Reengineering marketing

Radical change. 10 to 15 years of market disruption demands new marketing strategy and new organization designs to succeed.

The change required to succeed is bigger than the marketing role, the marketing function, or the marketing profession.

No longer an inside out activity, marketing relevance requires reengineering from the outside in and align people, process, and technology from the inside out.

This is not simply new thinking and new design, but requires radical change, enter:  Reengineering the Corporation, A Manifesto for Business Revolution.

Our world is a digital world. The way we access news and entertainment, connect to each other, and contribute opinion continues to disrupt strategy from product development through customer engagement.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again

People, and first and foremost we, ourselves are people, now control the relationship.  The new control standard comes from our customers who:

• Expect relevant communication,
• Demand transparent information,
• Insist on access that fits preferred times, and
• Want to experience connection on their preferred platform

In the old, model media companies controlled access space, or real estate as access, to customers.  Marketing sought to rent real estate to gain access and vie for attention.

The marketing budget was accountable to both craft the message and rent real estate.  The target market segment was the heart of the business strategy and that led the marketing planning strategy.  Marketing budgets bid for audience segment and segment size.  Media companies brokered access and charged according to Monopoly blocks of real estate value:

• Television
• Radio
• Newspaper
• Magazine
• Telephone
• Mail

Customers severed the business message and took control of marketing channels.  The new digital channels and platforms shift control to the age of the customer and now customers expect communication:

• Relevant to their objective,
• any time they prefer,
• on a device they prefer, and
• from locations they prefer.

Change happened from the outside in and organizations don’t change from the inside out, unless people change.

Reengineering Relationship

Technology allowed the relationship to change and we opted out.  Technology then allowed us to opt in to filter the noise:

• DVR to fast forward avoid commercials
• Satellite and Internet radio to avoid commercials
• Caller ID to screen the phone number and Federal opt-out telemarketing
• Federal junk mail opt-out list
• Custom Internet news and social sharing sites replace full-page ads
• Pop-up blockers on our internet browsers

We, each of us, to include those marketing and sales professionals among us, changed when we adopted direct connection to information and to each other.

Technology enabled a disruption greater than any department or team level at a company can solve.  New conditions demand new business management strategy that includes a total review of people, process, and technology.  Why a 1993 business management strategy book, by Michael Hammer and James Champy, on reengineering?

From its inception, reengineering has been a close partner of information technology. Technology enables the processes that are the essence of reengineering to be redesigned. The two have a symbiotic relationship: Without reengineering, information technology delivers little payoff; without information technology, little reengineering can be done. Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution

There is a technology link to this disruptive change, but the reengineering essence to enable change is the customer.

Imagine two relationships that need reengineering:

1. Imagine a relationship between marketing and sales and you image reengineering the corporation
2. Imagine a relationship with IT (information technology) and the business line and you image reengineering the corporation

People, process, and technology change relies behavior change.  The focus starts with people.

The customer is the organization’s holistic focus

Reengineering involves changes to a different category of process … as a series of activities that delivers value to a customer

The first step … determine the customer’s requirements.

in place of the expanding mass markets of the past, companies today have customers—business customers and individual consumers—who know what they want, what they want to pay for it, and how to get it on the terms they demand. Customers such as these don’t need to deal with companies that don’t understand and appreciate this startling change in the customer-buyer relationship.  Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution

Customers do not see your company silos

[c]oncentrate on the end-to-end business processes that create all real customer value and transcend these boundaries … reengineering is breaking down the walls that separate corporations from each other. Processes do not stop at corporate doorsteps. Product development, planning and forecasting, and a host of other processes are really interenterprise in nature; they entail work by both customer and supplier … allowing information to be shared across corporate boundaries.

Look at reengineering in a holistic way. It includes the process, the IT system that supports it, the organizations that use it, and the culture of your corporation. Each facet is inextricably entwined with the others, and all must be managed within a single project, within a single time frame. If you try to manage only one element at a time, you will fail because they are interdependent.  Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution

New rules require new engagement

Tradition counts for nothing. Reengineering is a new beginning.

Reengineering, as we have seen, seeks breakthroughs, not by enhancing existing processes, but by discarding them and replacing them with entirely new ones.

Reengineering is about inventing new approaches to process structure that bear little or no resemblance to those of previous eras.

The individual tasks within this process are important, but none of them matters one whit to the customer if the overall process doesn’t work—that is, if the process doesn’t deliver the goods.  Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution

Marketing remains accountable to enhance a company and a brand, but now marketing needs to:

• Compete for technology,
• Compete for platform,
• Compete for relationships,
• Compete for user experience,
• Compete to understand analytics

To meet new metrics, new models, and new capabilities marketing reengineering requires a new approach to both external, customer relationships and internal, company relationships.

Marketing can not simply improve to meet these needs, but to transform the company’s people, process, and technology, with an entire strategy to execution process that links:

• Strategy,
• Operating model design,
• Operational model assessment,
• Run/change the business priority setting, and
• Investment planning from a strategic perspective not a functional perspective

We all took part to architect this change and now the entire effort needs to align the organization in an explicit process that brings together formerly disjointed, disconnected, or missing activities that the business must do better.

Reengineering must focus on redesigning a fundamental business process, not on departments or other organizational units. Define a reengineering effort in terms of an organizational unit, and the effort is doomed.  Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution

Revolutions are about change.

Revolutions are not about incremental change, but radical change, that some do not survive.

Think of two relationships that need reengineering:

1. Imagine a relationship between marketing and sales and you image reengineering the corporation
2. Imagine a relationship with IT (information technology) and the business line and you image reengineering the corporation

Reengineering is starting over.

Original 1990 article:  Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate; Harvard Business Review