Ep. 17 | The Future of MarTech with Joe Stanhope
Martech disruption is all around us. Old tools and methods no longer work. Joe Stanhope, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, talks about the future of marketing technology in the Age of the Customer. With marketing a strategic and technical discipline, technology plays an increasing role. In this episode, topics range from the shift in thinking of martech as single applications, advice on how to move from purchasing products piecemeal to establishing a cohesive plan, and how to rethink customer engagement. Learn how to keep pace with customer expectations by building a stack to achieve goals. Joe shares insights on building a roadmap, the dimensions to consider when optimizing your martech stack, and the impact you can achieve.
Podcast Links:
Reimagining The Technology Foundation For Marketing
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, Q1 2018
Read Full Transcript
Allison Hartsoe – 00:03 – This is the Customer Equity Accelerator, a weekly show for marketing executives who need to accelerate customer-centric thinking and digital maturity. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe of Ambition Data. This show features innovative guests who share quick wins on how to improve your bottom line while creating happier, more valuable customers. Ready to accelerate? Let’s go!
Welcome, everyone. Today’s show is about the future of Martech and to help me discuss this topic is Joe Stanhope, vice president, and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Now Joe is an expert in the field of, or really I should say the intersection of marketing and technology, which is such a rich area of information, and I think I have personally single-handedly shared his future of Martech presentation about 100 times. Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe Stanhope – 01:06 – Thank you for inviting me to join. It’s great to be here.
Allison Hartsoe – 01:08 – Thank you. Thank you. Now I will include that link because I love that presentation so much about the future of Martech. It’s not often that we hear people who can see the future or see around corners very well, especially in such a crowded field. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got to this intersection in your career?
Joe Stanhope – 01:32 – Sure. I basically spent my entire working career in the marketing industry in some form of fashion in marketing services. Actually started my career at a college experience. Great companies still out there doing good things in marketing technology in many different capacities and I’ve even been a chief marketing officer and runs marketing departments myself, so I’ve worked a lot of different kinds of LEDs, have a marketing stool and a variety of perspectives, and that’s the kind of broad set of perspective then, but I try to bring me my stuff.
Allison Hartsoe – 02:06 – Do you actually study marketing in college or business or did you come at it from a different angle?
Joe Stanhope – 02:11 – So we did. I did get a Degree in Business Administration with a major in Marketing.
Allison Hartsoe – 02:15 – Nice.
Joe Stanhope – 02:17 – So I’ve been thinking about marketing for a very, very long time
Allison Hartsoe – 02:20 – I’m you sure have, have you sure as well. Tell us a little bit more about what your team does or, or you know, commercially what you specifically do at Forrester since such a big company. I imagine there are lots of specialties.
Joe Stanhope – 02:32 – Sure, yeah, and for anyone who’s not familiar with Forrester, we’re an independent research firm and we provide data advisory and syndicated research to large corporations to help business and technology leaders develop and execute their strategies from customer growth and to build their companies obviously have teams of analysts and supporting staff that cover all different kinds of technologies and capabilities throughout the entire enterprise, but I sit on our business to consumer marketing research team and so I cover enterprise marketing technology as a part of that group and so it’s my job to help our clients understand what their, their marketing technology requirements might be and help them organize and build and plan to develop marketing tech stack that would meet their needs.
Allison Hartsoe – 03:17 – That sounds like a pretty big challenge considering how many tools are in the martech stack right now?
Joe Stanhope – 03:24 – Well, there’s no shortage of options, that’s for sure, and it keeps. All of this is very, very busy. I actually split the marketing technology fields at or with my colleagues in London and so Rusty covers a lot of depersonalization in campaign management and marketing resource management or marketing operations technology, so my role is complementing dot coverage by. I cover the large suites or cloud solutions for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence as an example, and then I also look strategically at kind of the big longer-term trajectory of the marketing technology industry in between the two of us. I will tell you we are extraordinarily busy all the time. There’s a lot going on in our clients are very hungry to learn more about technology and telling them how to use it at the end to make sure they’re using it and leveraging their investments in the best possible way.
