The future of marketing 1
Thank you very much you know I I BM asked me to look back to look forward and it used to be so simple marketing drove people to the door sales close the deal and IT added it up that was it marketing was a one-way street the brand shouting at you marketing was TV than mass and cool nit was keeping the books and run of the reports and kind
of dorky right and then along came the web and it really changed all of it because marketing is now a two-way street and customers are involved and engaged in there talking back and consumers have a new tool in their tool bag in that tool is the mouse and it's changed the way they discover products learn about products shop by get service and rave or complain about products and that was really brought home to
be recently I was at a meeting like this and I was at the cocktail party the night before and a woman came up and said are you that guy who started travelocity.com said yes ma'am she said I want to tell you something about Travelocity you've never heard before and I'm backing up wondering how many martinis she's had what she was going to say and she said Travelocity is the wizard of odds and
I said it is she said yeah you know for years my travel agent told me not to book online I'd make a mistake and I was worried about ruining my vacation and today I made my first booking and it was so easy and I felt just like Dorothy when she pulled back the curtain and discovered there wasn't a wizard there was just a little man there and I could do it all myself
and so many of our customers feel that way they're wired and dangerous they're comfortable and confident and as we heard earlier they expect the best from all of us the best site they ever saw is what they want from you and they're getting smarter right this is the Tom Cruise of mice he's going to take your data and go buy somewhere else these people are multi-channel they communicate 24 x seven any way they want
they don't care about channels we care about channels they care about solutions so they're harder to catch and therefore we need a better mousetrap all right somewhere out there Patrick is the key to increase sales find that key Patrick bring it to me do you ever have a boss like that I did Bob Crandall American Airlines legendary tough guy and I'm looking out the window and the window looked like that I had no
idea what to do so let me kind of take the steam off the window because one thing I learned was that American we combine marketing and IT to create new models and markets so I got to be on the team of 20 that worked in secret on the advantage program the very first mileage and loyalty program and put that out and that was an idea from Tom Plaskett our CMO who had
to work very closely with max hopper our CIO and overseen by Bob who knew both marketing and IT and they went on to create the harvard business case automating your customer the sabre system which really controlled marketing right and our department was actually called marketing automation now when the internet came around it got even harder and even more important to have marketing automation but it's not easy and in fact that problem is still going
on one of you in the survey said our company does not have a belief that the end consumer is worth talking to because we distribute through intermediaries well folks intermediaries are being short-circuited I started my career as a travel agent back then customers would call us and we call the airlines ninety percent of customers book that way and then we invented Travelocity and people got computers and we saw the beginnings of a short circuit
and within a very short period of time eighteen thousand travel agents went out of business your record store your book store your electronics store bankrupt may be out of business right now not all businesses are baying short-circuited some are being rewired whether they like it or not about 10 years ago when i lived in dallas i bought an air conditioner for my house back then what did i do i looked at the yellow
pages i talked to some friends they said go two Johnson he's a good dealer and I went to Johnson he's old train and day night about a train I didn't talk to the manufacturer I could not talk to the manufacturer what would I do today the manufacturer has a website I've got a computer I go to two or three manufacturers site I go to a review site a price comparison site the manufacturer might
give my lead to the dealer the dealer might call me in a whole new relationship that's being rewired customers expect that one to one service I got at Johnson's air conditioning everywhere they are in every channel and knowing the customer as many people have said has gone from knowing their demographic to knowing the customer as an individual and I tried to focus on that when we started travelocity.com because I've worked in big data
my whole career every interaction the travelocity we tried to make driven by data and when I left the company when it was taken private we had a database of over 40 million people and we knew their demographics we knew their addresses we knew everything they purchased more importantly everything that ever searched for which allowed us to highly target our communications but this was hard you know and marketing wasn't very happy and marketing was always complaining
everything took too long the priorities were out of whack and that hasn't changed either one of you said I need something more agile right one of you in the survey so I did a couple of things I separated the paint from the plaster and what I mean by that was weary architected so marketing could make the daily changes so they could do the pricing so they could do the ads and IT focused
on the hard stuff the purchase path the database and I did something else it was maybe kind of crazy but it worked I got tired of the CMO complaining about CRM so I gave it to him I moved it to his department and I gave him the analysts and the programmers and I said you have to serve the whole company I was shocking to him all right but it worked it decreased our time to market it increased experimentation it's shortened the feedback loops and marketing served on the departments and that was good for him because now he's a CEO he have learned how to do marketing.
