Content or data -- the marketing ground shifts

For Mary's recent interview with Franco Folini for Business Association Italy America,
click the photo of the bridge.
 

Content or data -- the marketing ground shifts.  

The proliferation of customer information has been coming head-to-head with the ability of any company to become a publisher, not just a producer, of information.  In some corners, this is a marketing conversation.  In others, it's a battle.  Maybe even a war.

It falls to marketers to balance branding with selling:  the need to define and burnish the corporate brand and the need to sell products to customers who have access to information the company cannot always control.  Content -- product information, points of competitive differentiation, customer experience -- must be compelling and presented in ways all company stakeholders can use it.  It's tempting to go to the charts, where customer behavior can be captured and analyzed in infinite ways -- so that everything about a company's products and services can be designed on point with every metric.

So far so good.  Except when one priority or the other consumes company leadership -- leaving the realm of passion to enter that of obsession.  Data can do that to you.  So can unending editing and design cycles.  

Geoff Galat helps to keep the topic sane by writing here, for Econsultancy, about the ways to focus data on the elements of customer experience that can help to sustain differentiation.  Bruno Aziza breaks it down to a choice between defining marketing by product or by sales, which may seem to be an oversimplification but features some important observations.

The upside of shorter customer attention spans is that a company has more time than ever to tell its story in ways that invite a purchase.  The company just has to pay attention and be able to move in moments, not days.  Fortified with good analytics, a solid sense of itself and a drive to distinguish its brand from all others, a company can win hearts and wallets.  It just takes good marketing.  Which always means finding the best people for branding and analyzing, putting things out there, and being comfortable both leading and following the conversation.