Allison Hartsoe – 04:14 – Oh, I can. I can imagine. So let’s start with the classic, you know, why should I care about where B2C Martech is going? You’ve got thousands of tools out there. Isn’t everything accounted for? You know, I have an email budget, I stick an email tool in there. I have a CRM budget. I stick a CRM tool in there. You know, what more is there, why should I care about the future?
Joe Stanhope – 04:35 – Sure. You know, I think this is something that is driven by consumers and brands, customer relationships. Now at the most fundamental level at Forrester, we talk about this idea of the age of the customer, which is really kind of intended to demarcate this new era in the history of the business information age, right? The industrial age, and what it really signifies is this idea that within the last few years, consumers have really taken control of brand relationships. Whereas historically, right, for 100 or more years, brands control the relationships with consumers. Brands decided who they communicated with, what they told their customers, how and when they gave information to their customers. Now that that script is completely flipped over. A lot of that technical idea that all of a sudden a smartphone in their pocket, but a lot of it is cultural as well and that has major impacts across the entire enterprise. Not just marketing corporate strategy.
Allison Hartsoe – 05:35 – Was there a trigger or something that shifted us into the age of the customer?
Joe Stanhope – 05:39 – A lot of people would say it was really the advent of the Internet and personal technology like mobile devices,
Allison Hartsoe – 05:46 – so maybe the identification,
Joe Stanhope – 05:48 – I believe though it’s also a cultural shift, right? That not just the idea that consumers are empowered by these technologies but that they actually have a sense of entitlement and they want to control, and they want, they want exactly when and how they want, right? And when they don’t get that, they will go find it elsewhere. You know, and I think if we all reflect on our personal lives and how we like to deal with brands and how we, in our personal, professional relationships operate today, you realize pretty quickly we have been trained to be very entitled. We are used to Spotify. I can listen to every piece of music ever made. I’m used to being able to google everything. Still be able to watch almost everything on television and movies on demand. And that trickles down and creates expectations in every aspect of the business.
Allison Hartsoe – 06:35 – I see.
Joe Stanhope – 06:36 – Aren’t you going consumer-facing? And so it’s this kind of entitlement that drives that reasons. The far right for what marketing and customer engagement become and that fundamentally depends on technology. Technology becomes part and parcel of marketers roles that it’s become actually very balanced at technical and creative professional. Nobody ever calls for and says; we want to get the technology back. It’s never happened. It’s never going to happen. Right? We can use technology to do our jobs as marketers because that’s the only way to generate these frictionless relationships, to orchestrate and deliver of the kind of engagements that customers want and to even understand or predict, right and anticipates for customers want it is a technical discipline now.
Allison Hartsoe – 07:20 – Got It, got it. So if I care about this area, how does the technology shape up? Yeah, how should I think about it?
Joe Stanhope – 07:26 – Sure. We’re coming out of an age where we did, as you implied earlier by a lot of technology piecemeal to solve specific slices of activity or engagement with a customer. We want an email to a mobile tool. We got a social tool, right? There’s a set of web tools, and that’s happened naturally over time. It wasn’t even something I think that everybody explicitly planned out and it’s because marketing is always this moving target, right? There’s always new ways to engage coming up, right, and even as we speak today, someone is in their basement to come up with the best way to engage, right? The next social network, the next grade device. So marketing is always evolving, always changing, and that is always created the steady march of adding technology and what we find is, although technology has been very successful, it’s become ubiquitous in marketer’s lives now with the expectation from marketers, is that they will get this cohesive, relevant, personalized engagement anywhere, anytime on any device.
Joe Stanhope – 08:25 – Marketers now realize that having this piecemeal approach to technology actually stumps their ability to deliver that cohesive engagement. And so there’s been this kind of renaissance and shifting expectations with the brands that we work with Forrester where they’re starting to think through how do I build a technology staff that helps me bring channels, touch points together over time, understand what my customers need so I can engage with them anywhere they want to.
