It is good to listen to the market. It is good to hear the voice of the consumer. But outside-in listening can never work without a connection to the day-to-day processes. Spending literally millions of dollars in buying information that ends up on the desk of the Customer Intelligence department does not make a lot of sense.
So how do you make the connection? How do you feed that valuable information back into the loop? I am guessing that many of you know the Excel spreadsheets that are being send around in your organization. Or have you already moved onto PowerPoint? After the Office generation we are now seeing the Dashboard generation.
Dashboards are a step higher in the maturity ladder. They are repeatable and from the perspective of the information publisher, in this case the CMI department, they solve the need of being able to spread their valuable information in the organization.
However, if we switch positions and look at it from the perspective of the marketer: with a dashboard they can hopefully find the relevant information quicker. Dashboard can offer navigation systems that are far more suitable than can be provided in PowerPoint. But what to do with it? Sure you can get insight into the long-term actions for your portfolio. But there is so much more to marketing.
Marketing is about getting the right message to the consumers. Marketing is about speaking their language, their terminology. Reaching them through the channels they use, with the information that they need. Marketing is about CONTENT. Marketing is about content quality as defined in the 4 C’s. And how do the current marketing dashboards help the marketing professionals with this problem? They do not.
What we need is a dashboard that shows how your message is received, that links those results to the content you produced. That helps you value the content you produce versus the benefits it creates. That gives you insight in the process of when, what, how and where your valuable messages are created and how they are received by the audience: the consumer.
