, stimulating customer demand, and devising a strategy for maintaining customers' attention and loyalty. Stripped of all its refinements, marketing is a process of learning and experience gained through the constant exchange of information with existing and potential customers and with other market-infrastructure stakeholders, such as channel partners. The end game is to form lasting, value-enhancing relationships with customers...
"It's time for top management to recognize IT as a strategic marketing asset that can establish a responsive market presence to sustain customer loyalty. IT is the glue that binds the company and its customers in a dynamic feedback loop of information and services. Staying in touch with customers and maintaining a competitive edge require people who understand what each solution means to the customer."
Good point. As I've said a number of times, both here and on other public blogs, "too many companies sell products and services while their customers want to buy solutions to their problems." IT's contribution to understanding those problems and solutions can be to provide systems of communication that, if done right, can feedback issues of true value that can be included in the offering that wraps around the nominal product or service.
The article goes on to discuss the idea of "information logistics" to support "marketing from the core" rather than at the margins. Implementing such concept makes sense to me as part of a strategic future reality plan to identify, deal with, and capitalize on customer problems. The article, authored by Regis Mckenna, concludes...
"Most likely without even realizing it, IT is doing more for marketing than marketing is doing for itself. I've often heard that engineers and IT professionals just don't have the "creative skills" or "customer understanding" to be marketing types. But who would have imagined a decade ago that computers would manage customer relationships? In practice, if not by title, all of today's management responsibilities and business functions are unlike those of the past and those of the future. That means CIOs and other IT professionals probably already have the skills to link the customer's needs with the company's resources."
All that needs to be done is to link IT with marketing in a holistic manner instead of across the silo walls. A good article.
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