Ep. 51 | 2018 CEA Show Directory

This week in the Accelerator host Allison Hartsoe summarizes the episodes from 2018. Starting with the foundational concepts of CLV and customer centricity, and moving through all the ways companies are executing. From data visualization to strategy to CRM, Allison talks about the wide variety of guests who are benefiting from CLV marketing strategies.     

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This is the customer equity accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom-line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsdale, CEO of ambition data. Each week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go. Welcome everyone. Today’s show is a 2018 show directory. Can you believe it has been a first full year of producing the customer equity accelerator? I cannot. I never quite thought that I would make it through 52 episodes, especially standing at this point last year and just trying to record the very first one. So today I’m gonna just take you through a little bit of what shows we talked about, at what time, what themes there were. Because I think in general it can be kind of hard to find interesting shows.

Maybe you don’t know what to search. Maybe you just don’t know that this show exists and it can be hard to find them in just a long directory of 52 items. So that’s the purpose of this show. We started last year actually on the 29th of December, so almost exactly a year with the very first show that was all about customer equity and that is the whole point of this podcast. So if you have never really listened to the foundation episodes of this podcast, there are six of them, and they’re all about customer equity, how companies move up, the maturity curve, what happens at the different stages. And all of that is just really good stuff from the very beginning. Uh, so oftentimes we refer to certain key concepts along the way in the show. Those are what I call the foundational concepts. Uh, the things such as customer lifetime value, what customer centricity really means, why you can’t take bad customers and make them good customers, why you shouldn’t be focused on high-value customers if you’re trying to grow your business.

Uh, all sorts of key concepts that you’ll hear again and again on the show. So that was episode one through six, and it was, what is customer equity? And then moving into key traits. And then starting in episode seven, we actually had two very long episodes that broke. We broke into two pieces, which was about empowering customer centricity with big data. And I had guest Bob Paige, who’s just a silicon valley legend. Uh, Bob has been through many of the largest silicon valley companies, and he knows his stuff when he’s talking about technology and how to get adoption through. It’s a very popular, fascinating episode. Then we brought on Peter Fader who talked about the four steps to customer centricity. And Pete, if you haven’t listened to this show a lot, Pete actually wrote the book Customer Centricity, which is about finding a strategic advantage by looking at your customer base in different, uh, different ways through different value lenses.

And then we got into some very interesting episodes promoting the customer centricity conference that we typically run every year. Now, I have to tell you at this point, we’ve run the customer centricity conference for two years. And I decided not to run it this year because we were getting so many people that already understood customer centricity and what you could do with it. So I thought it was time to take that concept on the road and so we’ll be taking that first stop will be to e-tail west and I’ll be talking about customer centricity there with our partner Custora, and we’ll go into great depths about what you can do with it. Anyways, last spring we hadn’t yet made that change, so we were talking a lot about the conference, and some of the speakers who are at the conference and really some of the great leaders in customer centricity were on the show and that included Jaime Contreras from eBay who talked about product versus customer centricity.

We had Diane Majors who is the CEO of the customer experience Professionals Association on. Uh, we had Artem Mariychin from Zodiac metrics, which was later on that year acquired by Nike. We had a very interesting episode with Sarah Thompson who talked about the Wharton simulation game. This is the customer centricity simulation game, and Sarah then went on to write the book that came out this fall, which was the customer centricity follow up book called the customer centricity playbook, and she is a heavy contributor to that book right after Sarah is actually our most popular episode, which came from Jose Murillo who’s chief analytics officer at Banorte Bank. He talked about gaining massive value with analytics. He actually had a Harvard business review case study that went along with the show, and it’s a really fabulous example of what happens when everything goes right. One of the things Jose emphasizes is just the sheer interpersonal nature of having everything go right by having everybody work together in order to get really great concepts and ideas through into the organization.

Then we had Dan McCarthy go in and talk about modeling with customer lifetime value, and that was heavily followed by CLV transformation with Zach Anderson from Electronic Arts. Now Zach was one of the primary case studies in the customer centricity playbook that I just mentioned. Uh, this is a very interesting episode as well. We then moved on to Joe, Joe Stanhope and Neil Hoyne and Anthony Choe all speakers at the conference. Joe talked about the future of Martech, Neil talked about attribution modeling, and CLV and Anthony talked about private equities perspective on customer lifetime value. And then we had Ash Dhupar and Bob McKinney and Joe Megibow, um, Ash talked about AI using concepts of AI and machine learning with CLV, particularly around the idea of reducing costs in a very smart way for publishers clearing house. Bob talked about arming the front lines with CLV data. And Jamaica Bell had a very interesting perspective about where academics meet reality.

