Chief customer officers are a fast track to homogeneity, says Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier
Thinkerbell co-founder Adam Ferrier has called for the end of the chief customer officer, claiming that the role is “a fast track to homogeneity with your customers”.
Speaking at his session at Mumbrella360, Ferrier told the audience that “a lot of CMOs are changing their titles to chief customer officer, which feels both disingenuous and silly”.
Ferrier on stage at Mumbrella360
If we do listen to the consumer, Ferrier explained, we start to create a seamless, frictionless customer experience. While this might seem a good thing on the face of it, it actually creates homogenous brands.
“If we listen to the consumer, we’ll make things super easy, we’ll make it so they don’t have to think about the experience at all – come in, get out, and go about their day again.”
He pointed to the front pages of Coles and Woolworths’ online stores, both of which promise an easy, seamless user experience. Or as Ferrier put it: “Get in, get out, don’t worry about our brand.”
This idea of a “Teflon brand” – one which doesn’t stick – is the very opposite of what we want to do if we want to create brands, he said.
“The role of a brand is to be in your face at the time you need that product or service.”
Ferrier believes customer experience and customer journey experts are to blame for this shift away from brand and towards consumer.
“You try to get insights about what the customer wants, and you try to follow their customer journey, and then you try to deliver on their needs,” he said.
“On the face of it, it seems like a good idea, but the consumer doesn’t need you. They don’t need any of your brands. Every single one of your brands is competing with three, four, five, six, 10 other brands in your category. What they want is your category.”
According to Ferrier, the trigger to buy something is not at a brand level, it’s at a category level.
“The consumer journey is often at a category level, and not a brand level, and so the insights you often get and deliver on are normally category generic, and helping you become more and more, theoretically, like the category,” he said.
Using the example of Twitter’s recent shift from a 140 to 280 character limit, he explained how the implementation of a better customer experience made the Twitter brand more generic by taking away its unique selling point.
Twitter’s destroyed its USP. The whole point, for me, was how inventive people could be within that concise framework. #Twitter280characters
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 8, 2017
“There’s a bee’s dick difference between your brand and your competitors,” Ferrier warned. “It’s really important to understand what the difference and magnify that, not regress towards the mean.”
The audience were told to replace customer experience with brand intelligence, which is “being able to understand and prioritise what your brand delivers, above everything else.”
Ferrier also suggested brands “try not to have a marketing department”.
“If you have a marketing department internally, then you believe marketing is the job of one person or one little team within the organisation, as opposed to the whole entire business being marketing.
“I have a friend who’s an investor and he won’t invest in a business that has a marketing department, because if they have a marketing department they just don’t get that the whole thing is marketing.”
No marketing. No ad agency. No Tinkerbell.
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I don’t believe anybody actually wants to THINK about their consumer experience.
The best chief customer officers will indeed deliver frictionless experiences where we can get in and get out and as a result win our dollars. Not every brand in every category will get this right so the assumption that a job title will regress every brand with a category to the mean is confusing.
While average chief customer officers might operate close to the mean that is no different to average CMOs or average marketing directors doing a category job.
The CCO title forces customer centric thinking that brings multiple disciplines together within the brand and that should help elevate marketers and their colleagues in adjacent disciplines to the understanding that while product, service and brand is important and experience plays a critical role, it is the addressable audience that demands more attention.
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He’s saying everything is marketing not nothing is marketing. If everything is marketing that means loads more work for agencies.
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There’s a great point in here in that, if a brand’s customers are very similar to its competitors, a completely consumer centric approach will result in every brand in a category looking very much the same, which as Adam says takes away any meaning the brand has. I think that’s a pretty good argument for marketing being marketing, rather than focusing solely on consumers.
At the same time, I feel like Ferrier is using UX as a scapegoat. UX for ecommerce or easy lead gen comes after the fact. By the time you get to shopping on Woolworths or Coles website the brand has already done it’s job of enticing you. Or say it’s USyd, once you get to the point of enrolling in a short course the brand has done it’s job of getting you there. It is then about ease of purchase. You then need to make purchase as easy and simple as possible to ensure the brand’s hard work isn’t wasted. If you make people think about the experience of buying groceries they’re not going to buy them. They just want to get it done.
In short, being completely consumer centric won’t make you distinctive or differentiate you, so don’t make yourself all about the consumer. However, good UX is needed to ensure you convert those brought in by the brand and to make sure a strong brand isn’t wasted.
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So what is the alternative? Pissing your customers off by making your brand really difficult to engage with? I don’t think so…
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This is somewhat contradictory to the advisory papers and research PwC publish to clients. As an example https://www.pwc.com.au/consulting/assets/changing-the-game-report.pdf
I don’t understand why PwC allows an associated entity to openly contradict the consultancies own position. Or are we to assume that PwC doesn’t stand behind what its partners say or publish?
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Exactly.
I don’t know what is so controversial or negative about creating a commercial culture in which customer needs have a high importance.
I do wish though that the trend for CCOs and CX type skillsets was actually translating to tangible things.
I still have the exact same difficulty talking to someone in my utility company, getting technical support, getting rewarded for my long term loyalty or online portals having bugs as I did five years ago.
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What I take from this is people don’t always know what people need, and we need to lead the conversation as much as listen.
If we only focus on user experience, not brand experience, brands become like every other brand. Just category experiences. Which is boring.
It’s like when cars all started getting aerodynamic in the 90s. Let’s hear it for clean lines, everyone said. Suddenly a Commodore looked like a BMW. It was boring. No distinctive qualities. Just look at VW Golf Mark 2 vs Mark 4. Got boring. Now look at Mark 7. Suddenly those distinctive lines are back. Probably less aerodynamic, but better branding. They learned.
Advertising needs to be more car.
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IKEA do just that.
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Soccer teams should try not to have a goalie, because if you do then you believe not getting scored on is the business of one person as opposed to the whole entire team trying to not get scored on.
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Ok. No marketing Dept. No agency. Fixed it for you.
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@sam I think you’ve stumbelled into a very good thought.
Agencies set up to just deal with briefs from a marketing communications stand point may be limited in their appeal for businesses that really get that everything they do is marketing.
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Fairly sure Ferrier wrote a book that recommends “eliminating complexity”
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IKEA have made a living from it.
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Brilliant analogy, mate! Spot on!
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Luring customers is a marketing responsibility; fascilitating a painless, seamless shopping experience is an all-hands responsibility!
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I don’t get the fuss – he’s just trying to be interesting via provocation. Why worry what he says. If you disagree, ignore it. If you agree, then feel good someone else has your POV. Personally, I’m sure the reality lies somewhere in the middle.
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