Allison Hartsoe – 08:49 – Got it. And I think that part of the stack is really interesting because just a couple of weeks ago we had the Adobe summit just before that IBM had their event and you know, you’ve got these mega companies out there who are acquiring the different tools. And I know you might not say this, but I will say this, I will go on record with this. I think what they’re building or Franken stacks, you know, they’re, they’re acquiring different chunks, and then they’re trying to gloss it over it. Like if I were baking a cake and I took six chunks of chocolate cake and then tried to pull it together with icing, it would look like a cake from the outside. But when you cut into it, it’d be a holy bath. I see a lot of these things.
Joe Stanhope – 09:35 – Well, the marketing technology ecosystem is following, I think the standard development right where you go through at some stage a level of consolidation as it gains traction and acceptance. And that’s perfectly normal. And certainly, we have seen what you have these large marketing cloud vendors as they’re commonly called that many times through acquisitions have acquired a wide range of functionality that they can sell by themselves. And of course, they are doing that because they see a market put marketing technology that is abroad and growing their customers are asking for it. There are obvious costs and procurement benefits to working with maybe fewer vendors. And then there is this, you know, outlying marketing benefit, customer engagement benefit. If I can have a set of tools, it’s based on maybe one understanding of the customer, one customer profile, the ability to coordinate across channels that helps marketers get to where they want to go, the marketing technology stacks.
Joe Stanhope – 10:38 – So from a commercial level, from a vendor perspective, as companies that want to grow, many of them are publicly held, right? So they need to keep growing themselves from a customer engagement perspective. All the stars align, right? And kind of supported a theoretical level. This growth of that kind of vendor. And no that’s out there. And certainly, they do have a lot of traction. And a lot of power in the marketplace, but Forrester is also on record as saying that they are fragmented, and the tools are not always as integrated as we might want them to be unnecessary. That as a fact of life when you acquire a lot of different technologies, finding some ticket, gather from a front end Ux or even on my back end platform perspective takes a lot of time and investment. Nobody ever said that this would be easier for even quick. So the promise is there, and that’s actually why forester, we don’t call them clowns or even platforms. We call them enterprise marketing software suites because of they already collective or a collection for functionality that you can acquire from a single vendor.
Allison Hartsoe – 11:39 – You know, and I’m just going to call out because I saw this on your website recently, that there is a new Forrester report out on the enterprise marketing software suite. So if your company has a Forrester license, you can get that pricey report, and if not you can look at the summary. I’ll include a link to that page, but let’s come back to the enterprise marketing vendors are where many companies are today, who are their challengers, who’re coming up behind them to say, hey, we can do it better, faster, stronger.
Joe Stanhope – 12:09 – Well, there was still an established need to have what you could call historically what has been called a best of breed set up vendors even for as broad and as large, as insignificant as these vendors are. They don’t do every set. Right and like we said, that’s really been their fault. It’s because marketing was continuously expanding and evolving and growing, so everyone’s trying to keep up with that, that continuous expansion of the marketing universe and customer engagement universe, and so even if a brand is highly committed to one of the large vendors, and a lot of them are sometimes for a good reason, they still need to fill in certain gaps, right? Maybe in a shorter midterm or because of sophistication needs or industry needs, they have to fill in certain gaps around what that large vendor does, and that has created a continuous need for a specialty in best of breed vendors.
Joe Stanhope – 13:03 – Wrap, wrap around those, those large suites, and that’s why you still have hundreds if not thousands of vendors in this landscape because there’s continued innovation and in need for a diverse kind of compilation that marketing tech stack looks like for a variety of programs.
Allison Hartsoe – 13:20 – So what are examples of those categories where our specialties are popping up?
Joe Stanhope – 13:27 – Well, you still see that one of the best examples is that advertising technology, marketing technology are largely still separate worlds, and a lot of that is because of how they are resourced and how they’re bought and paid for the involvement of agencies on the advertising side. Marketing Technology and technology work with every different data. They have different buyers, different users on the corn into the agency side. We only in the last say 18 months or so, I started seeing some meaningful integration and consolidation between advertising and marketing technology, but largely today there are different technologies, different marketing disciplines. That’s an area where you still see quite a lot of separation.