So there’s a lot of concepts about customer lifetime value, but he ran into eight different definitions of the customer when he tried to apply it. So he talks a lot about those real-time conflicts and how you get through them. And then I did my very first recap episode, uh, right after that, which was about the customer centricity conference. So up until that point, up until May, the end of May, we had just a variety of guests on all talking about customer centricity, the proper definition, the proper use of it, and I was very particular about not letting anyone on the show who really didn’t understand what customer centricity and customer lifetime value was. And then we started to branch out a little bit after that. So I picked up some very interesting authors along the way. The first one was Brian Eisenberg who wrote this fantastic book Be Like Amazon: Even a Lemonade Stand Can Do It.

And it was all really good concepts about customer centricity but almost told in a fable format, actually, it was told in a fable format, and Brian’s book is one of those books that you can read on a plane flight, and it just feels like you got so many good nuggets out of it. Uh, fantastic story with some really great learnings and insights. And then after Brian, we talked to Piggy Winton who ran an association and actually applied the CLV methodologies and concepts. And that actually kind of, actually kind of blew my mind because I can see retailers picking up customer centricity pretty easily, but out of a membership association doing it and have someone at the C-levels really understand it well was a surprise. Right after that, we had Laura Boden from Bain, and she talked about some fascinating firsthand research they conducted about market leaders and what market leaders do that separate themselves from the rest of the pack.

And of course Bain is the home of the NPS (Net Promoter Score), and one of the things that they were finding was wasn’t just the application of net promoter score, but it was the union of technology, the focus on customer lifetime value, the precision that was driving these companies forward. She shared a research paper that you could get on the show by contacting her or by going to a particular address, and that’s definitely worth looking at. Right after Laura, we started to look a little bit at questioning some of the ideas that came from the conference, and June Dershewitz joined me on the show. June is over at twitch now, and she was pushing on the idea of customer centricity versus product centricity. So earlier in the year, Jaime Contreras at eBay had been echoing this concept that companies are either product centric or customer-centric and what it’s like to be inside them and how they are different and when we were at the event, June said, no, you really can push some of these concepts into the product managers and here’s how I would do it, and so the episode with June was really building on that idea.

It’s, It’s a fantastic episode that pushes what we oftentimes take as assumptions, it’s not gospel, you have to push on these ideas in order to make sure that they hold water under all sorts of different ideas and hers is an episode where we really pushed the boundaries a little bit. Right after that, I ran another event summary of the chief analytics officer conference that I actually attended earlier in the year. That episode summarizes people who were going to the chief analytics officer conference, the state of what their thinking was and a number of really good key takeaways from that conference. So another fantastic episode worth listening to, that one ran in July, uh, July fifth, called the CAO event summary. Then we talked about finding the customers state of mind by looking at testing with Brooks Bell and whether customer centricity was really right for your company with Jeff Gardner from staples.

And then we talked a little bit about the methodology behind the CEA podcast and then we did something interesting. So this was the end of July, and I started to think, well, I like the idea of taking different themes. And themes are heavily prompted by different ideas and things that come up in client conversations and in casual conversations. So the first set of themes was all about visualization, and I actually put a post out of this time just to see what I would get back about data disasters. I said to my network or like, could you tell me if you’ve had a data disaster? And I, I got a number of people responding back, some that were really good and turned into episodes. So the first one, not exactly a data disaster, but an expert in the space is Leah Pika, and she talked about what good looks like in data visualization and Leah is just the bomb.

She runs a podcast called beyond measure, and she has some very crisp and clear ideas about how to get the best out of your visualizations. But after Leah, we talked to Alberto Cairo, and he talked about kind of the way data visualization can mislead you. He has a book out and some fantastic stories a lot in the political space that show how data visualizations can be very misleading and why we as people with analytical backgrounds should be part of the vanguard in one, preventing that kind of misleading from data from going out and two, a part of the vanguard of requesting or pushing or questioning these ideas when they do get out in the press, so they do get out in the media. And that was a very interesting perspective, that was a very fascinating episode that we just hadn’t heard before. After that, we had Felix Schildorfer and Goras Khan who both shared different ideas about how data visualization disasters can be rescued from implementation nightmares or how data can lead to really powerful storytelling through the use of fables and analogies, uh, both really great guests.

Felix’s is at First Retail, and Goras is at Microsoft. I gave a quick summary of those episodes, and you’ll see that pattern going forward we’re all take a theme, and then I’ll summarize it for those folks who might’ve missed it or just want the crib notes of the particular episodes. After that we stepped into a whole section on strategy, and it was September, and I always think January and September for some reason seemed to be good times to reassess and think about strategy, so we started with an episode from Custora about a cool technology of which Custora is, but also just a raft of case studies of how retailers we’re using customer lifetime value to get better results and improve the goodness of their customer base, make more strategic decisions, weigh those decisions at a, with a different metric using customer lifetime value as opposed to just, you know, the highest paid person’s opinion.

