The shift from CMO to chief customer officer is both ‘disingenuous and silly’ | Mumbrella360 video
Missed a session during Mumbrella360? Don't panic, as we'll be releasing videos from our most popular sessions during the coming months. In this video, watch Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier explain why hiring a chief customer officer is 'a fast track to homogeneity with your customers'.
During the following video from June’s Mumbrella360 conference, Thinkerbell co-founder Adam Ferrier calls for the end of the chief customer officer, and claims the role is “a fast track to homogeneity with your customers”.
Ferrier tells the audience that “a lot of CMOs are changing their titles to chief customer officer, which feels both disingenuous and silly”.
If we do listen to the consumer, Ferrier explains, 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.”
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 says.
Using the example of Twitter’s recent shift from a 140 to 280 character limit, he explains 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) 8 November 2017
“There’s a bee’s dick difference between your brand and your competitors,” Ferrier warns. “It’s really important to understand what the difference and magnify that, not regress towards the mean.”
By this logic, Instagram should not have copied Snapchat with their highly successful Stories feature?
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