Allison Hartsoe – 14:05 – I’m going to challenge that because I think the common route between the two of them is the customer and don’t you have some customer data platforms that are coming up that are trying to, in fact, what usually one of their first areas of success is in Ad Tech.
Joe Stanhope – 14:20 – Well, I do think that again, as brands to create more cohesion across customer engagement points and even between the acquisition and customer marketing sides of the house, there is a movement to start bringing that information together, so beverage information across the customer journey and to build better experiences based on that. There was a need for it, and as I said, they’re just starting to come together, but it is fundamentally challenging. I mean you’re talking about significantly different kinds of data. In the ad tech world, you’re really talking about often a cookie-based anonymous third party data where it is in the end, the customer marketing, customer retention world. We’re talking about PII data, first-party data. Rationalizing these different data types is a significant and longstanding challenge that we’re still working through.
Allison Hartsoe – 15:05 – Okay. I buy that. There definitely are two different datasets, but I think one of the bridges that I start to see is in the lookalike modeling, and maybe that’s not as sharp as it should be. Maybe it’s an area ripe for artificial intelligence, but it seems like there are some bridges forming across the two data sets, ideally down at the grain of the customer. Yeah.
Joe Stanhope – 15:28 – Yeah, and the integration points, at least in the early to mid stages of this consolidation are definitely at the data level and finding those points of crossover. Where can customers marketing and e-commerce and acquisition in digital media exchange information create consistency in profiles, share data sets and even customer identity fragments? Oh, that’s definitely, I think how it starts, but it’s gonna take more than that. If we’re honest, it’s going to take organizational challenges, and brands organize differently. They budget differently across advertising and marketing. Today, the way advertising and advertising technology is bought and paid for is fundamentally different than the way marketing technology is procured, so there are still some. Beyond the technology and the data side of the organizational model, the leadership mandate to bring these disciplines together, even pricing aspects are still going to have to work through a level of convergence.
Allison Hartsoe – 16:27 – Yeah, that makes sense. So if I am going to modernize my marketing stack, what would I be looking for? What would I be trying to modernize it for? To do what?
Joe Stanhope – 16:37 – Right. So the way we talk to our clients about is to really start moving away, to pivot away from thinking about marketing technology in terms of applications, because right now, like we were talking about earlier, we think about it in terms of I need to deliver engagement in this channel or I need to create this bit of data and information. Does it tend to be very siloed, right? That’s what we budget for it, how we use it. And that’s sort of how we’ve gotten to this place where we have this kind of big frankly pretty ugly marketing tech stacks is the most play nicely together is because we built it out one piece at a time for one little slice of engagement at that time. And that turns into essentially painting by numbers where you’re buying it category every time, right? You’d almost; you’d go to the store, you’ve got this shopping list, right? I need a DMP, a campaign tool, an email to SMS tool, demand-side platform, and you buy one of each, right? And you think that you’re done. And that clearly hasn’t worked. It hasn’t gotten marketers where they want to be.
Joe Stanhope – 17:34 – So I start by saying, you have to divorce yourself from this idea of I’m shopping for an acronym to fill in a shopping list. When I buy marketing technology, you have to think about cohesively what you want their marketing technology stack to accomplish. How do we engage with our customers? Was kind of insights do we need about our customers? Where are we going to engage with them? And throughout a life cycle, what are the critical moments in that lifecycle where we need to engage, and you build a technology stack to accomplish those things. Then that gets you into a more strategic place where you’re thinking about a completely set of technologies. And so the areas we really tell them to focus on one thing about engagement differently, instead of engaging one channel at a time, think about what I call continuous engagement, where you are basically playing out a life cycle experience over channels, over touchpoints over a longitudinal period of time with a customer or a segment of customers thinks about the speed aspects. Everything’s getting faster. A lot of current marketing systems weren’t designed for that kind of speed.
