CMOs Still Paying Lip Service To Customer Obsession
Marketers pay lip service to putting the customer at the center of everything they do, but in practice, many roadblocks still stand in the way of making customer obsession a reality.
In a new Forrester/ANA survey of 61 marketing leaders, 87% agree that adopting a customer-life-cycle-based approach is better than the sales and marketing funnel for representing a customer-obsessed point of view, yet 70% of respondents are still aspiring to adopt this model.
Why? Seventy percent of those surveyed say that applying the customer life cycle in practice is a challenge because it requires them to reorganize their marketing organization around the customer, rather than their product, brand, or marketing silos. A further 53% say they face challenges around adopting the customer life cycle because it requires a robust technology infrastructure to manage the complexity of customer engagement.