Right after that, we talked to Michael Schrage who is at MIT, and he’s written a number of books. Uh, you know, he is, he has so many interesting things to say, and we just picked up on one concept which was, who do you want your customers to become? So like Bryan Eisenberg kind of takes that book and pops your thinking a little bit. Michael Schrage does the same thing, and he takes the concept of what business are you in and, and pops that idea a little bit to make it who do you want your customers to become? And I remember this great example from our conversation which was about Mcdonald’s, you know, Mcdonald’s and focusing on short-term gain, wanted their customers to supersize it, but didn’t think through the second and third order operations, which are, well then what does that ask your customers to become? And is that a good thing?

So, uh, just a fascinating episode with Michael, right after that, another very popular episode with Judy Antipas over at electronic arts, and she talks all about customer-centric research, so basically once you get the cuts of different customers, and you start to get the values, then you have to dig into who they are and what really motivates them and that’s what Judy talked about. I did a quick strategy summary before moving into a new episode on the intersection of customer experience and CLV, which talks a little bit about personas and then make historic conference summary Right after that. Then we took a final turn towards the end of the year, you know, we’re coming up into the big retail season, so the end of October and all through November through the end of the year is all just retail sales. And so from that point forward until, until this episode basically, we did a number of retail interviews and the retail interview started out with creating quality customers with Kate Fernandez at Winky Lux.

And then we moved into the CRM discussion against CLV with Phil Irvine from the Bouqs, which was really about activating CLV strategies. And we also put in an episode with Gary Angel from digital mortar, and he talked a lot about the offline measurements and how online measurements are creeping into the offline world and how we can use some of the same strategies and techniques to understand how people are operating in the real world. He gave a great example about, um, people waiting in line for example. We don’t oftentimes think about that, but you know, in the, in the online world we’re always measuring the flow to conversion. But in the offline world, it’s a little bit foreign to measure how many people are waiting in line. But it’s actually pretty much the same thing. People aren’t willing to wait forever in order to get to the cash register.

So I thought that was a really interesting example of the two worlds coming together. Then we had professor Peter Fader back on again, and he just took black Friday to task while also promoting the new book, the customer centricity playbook. And that was again a very popular episode about why Black Friday is sometimes not the best strategy for retailers and what they might be doing instead. We followed up that show with an episode from Ed Cleven who has a lot of experience in retail, and he gave us a lot of insights about old retail versus new, how things used to operate and why are things moving so differently now. A context that I actually didn’t know about, why couldn’t you just do direct to consumer 10, 20 years ago, and he provides that grounding and also gives us a little bit of clue about why it is hard for older retailers to move as fast as the brand new DDC retailers.

I did a quick retail summary, and then there was a quick bonus episode with Jill Manoff who is the editor of Glossy magazine, and she gave us couple more examples about a retailers particularly luxury retailers and fashion retailers who just seem to be getting the right traction in the new digital framing. So these were examples of old retailers who had successfully made the switch as well as a few new retailers who were just taking off. And then finally, this episode, the 2018 show directory. And that is basically a recap of all of the 2018 shows I am so grateful to all of the guests and people who have agreed to be on the show who have shared their ideas and thoughts, some people who were a little shy to do so and some people who were just so in love with customer centricity and CLV ideas that they couldn’t wait to get on.

So thank you to everyone who joined the podcast this year and helped make us a very successful show. We are number five on the C suite network and starting from zero this year, that’s a heck of an achievement, and I certainly would like to see us get even higher on that list, maybe even double next year as we move into a predictions for 2019, maybe a few more people who are the actual customers who are benefiting or suffering from these strategies. Got Some really great ideas planned for next year and I hope you stay tuned to enjoy them. Remember this whole process, it is not magic. It is just a very specific process that you can follow to get results. Thanks everyone. See you next year. Thank you for joining today’s show. This is your host, Alison Hartsdale, and I have two gifts for you. First, I’ve written a guide for the customer-centric CMO, which contains some of the best ideas from this podcast, and you can receive it right now.

Simply text ambitiondata, one word to 31996, and after you get that white paper, you’ll have the option for the second gift, which is to receive the signal. Once a month. I put together a 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. Things I include could be smart tools I’ve run across articles, I’ve shared cool statistics or people and companies I think are making amazing progress as they build customer equity. I hope you enjoy the CMO guide and the signal. See you next week on the customer equity accelerator.