Joe Stanhope – 18:34 – Think about how quickly right you need to generate insights, how often you’re going to be able to feed data back into your systems, how often you need to be ready to engage with your customers and technically right. Build the right kind of data in data transfer systems, signal processing environments to physically be fast enough to keep up with your customer. Think about changes in the way analytics is going to evolve. Right now we tend to do analysis at a campaign level, and it tends to be kind of rearview mirror looking, looking back as a post-mortem and things that have happened in the past in a world that’s very fast where we are continuously engaging with customers and literally becomes more of a monitoring exercise, so I have to rethink the way attribution let works, and then we have to think again, we’ve emphasized very much in this conversation the aspects of data that really the modes of intersection, right? What kind of data do you need and what kind of identity resolution requirements do you have?
Joe Stanhope – 19:29 – Because identity resolution is really the ultimate expression of bringing this information together, knowing it’s the St Joe’s St Allison across different applications, devices, interactions across different systems. If you can’t know that it’s the same customer and build a cohesive profile of that customer, really nothing else matters. Identity resolution becomes mission critical, so we want our customers to be thinking about these new dimensions of marketing technology in a strategic way, and that distills down into acquiring technologies or filling in the gaps with their current technology stack to help them get to those strategic outcomes.
Allison Hartsoe – 20:06 – Oh, that makes sense. That’s a great framework, and I would go back to what we were talking about with the enterprise marketing systems. If you have all these new dimensions, it seems like it calls into question, do I keep trying to fill in the gaps or wait for my enterprise marketing system to fill in the gaps for me or do I chuck it all and try to build on maybe building my own cloud systems and using lots of API calls or API bridges to make it work the way I think my business runs,
Joe Stanhope – 20:40 – which you get into some optionality there for sure. I’m just to be total; we don’t see a huge amount of interest, um, and in large marketing organizations and building their own marketing technology. Nobody thinks marketers by trade right on the, uh, the commercial side of an enterprise or not in the application development business. Now, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be technical when it, but they don’t understand data, and they’re building some of those systems, but right now, overwhelmingly they anticipate that they will be buying commercial package software. We know her on demand technology, uh, to accomplish those goals. Now that being said, they still have a huge number of options, right? Um, and, and it really becomes this idea that how best to breed you want to be a, it would be a fallacy to say that if I buy one marketing cloud, going to do everything that I need because it was already established, no marketing cloud, no marketing system does everything.
Joe Stanhope – 21:38 – And even working with multiple applications within a single marketing cloud, let’s require some work to integrate them. You always have to think about the data, no matter whose applications you’re buying, you have to think about the users. So there’s a lot of work even to make a single marketing cloud work together. So it becomes a question of do I want to compile and, and do a lot of integration work across applications that have been sourced from multiple vendors? Or do I want to commit to a single vendor and buy as much as I can from them, which may have some efficiencies both commercially and technically possible, but it’s not a get out jail free card. Right? On the integration and management side, there’s everything is more or less best of breed no matter who you buy from.
Allison Hartsoe – 22:18 – Got It, got it. So I like your comment about efficiency and let’s talk a little bit more about the impact, you know, so if I make that move and if I decided to look more at my marketing tech stack from the dimensions that you outlined and think more about how to engage with my customers along the way and how to create better messages, a framework or is there something I should be thinking about in terms of how to evaluate the best options for me?
Joe Stanhope – 22:47 – Well, I always advise clients think about use cases and how they want to apply insights and customer engagement options because again, a lot of times we think about I’m going to buy technology and that’s going to help me fix something. The reality is technology for early fixes. Anything on so, so we have to be always thinking about what kind of customer insights do I need, how do I want to engage my customers? We find solutions to deliver the capability that we need specifically as from that perspective. It really comes into a planning effort. There’s another common error I think where we think about that we’re going to buy a bunch of technology and we’re going to be done to build the marketing tech stack, and you can all go home, right? Where the reality is, and this is true with any technology set, is it’s sort of a living machine, right? Because again, marketing is evolving. Our users are evolving the way we engage with customers; even your own industry be evolving.
