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Skip to main content. When you think about it, this is a lot like the dynamics of platforms in the market at large. The centralized platform of the iPhone enabled a decentralized explosion of millions of specialized apps. Increasing consolidation of centralized martech platforms is actually facilitating greater diversification of specialist and vertical solutions within their third-party ecoystems. Platform Revolution is also a terrific book on the subject that you can adapt through the lens of internal platforms too.
We want to leverage technology to automate as much as we can — because it provides greater efficiency that can be beneficial to both us and our customers. But the more machines handle on our behalf, the more we can lose touch with the humans on the other side of those machine-managed interactions. A manual process of sending an email, from one human to another, forces some modicum of thought about the recipient in the mind of the sender.
An automated email nurturing algorithm that can fire off dozens of messages to thousands of recipients without any direct human decision-making at all has no such inherent empathy. The answer is not to avoid or drive out automation. Good automation can help customers and, interally, employees get what they want or need faster. But marketing technology and operations leaders must consciously work to continually provide human checks and balances to automation.
People on the edge of the organization, those who are closest to customers and front-line delivery of your brand promise. This is where the two axes of the grid start to come together: decentralization can support better humanization. An error may have been made by the cartographer. Or the landscape may have simply changed. Rivers dry up or change course.
Paths are altered or abandoned. This goes for you drivers blindly trusting your GPS too. We can adapt this wisdom to marketing technology and operations. Those properties may have been misrecorded or changed over time. This means empowering decentralized staff on the edge of the organization — those closest to the customer — to apply empathy, intuition, and common sense in detecting and resolving customer problems or unaddressed needs. Marketing empowerment should be one of marketing operations key objectives to help front-line marketers and customer-facing staff use good judgment in fixing problems and avoiding inadverently human-unfriendly interactions.
Processes that are inefficient for both the company and customers are generally crappy and should be improved. Processes that are efficient for both the company and customers are generally awesome — but should have checks and balances to make sure they remain so.
Yet a process that is infficient for the company but efficient for the customer may be worth it, if the experience is good for the customer and the economics work for the company. But those moments of making things easy for the customer, at some expense to the company, can deliver powerful ROI over time through customer loyalty and word-of-mouth business.
Be careful of overly optimizing activities in this quadrant. The dangerous quandrant is processes that are optimized to be highly efficient for the company, yet are inefficient or unpleasant for customers. Because so many projects to increase efficiency are inward-facing, measured by internal efficiency metrics, it can be easy to slip into this quadrant without even realizing the negative experience impact on customers.
In theory, they can help customers get answers immediately, on their own terms, at very little cost to the company. But if these options become mandatory — the only channel for a customer to resolve an issue — and they fail to handle all cases well, they can backfire on customer satisfaction.
In the northwest quadrant of centralize and automate we want to standardize common tools and data and optimize global processes. In the northeast quadrant of decentralize and automate , we seek to empower smaller teams to experiment locally, optimize workflows to thier needs, and leverage our centralized platforms and infrastructure to innovate quickly and cheaply.
But content experience works only if you treat it with respect and take the time to understand its nuances. When you do, you'll be on a fast track to big results.
Two tweaks I think are helpful. Marketing technology and operations have become a pillar capability of the modern marketing organization. Leaders of this function sit between two layers of marketing: high-level marketing strategy and vision above, and on-the-ground marketing and customer experience delivery below. Any gaps on your grid are weak points to be strengthened. In fact, this gets right to the heart of why marketing technology and operations leadership is challenging: we are being asked to balance powerful, opposing forces — and simultaneously be successful on both ends of the spectrum.
Better centralization and better decentralization. More automated and more humanized. Organizations have been wrestling with this trade-off for ages: more power and control at the center of the organization e.
Leaders on the edge push the boundaries to achieve their goals on the ground — until such decentralization starts to threaten the unity or overall efficiency of the whole. Then the center pulls more control back in. Until the edge chafes at that yoke and creatively finds new ways around those centralized constraints that they find too restrictive, so they can get stuff done. We want both. We want the efficiency and brand cohesion of centralization — it gives us scale. Yet we also want the fast adaptability and creative experimentation of decentralization — it gives us agility.
But if this is a trade-off, a balancing act between centralization and decentralization, can you improve both simultaneously? That seems like a paradox. Marketing technology, at its best, breaks this tyranny-of-or paradox. Here are a few examples:. A centralized CMS provides brand-standard templates, with established guardrails that prevent content creators from accidentally publishing bad or broken HTML.
Yet it empowers a much wider set of individuals on the edge of the organization to quickly and safely create campaign landing pages and blog posts without being bogged down by a backlogged central production unit. Customer data platforms CDPs , all the rage these days, provide a centralized way of pulling in data from across the organization and rationalizing it with a standardized customer identity. You can analyze and act on this data independent of all the different source applications that generate it.
As a result, although they centralize this disparate data, the open architectures of CDPs simultaneously make it easier to support more data sources that are spread across the organization. So you can gain the agility of firing up new ones on the edge of the organization as needed, tailoring them to the local context in which they are being applied, without sacrificing the cohesive scale of centralized data capabilities. A simpler example is with something like Google Sheets.
By standardizing on a common tool for spreadsheets — an act of centralization — it becomes easier for anyone throughout the organization to create models, share them, collaborate with others, etc. These are network effects of centralization that give increasing benefits to decetranlized teams and individuals. One of the more advanced examples is a new category of software known as application-platform-as-a-service aPaaS solutions.
These low-code and no-code platforms empower regular users — i. All of these examples create more scalable and efficient centralized capabilities while — at the exact same time — empowering decentralized teams with greater functionality they can wield in creative, agile ways.
When you think about it, this is a lot like the dynamics of platforms in the market at large. The centralized platform of the iPhone enabled a decentralized explosion of millions of specialized apps.
Increasing consolidation of centralized martech platforms is actually facilitating greater diversification of specialist and vertical solutions within their third-party ecoystems. Platform Revolution is also a terrific book on the subject that you can adapt through the lens of internal platforms too. We want to leverage technology to automate as much as we can — because it provides greater efficiency that can be beneficial to both us and our customers. But the more machines handle on our behalf, the more we can lose touch with the humans on the other side of those machine-managed interactions.
A manual process of sending an email, from one human to another, forces some modicum of thought about the recipient in the mind of the sender. An automated email nurturing algorithm that can fire off dozens of messages to thousands of recipients without any direct human decision-making at all has no such inherent empathy.
The answer is not to avoid or drive out automation. Good automation can help customers and, interally, employees get what they want or need faster. But marketing technology and operations leaders must consciously work to continually provide human checks and balances to automation. People on the edge of the organization, those who are closest to customers and front-line delivery of your brand promise.
This is where the two axes of the grid start to come together: decentralization can support better humanization. An error may have been made by the cartographer. Or the landscape may have simply changed. Rivers dry up or change course. Paths are altered or abandoned. This goes for you drivers blindly trusting your GPS too. We can adapt this wisdom to marketing technology and operations.
Those properties may have been misrecorded or changed over time.
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