HVTO: Meet Your Customer – Mr. & Ms. CMO

By Scott Gerschwer

We read a great deal at OutputLinks about the need of businesses to communicate more effectively and efficiently with their customers. While it might seem to some OutputLinks subscribers that this is obvious and need not be stated, there is solid evidence that we need to keep beating that drum.

It’s becoming clear to me that the high volume transaction output industry doesn’t know our customers and therefore can’t communicate with them in any meaningful and valuable way.

Or, as one associate of mine put it when discussing one of our many annual gatherings, it’s the same ten people talking to the same ten people about the same thing they were talking about ten years ago.

Putting the cynicism aside, I’m going to make some assumptions before I continue: HVTO professionals fall into two categories: print service providers---whether in-house or as an outsourcer---and the customers they market to; and the technology vendors who serve this particular segment of the wider print industry. Ultimately, however, the HVTO message---whatever it is---needs to be “heard” by “the customers they market to,” which means either marketers or operations people or IT or the c-suite.

Communication theorists often talk about the “two-step flow” phenomenon, where influencers or gate-keepers filter communication before it reaches the consumer, influencing the message by deleting or adding, coloring or masking, editorializing or propagandizing all along the way. The result is that the end user doesn’t always get the full or true story: the message has been meddled with in some way. That’s not to say that two-step flow is a bad thing; there are so many potential messages out there that some filtering or gate-keeping is necessary. But the gate-keepers do inevitably become message arbitrators and once the straight line from sender to receiver is broken the message changes to some degree.

HVTO professionals---whether they are tech providers or users---have fashioned a message or two (such as transpromo, for one example; or the value of color, for another; or with regard to personalization and VDP, to cite yet a couple of others) that appear to be well-entrenched in the community but have not reached their ultimate destination in a way that has been internalized, assimilated, accepted or acted upon. Clearly, I’m suggesting that a garbling of the message due to the nature of any two-step flow is at fault. And I’ll offer up some evidence.

I attended the Argyle CMO Leadership Forum in NYC on a snowy and very cold January day. I mention the weather because the room was fairly packed with marketing professionals, director level and higher, who came from as far away as Vancouver to attend. The content was of mixed value, with some sessions offering good information and others being blatant commercial messages. Kodak’s Kevin Joyce was on the agenda, which was the real draw for me, as it gave me a chance to see the transpromo message delivered directly to marketers. Unfortunately, Mr. Joyce was a late scratch but his message was delivered—very well, I thought—by David Wigfield, Managing Director, US and Canada, Kodak GCG. Mr. Wigfield talked about transpromo and showed eye-catching examples of the stream output. He showed a video and discussed the value proposition (which would be very familiar to readers of this space). But when it came to the Q &A he fielded no questions.

Marketers, like other business people, are heat-seeking missiles. And what was hot on that cold January day was social networking and search optimization, two initiatives that appear to deliver solid value for the money. Transpromo was not on the radar. Print was dismissed without a second thought.

A speaker from Microsoft Dynamics, a CRM vendor, also found the sledding tough. (Full disclosure: I was the only attendee to ask him a question---a leading one, designed mainly to show the audience that CRM continues to ignore print at its own peril after all these years. His reply---that connecting CRM tools to hard copy print was very difficult and still a work-in-progress---was quick thinking, but probably somewhat disingenuous, as it doesn’t appear to be on the tech vendors radar any more now than it was nine or 10 years ago, when the thought was, why integrate with print/mail when it’s going away? Yet all these years later print is still here, perhaps just hanging on, but viable and still not integrated with CRM-influenced online channels. But this parenthetical aside is going on much too long and, besides, this kid was probably in high school back then so what could he know?).

The bottom line is that marketers aren’t buying into transpromo yet. They may not know what VDP is or how it relates to the printed material they send customers, they don’t appear to be overly anxious to consider the place of print and mail (direct or TP) in the marketing mix, and they have no thoughts about whether they could grow their customer relationships with this very low-tech, not-too-sexy medium. The Message is not reaching the intended target, the Marketer…HVTO knows Operations. HVTO knows IT. Those groups fulfill the needs of the marketers. HVTO doesn’t know marketers.

So, as a public service, here’s an introduction. HVTO, meet your Customer.

The Argyle CMO Leadership Forum featured an on-the-spot electronic survey that revealed that 47% of attendees predicted that they would grow awareness of their brand in the coming year. An even larger percentage (58%) said they will invest in new marketing products. And, while 67% frugally said that they would increase their use of in-house resources, 46% said they planned to continue to work with outside vendors and 11% planned to increase their use of agencies. That’s the good news.

Shortly after the Argyle event, I read a CMO Council report called Giving Customer Voice More Volume, a survey of 480 marketers. While I can’t reproduce the report, I can share some of the more pertinent findings. Not surprisingly, given the state of the economy, the most oft-stated goal is to increase customer engagement and retention, which includes initiatives to improve customer communication (65%); addressing complaints (52%); and enhancing the customer experience (55%). However there is a clear disconnect between what marketers want to do and what they are equipped to do.

For example, CRM systems are rated as deficient by 45% of those surveyed, which is not surprising given that only 15% rate themselves very effective at integrating disparate customer data sources and repositories. About 50% admit to having fair, little, or no knowledge of the customer.

And, as economic constraints force budgetary re-allocations, the first lines to be cut are print (44%) and direct mail (33%) in favor of social media (69%), email (68%), and search (50%).

The CMO Leadership Forum corroborated these results. Tom O'Toole, CMO of Hyatt said that the single best producer of marketing ROI for his company came from search engine marketing initiatives. And, according to Century 21 CMO Bev Thorne, after the firm encouraged social media participation by its agents, search optimized its website and added listings to www.realtor.com, the most popular search engine in the real estate business, the number of leads captured online increased 250 percent from 2007 to 2008, with the cost per lead dropping by over 60%. As a result, Century 21 cancelled all its television advertising in 2009. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to ask her if she reduced direct mail, a very important channel for realtors.

But while web-based initiatives increase marketing effectiveness and efficiency, it says here that they can do even BETTER when combined with print/mail initiatives such as targeted print-on-demand direct mail and Transpromo offerings, perhaps as part of an relationship marketing campaign.

The point I’m trying to make is that HVTO is fiddling while Rome burns. Our message –articulated so beautifully by the Barb Pellows and P.C. McGrews and Roger Gimbels (I don’t wish to leave anybody out but you get the point) is not reaching the true target audience—the people that pay for print.

Here’s my first proposal, which is a small first step and certainly not the only action required: for the past few years, Xplor has partnered with Graphics of the Americas and with On Demand (which in turn partners with AIIM). At the same time, the audience for Xplor has gotten decidedly more IT-oriented. I believe it’s time to partner with the DMA or the CMO Council or other marketing-oriented organizations, so that the message is not lost in a two-step flow and we aren’t speaking to ourselves. In addition, since Gartner hired Pete Basiliere to take the lead in their production print practice, the Print & Imaging Summit has grown in prominence. It may be time to combine the Summit with another CRM event or another marketing-oriented initiative in order to further promote the connections and synergies between digital print and customer-focused technologies.

Most Xplor members can recite the transpromo liturgy chapter and verse. It’s time to leave the House and evangelize the marketing masses. They haven’t heard yet what we have to say but I think they’ll like it.

How do you feel about this column? Respond back at sg@outputlinks.com.