Should You Have Customer Brand Managers for Your Target Audiences?

As organizations move from product-centric to customer-centric, they often discover a missing core competency. They don’t have an executive with clout who acts as the advocate for each target customer audience (customer segment+role). Most companies have product marketing managers who represent the product line and ensure that the brand message, competitive positioning, and customer experience wrapped around that product are appropriate and consistent. But many organizations don’t realize that they also need a “brand manager for customer experience” for each key customer segment they serve.

Retail financial institutions are one exception to this rule. They often have VPs in charge of High Net Worth customers and/or for customers in different life stages and demographics (young adults, middle-class Hispanics, about-to-retire, parents with young children, etc.). Automotive brand managers are a hybrid of a product marketing manager and a customer segment/audience brand manager. Every car brand is designed to appeal to a particular audience. But these are the happy exceptions. Companies in other industries are beginning to realize they need “customer brand managers.”

In our client work, we’ve found that the companies that take customer-centricity seriously have de facto high-level customer champions for each key customer segment. These executives ensure that the end-to-end customer experience is well thought out and that it connects their brand to the customer’s self-image. In a B2B setting, your target audience may be chief information officers or design engineers or architects. In a consumer setting, it may be trendy 18-to-25 year olds or retirees or single parents. Whichever target audiences are important to your business strategy, that audience deserves an influential advocate who can ensure that they can easily find what they need on your Web site, that the information they encounter speaks their language, that their key scenarios are well-understood and streamlined, and that your firm’s policies don’t get in their way.

Do you have customer segment advocates or customer brand managers? Look around. You may not have a customer brand manager title or role, but if your firm is successful, the chances are that someone with influence is actually playing that role for each of your major target audiences. If not, make that a priority for 2008!

Comments

[Graham Hill]

Patty

My experience is similar, but not the same. Let me explain.

Like you I see quasi-segment managers in place in financial service companies, particularly credit card companies. But they are responsible for creating as many collaboration problems, as the segment management problems they resolve. And the brand managers in automotive are a hybrid between product and segment managers, but not lets fool ourself that the customer carries anything like as much weight as the model-lines. And the collaboration problems are just as endemic in automotive as in financial services.

Segment managers are an end-state of a logical organisational evolution from e.g. a product-centricity, towards a customer centricity. The evolution goes through a series of stages, each one of which is necesary if the next stage is to work.

The stages start with pure product-centricity. This typically evolves through the development of internal networks of colleagues who need to work together to deliver the value proposition. To cross-functional teams that formalise the collaboration of the internal networks. To a customer segment coordinator who takes on formal responsibility for collaboration across different teams. To a matrix organisation with nascent segment teams reporting to both product and customer management. And finally to bona fide segment managers responsible for all aspects of segment experience delivery. The vertical silos of product-centricty have given way to the more connected, more collaborative customer-centric organisation.

The problem with many of the so-caled segment managers in financial services and the brand managers in automotive is that companies have usually just jumped from a product-centric siloed structure to a customer-centric siloed structure, without working through the necessary intermediary stages first. It is the intermediary stages that drive the transformation to customer centricity, not just organisational restructuring.

To be honest, I am not sure that a formal customer segment manager approach is relevant anymore. They too quickly ossify into rigid, inflexible roles that neither serve customers nor the business. In the information-rich business environment we find ourselves in today, dynamic sensing of changes in the market and responding to them rapidly is the key to success.

I still see a role for a customer segment manager, but mostly as the conductor of how the whole organisation orchestrates the end-to-end experience. Not as the designer of how specific touchpoints will be delivered. Supporting the segment manager are a number of customer analysts, delivery staff, delivery partners, even customers themselves, who are responsible for taking the experience framework and mass-customising/personalising it so that it delivers the right value, to the right customer, at the right touchpoint.

Customer segment managers sound like a great idea, but the devil is in the organisational evolution details.

Any further thoughts Patty?

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager