Martin Kihn - Customer Data Platforms: Use People Data to Transform the Future of Marketing Engagement

1. Chapter 4

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 8
8. Chapter 9
9. Chapter 11

At Procter & Gamble, Georgia-Pacific, and Piedmont Healthcare I experienced how Marketing can become the human-centric machine' that drives growth, with data as its main fuel.' Customer Data Platforms is a must-read guide to the modern approach of optimally building and leveraging a human-centric and data-powered Marketing Machine.

Douwe Bergsma, Chief Marketing Officer, Piedmont Healthcare

Every company needs to deliver experiences that turn consumers into loyal customers and data is at the heart of it. Executives interested in leveraging technology to drive digital transformation will find a wealth of actionable insights in Customer Data Platforms to start their journey putting customers at the center of everything they do.

Doug Hammond, Chairman and CEO, NFP Corp.

Having personal experience running large software companies like Computer Associates, I can personally attest that there is no bigger challenge than getting customer data right. Every time you introduce a new capability, there is a good chance you create another data silo that makes it harder to provide seamless experiences across sales, marketing, and service. Unifying 'people data' such that you can deliver the type of personalization today's customers expect is still one of the biggest challenges in business today, something that I am working on with Ringlead, a data quality and orchestration company. Kihn and OHara make this highly technical problem easily understood by business people, and offer clear and compelling solutions couched in customer stories and anecdotes which bring the challenge and potential solutions to life. Must-reading for any business executive looking to take on the challenge of digital transformation.

Russell Artzt, Co-Founder CA Technologies, Executive Chairman and Head of R&D at RingLead, Inc.

Customers don't care how hard it is. In the best case they merely push through when it's not a connected experience, and in the more likely case they move on to something else. In today's climate, this capability is expected and it is obvious when it fails. Digital transformation has been a hot topic over the past few years, but today this is no longer about if.' We are now at the point where it is about execution. Kihn and O'Hara bring years of experience and learning to catch up to the current state of play and lay out a practical guide through these challenges.

Mike Cunningham, President, CrowdVision (former CIO, Keurig Green Mountain)

MARTIN KIHN

CHRIS O'HARA

Copyright 2021 by Martin Kihn and Christopher B. O'Hara. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Art Sebastian had a problem. The affable, Chicago-born VP of Digital Experience at Casey's convenience stores joined a team on a journey to transform the company into a more modern, contemporary and digital brand one that recognized each guest as an individual with their own preferences and needs.

With retailers in the digital era, what consumers want is more relevance, he said. They don't want marketing that goes to everyone but rather relevant promotions, messages that speak to them as individuals.

The problem? In a word: data. Not a lack of data, but a lack of connection, organization, and accessibility. A frustrating inability to create a customer profile that can be used to deliver a seamless digital experience.

We had made some good progress, said Sebastian, but with the progress, we accumulated more data. We have a website and mobile app that collect purchase behavior. We collected pizza orders in one system and loyalty in another. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to unify these multiple data sets.

Casey's logo is well known across the Midwest and the South, boasting 2,200 locations in 16 states and counting. It has a customer base devoted to its heart-of-the-community convenience stores, which are famous for comfort foods, like the tasty Taco Pizza, and friendly staff that treat you like their neighbor.

Half of our stores are in small towns with a population of 5,000 or fewer, said Sebastian. We really play a central role in those towns. We're the grocer, the restaurant, and the place where people meet. We support the local high schools and nonprofits some of the area's bigger companies don't focus on.

Like many retailers, Casey's aspired to deliver a better digital experience to its guests, one that paired relevant promotions with the soul of the brand. When you look at all the things that people love about Casey's, said Sebastian, it's authentic to be friendly and relatable.