Joe Stanhope – 23:46 – So I really tell people to start with, build a roadmap for your marketing technology, plan out, you know, what do we have, what are the use cases and how do we want to use this technology? And you plan out over an appropriate period of time-based on your resources, investment levels, what you currently have and what you need. Build an actual roadmap plan to construct that marketing technology stack over time and that’s actually where I spent a huge amount of time advising Forrester clients are getting in a room and figuring out, you know, what is the next two to three or even longer number of years to compile the marketing technology that we need and not just acquire the technology but to actually get it up and running inside a business. So there are organizational aspects, there are marketing operations and process aspects. There are partnership and agency aspects to using this technology. Really looking at it holistically and planning it out. Very, very intentional.
Allison Hartsoe – 24:39 – Got It. So that is a whole lot of strategy to think through, and I imagine that there’s probably this, let’s call it like a crying need for somebody to say just fix it for me. Just do it for me. Are there any. You’ve already said that no tool or no system does it for you, but is there anything you’re really excited about that’s coming up that seems like it might be, you know, the holy grail for marketers?
Joe Stanhope – 25:06 – I don’t know if there’s a holy grail out there. We have a holy grail. Things are always moving along, so it might not be the holy grail for battery. While we’re certainly very bullish at forest or on artificial intelligence and that is, not to say that it’s completely done and fully baked yet, but the promise of AI as a foundational component to marketing applications is extremely compelling, and I think the brands that start getting educated, certain learning how to apply AI in their businesses today are setting themselves up to adopt a very powerful future states of AI. As that technology develops and you know, it’s also important I think for brands to develop their marketing processes and their analytics and their skillsets to handle these new artificial intelligence based systems. Because again, it’s not just a technology piece. So AI I think has a huge amount of potential and will over the next three, four, five or more years of developing some pretty dramatic ways from right now.
Joe Stanhope – 26:06 – What’s what’s pretty humble beginning. But again, don’t want to ignore it for five years and then try to get on board. It’s much easier to start thinking about AI and adopting the discreet and simplified use cases of AI now so that you can develop your capabilities over time to fully take advantage. That would be extremely powerful. Capabilities are going to be arriving in the next few years around marketing automation, based on content creation, based on AI, so it’s a development process for marketing organizations, answer the technology. We are certainly very interested in the concept of identity resolution, which is something I mentioned earlier and profiles and identity is nothing new in marketing, and we’ve been doing it for 40 years or even longer. Certainly from my whole career in this industry, which has been hugely renewed sense of interest in this because there are so many more touchpoints and channels. The interest in binding together, the acquisition customer marketing side because the digital side and the offline side from a data perspective and a customer experience perspective, so there’s a whole new set of expectations around building profiles and identifying customers, and that’s a very exciting and an emerging industry where there’s a huge amount of potential and enormous amount of interest enforced compliance.
Allison Hartsoe – 27:18 – Yeah. I noticed you didn’t say permissions in that explanation about ID resolution and there are some people out there that think that whole advent of blockchain, and I realize this is an opening of a whole new ball of wax, but you know, if blockchain rolls out, and it’s successful and, and the consumers get hold of it and they say, okay, brand, not only do I expect you to give me great experiences that are relevant to me at the given moment in time that I want them, but I’m also just going to allow you to use my information, my identity resolution when I think it’s relevant for you to have it. Do you think that’s a future that we see?
Joe Stanhope – 27:57 – I certainly hope so. There’s a strong possibility of that happening. I don’t know if it will be based on blockchain per se, but the idea of consumers. These again empowered entitled consumers wanting and taking more control over their own identities that you were certainly in the regulatory environment. A lot of excitement right now around what’s going to happen next month, May 25th around GDPR as an instigator of a lot of talking and change in the industry so you know a lot of this is already in motion through various avenues and we have thought about its forest or a colleague if anyone wants to search a blog or twitter of the team accountable recovers privacy and regulatory matters as well as preference management at Forrester, so she literally spend all day thinking about this concept of personal identity. Lockers were a consumer, and again this is something that could eventually be managed through a blockchain technology, have their own set of identity, right in personal information that they control in their own kind of analogous or metaphorical locker of information, and you basically make that set of information available to brands or applications or firms as you see fit.
