The Rise of the Platform Marketer

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Copyright © 2015 by Merkle, Inc. All rights reserved.

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In 25 years leading a growing, evolving customer relationship marketing company, I have witnessed a number of major industry shifts, propelled by advancements in technology, increased access to data, and improvements in analytic techniques. The digitization of just about everything in the lives of consumers has brought about the greatest shift of all – the ability for marketers to customize the brand experience to the individual customer. Through personalized interactions that take place via online and offline media and channels, across multiple screens and platforms, throughout the customer lifecycle, today's marketer can truly optimize the value of the customer portfolio. The opportunity of addressability at scale far surpasses those of eras past.

My colleagues, Craig Dempster and John Lee, were among the forward-thinking leaders who recognized this opportunity early on. Together, we spent the first few years of this decade developing a customer relationship marketing (CRM) approach we call Connected CRM (cCRM)®, which has proven itself in activating customer-centric strategies for Merkle's Fortune 1000 clients.

My 2014 book, Connected CRM: Implementing a Data-Driven, Customer-Centric Business Strategy, outlined a highly structured organizational framework for building customer strategy as a business strategy. The concept of the Platform Marketer was first introduced in that book as the persona that harnesses a new set of skills necessary to operate within the cCRM framework. And in the year since it was written, Craig and John have been closely involved with clients who are establishing and executing cCRM strategies.

With that experience, we have expanded our thinking. We have cultivated a deeper understanding of the addressable audience platforms and further honed the Platform Marketer skills, whose influence and complexity we didn't fully realize when I wrote cCRM.

As the market's movement toward digital accelerates, so does the movement of marketing spend, with brands investing in new technologies that enable addressability in all their customer interactions. These growing and constantly fragmenting digital audience platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are the new frontier of marketing. They open countless avenues for creating relevant engagements with consumers. The opportunity is so vast and multifaceted, we've come to realize that marketers must begin to retool themselves, at the most foundational level, in order to master the rapidly proliferating digital platform opportunity.