What Makes a Great CMO?

The best Chief Marketing Officers know their market, know their offerings, and know how to connect the two…very simple. CMOs understand who they are trying to reach, what they are offering them and why it matters.
Understanding WHAT and WHY requires a strategic mind and makes a great marketing leader—and the need for strategy hasn’t changed.
What has changed (so much!) is HOW we reach our audience, and WHERE.

How Grocers Should be Using Data

Groceries are able to use loyalty cards to collect tremendous volumes of data about the behavior of their most loyal customers. They also have regular face-to-face access to their customers and could survey or interview them on any visit, with the right systems. And yet none of them are really thinking creatively about building strong ongoing relationships. Very little is happening in the way of segmentation and custom programming. I am baffled about why they are so slow to create community.

I recently got a question about configuration vs customization. In The Membership Economy, I point out that ownership is about customization, but membership is about configuration. In software, customization requires professional services to do, and can't be...