Joe Stanhope – 29:13 – Right, and you decide who to share and which information of yours do you want to share. You turned it on; you can turn it off, you can change again. Which information gets shared at what level of granularity for how often. So that’s very, very interesting. Perhaps I could say, look, I’m applying, I’m going to buy a new car, I need to get a new car loan. I go into my locker, and I make my credit report and my personal financial information available to the automobile finance company right this week so that they can check my credit and grant my loan. Right. Or I work with a different kind of team. I work with a retailer, right. And I might make some of my interests, maybe my clothing size information, some of my personal interest available to them, my location available to them, travel interests available to them on an ongoing basis so they can send me maybe personalized, you know, closing every quarter. Right. That I might want to pick like a stitch fix. Right. I didn’t make certain information available, stitch fix to improve their algorithms, and I get better clothes because of that.
Joe Stanhope – 30:13 – Right. Stitch fix knows I’m going on vacation this fall and it’s going to be a camping trip. So maybe they’d suddenly camping related things because I elected to share that information with that. I benefit from that because I got a great set of clothes from them when I need it. Having control over that. It’s a fascinating concept of how we get to scale in that right from a consumer adoption as well as brand adoption level, how we typically do it like with blockchain, those things remain to be seen but as a very strong possibility and a very strong option for inverting the current process which has a number of regulatory and security and control as we are seeing and again many, many, many different dimensions right now and I think markers would embrace that. The resolution and handling the data is it’s fraught with error. It’s always been different. Having high resolution, high quality, complete data has always been hard, and it’s not getting any easier. If consumers share the information they want exactly when they want to, presumably it would be higher quality data.
Joe Stanhope – 31:11 – You have the permissions sorted out. The security issues in many ways wouldn’t be completely absolved, could be vastly improved. Everybody I think can benefit from that kind of situation rather than right now where it’s really kind of a wrong image. The gag was how much information could you pile into these systems and hope that it’s scaled and has high enough quality with.
Allison Hartsoe – 31:36 – I love that concept. I want that future now because I can see how much, how much it reduces the friction in your life, so for example, my son is getting into backpacking and I am just starting to learn to do backpacking and the sheer heavy lifting of trying to figure out all the various pieces of equipment and then the backpack itself is a lot of friction and so you could ask lots of different people but everybody has a different idea, you know, to be able to enable and say I’m in the market and here are some specs about me and the kind of backpacking I plan to do hit me. I’m ready to take a look at certain products that are right for me. That is so much better than trying to sort it out yourself of what’s in stock, what’s not in stock, what’s carried, what’s not carried. I mean, what a zoo. We go through all the time when we want to purchase. I love your passion,
Joe Stanhope – 32:32 – It’s a huge convenience, ramifications for consumers regarding relevance and getting us closer to what I think consumers right and think should be possible, but isn’t always as reasonably possible because of so many reasons, and again, I think for marketers be great. I mean, just think about the reduction in the spoilage to produce reduced waste. You no longer really be marketing or personalizing for people that don’t have the intent to, aren’t interested, are tired of seeing the same thing over and over. Just the raw hit, right? Right. Of Relevance would go up so much and that is what marketers want. Marketers want to be building and marketers, the marketers I deal with are very conscientious, and they want to give their customers amazing experiences when and how they want it. So it’s a win-win. If that kind of capability or environment can come to fruition.
Allison Hartsoe – 33:21 – I love it. I love it. So Joe, if people would like to reach you, what’s the best way that they can get in touch?
Joe Stanhope – 33:28 – Yeah, I would love to. I love meeting new people and getting new ideas and getting feedback on where brands and even technology suppliers are with some of these ideas and capabilities. I’m on Twitter at Joe Stanhope to engage there, and of course, you can email me directly. It’s jstanhope@forrester.com.
