What skills will the great marketer of the future need?

I’m not strictly speaking from a marketing background, so I’d be interested to hear what you marketers think about the following…

First, a few observations:

1. Whilst global brands dominated in the 90s and it was accepted thinking that they would continue to dominate, this has turned out not to be the case. The big brands are pulling away from the centralised, globalised, very mass-market approach and are handing brand management power back to more localised parts of the organisation. In many cases, the big brands are actually creating new, country-specific brands because they are finding it difficult to compete in the local markets.

Take China – neither Coca-Cola nor Procter & Gamble had any brands among the top 10 advertised products last year. Both Procter & Gamble and McDonalds have recently announced measures showing that they are re-focusing on core markets and curbing global expansion. A recent league table of the world’s most valuable brands published in Business Week showed a massive drop in value – around 5% overall – in the value of the big global brands compared to last year. So the message is that people like things closer to home, more relevant to them, their surroundings and their culture.

2. The available means of communicating with customers are getting increasingly personal. From TV to direct mail to e-mail to SMS. This month in Britain the number of text messages sent is likely to top 1 billion. So you can get to customers quicker, more directly and more cost effectively. Great, except that if you get it wrong (like not asking their permission to communicate), customers will punish you equally decisively and speedily. Because they can. So the stakes are higher.

3. Customer Relationship Management and Permission Marketing – two current darlings of the marketing world (rightly so, I happen to think) – preach the imperative of building an ongoing dialogue and relationship with your customers. This has to be built over time and is based on customer-company value exchanges that build trust and win-win benefits for company and customer. These strong customer relationships are a company’s key asset and source of sustainable competitive advantage.

At the same time this longer-term strategic vision needs to balanced with shorter-term revenue and profit targets as well as a multitude of tactical initiatives to learn, mitigate risk, iterate and experiment in the quest for optimising marketing effectiveness. So marketing is a tactical, operational thing and a longer-term vision – a micro-operational environment within a macro framework.

And so it seems that marketing really is faced with the ‘mass personalisation’ challenge. You’ve got to deliver personalised, relevant and timely messages to increasingly fine customer segments but you’ve got to do it on a mass scale. And it’s got to be cheaper than before. Put another way, it’s about delivering higher volumes of business but still maintaining higher margins. Tough.

As marketing becomes more personal, the potential risks and rewards both increase dramatically. Consider average response rates of the following communication channels:

Direct Mail: 3-4 weeks
E-mail: 4 hours (typically around 80% of responses come within 4hrs)
Mobile: 5 minutes (cf. recent Wella and Smash Hits case studies among others)
Face to face: Immediate

Clearly there is a correlation between how personally ‘invasive’ the communication is and the speed of response. The more personally invasive the communication the more timing is important to success (don’t SMS me in the middle of the night...), the more direct active participation from the recipient is important (imagine not replying to someone face to face…), the more personalisation is important, the more location is important and the more important (but harder) it is to have the permission to communicate. If you get things right, the rewards can be very large and come very quickly. If you get them wrong (if anyone ever spams my phone…) they could be catastrophic. Marketing, like society, is speeding up and becoming more ‘wired’ – living life for the moment, living on the edge.

So what skills with the marketer of the future need? As marketing can get so much close to the customer, the marketer will need to be increasingly sentient. Blunt tools such as demographics become increasingly meaningless. Channels of communication absolutely must be managed in an ‘emotionally’ intelligent way to deliver the appropriate overall customer experience. The marketer will need to be finely attuned to the sensitivities of his/her customers. It is the anti-thesis to mass marketing. It is has more to do with psychology, humour, people skills and intuition. The marketer must understand the technology and tools available in order to optimise the marketing mix and there can be no excuse, especially with digital channels, for not producing very scientific results, but there is a set of much softer and less ‘tangible’ skills that will still define the great marketers.

I imagine a spider at the centre of a web. The strands of the web representing the different customer contact channels, each interrelated to the other and each very precisely relaying intelligence to the spider at the centre. A spider that thinks a lot and plans how best to optimise its web but which can still move lighting fast in response to the slightest tremors the strands of its web feed back.

I have seen this impressive degree of finely attuned marketing intelligence and control in reality but only operating across a few communication channels – most often pure plays operating largely online and through direct mail and call centres where it is clearly easier to do (having built from the ground up this way) than integrating multiple existing on and offline channels.

What do people think? Sentience over science? Any multi-channel digital marketing spiders out there?