Allison Hartsoe – 33:46 – Fantastic. Thanks for providing your information. I, I know not everybody is comfortable providing contact information, so don’t abuse Joe for all of his great insights, but I know I am reaching out to you
Joe Stanhope – 34:00 – I always love this industry a long time and then that gets me up in the morning. It makes me excited is marketing and analytics, you know, always evolving and of course the community around it. It’s always been a great, great group of people. Everyone in this business
Allison Hartsoe – 34:17 – yet. I’m going to attempt to summarize a little bit, but I’m going to ask you to fill in if I’ve missed anything and we took a slightly different format on our podcast. I’m going to break it into two different pieces of the summary we started out with why should I care about the future of Martech? And I think this really comes down to the fact that we’ve entered the age of the customer, as you said, and I ardently believe this as well, and that’s resulted in this kind of everyday Martech disruption around us as well as so you have Martech, disruption of innovations, new tools and customer expectations going higher and higher, but the old tools and the methods don’t really work. And so we’re kind of in this crossfire of trying to figure out where do we sit with the platform or with the tool stack and how do we get to this beautiful future of satisfying the customer. I actually think the only thing that does work in that old paradigm is probably the math which we’ve talked about on other podcasts, the customer lifetime value math, which is a great way to still keep the focus on the customer. Did I capture that about right?
Joe Stanhope – 35:23 – I couldn’t agree more. Its technology is not optional. The need for it is escalating, and it’s time for rethinking customer engagement in the age of the customer. We need to rethink the technology foundation as well and make sure that that’s keeping.
Allison Hartsoe – 35:38 – Okay, good. And then we talked about some of the dimensions that you encourage your clients to think through in the Martech stack, so when you put a roadmap together for where you go, you need to think through things about what do you want it to accomplish. You mentioned use cases and how do you want to engage with people. I think that actually the undercurrent of that, which we didn’t talk about specifically is that marketers need to understand the business and what drives the business at a very deep level or perhaps have partnerships with the CFO or the other aspects of the organization that helped them know that when there are certain types of engagement that they tend to get better customers long term or if people are buying immediately, maybe there are interesting patterns in the recency and frequency of buying behavior that help them think through use cases that drive the business model. Instead of doing that rear view campaign analysis that you mentioned.
Joe Stanhope – 36:37 – That’s right, and marketers have to represent the customer right within their firms. They have to take a multidisciplinary approach, technology with finance, with the product to thinking through and planning thoughtfully how they want to engage with customers, how they want to acquire customers, and marketers have to be strategists, and that’s what’s hard about it. Thinking strategically, marketing, having a seat at the table to make those strategic decisions is harder than just going out and buying the technology, but I will tell you the company that physically sends your emails matters a lot less. Your customer engagement strategy, almost anyone can send your emails, no one else can tell you the best way to engage with your customers, and that’s where marketers need to put their cycle time.
Allison Hartsoe – 37:21 – That’s perfect. A great tidbit right there. Great Nugget. And then finally we talked about the ideal future of empowered customers and how that equals happy, efficient, effective marketers. I think this is a brilliant future, so I love that you shared this with us about the future of Martech and how everybody wins in the long run. That’s just fantastic.
Joe Stanhope – 37:44 – It’s an exciting time, and there’s so much potential to use some of these technologies and to look down the line at some of the technologies that need to be practical in the near-term future, and it’s just, it’s really exciting, and it’s an amazing opportunity for the brands that learned how to leverage those tools as well to create differentiators and advantages their industries.
Allison Hartsoe – 38:04 – Absolutely. All right. Well, everything we discussed today is going to be at ambitiondata.com/podcast, and there were a few call outs that will be linking to. Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. It was wonderful to have you on the show and hear your insights.
Joe Stanhope – 38:20 – Thank you. It was wonderful to be here. Great conversation.
Allison Hartsoe – 38:23 – Remember, when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It’s not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. Thank you for joining today’s show. This is Allison. Just a few things before you head out. Every Friday I put together a short bulleted list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent customer equity signal, not noise, and believe me, there’s a lot of noise out there. I actually call this email the signal things I include could be smart tools. I’ve run across articles, I’ve shared cool statistics or people and companies I think are doing amazing work, building customer equity. If you’d like to receive this nugget of goodness each week, you can sign up at ambitiondata.com, and you’ll get the very next one. I hope you enjoy The Signal. See you next week on the Customer Equity Accelerator.