Mary

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Written on the wall at StartupHouse in San Francisco

Google: "These micro-moments when people act on a need with intent, immediacy, and within a particular context are rich opportunities for brands to engage."

I'm excited and pleased to announce my partnership with ReBoot, which is powering the return of experienced women to the workforce. From Silicon Valley. For beyond.

Customer-centered branding Embrace tech, tell the value story

Successful businesses have always paid attention to customers -- listened to them, catered to them, honored them. Yet with technology enriching marketing, there are new considerations and opportunities to up the game.

Technology has altered marketing in two ways. We're comfortable with the first: the ability to reach our markets in the moment, with accuracy and simultaneously across channels. The true game-changer, however, is the analytics that run multilaterally among customers, stakeholders and influencers -- not just company to customer. Fueled by technology that escalates pretty much by the quarter, companies now have to decide which platforms to use and how to use the resulting data to cement the customer-company bond. The choice of the platform depends upon the company's infrastructure, the size of the market, the budget and the customer base.

Whatever the platform, the CEO is a more important factor than ever, as I wrote in a blog post this week. I shared some ideas for what to do daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. In the current landscape, the company's top leader must be intimately engaged in customer relations -- as a conversant and as the standard for every other person in the company. The act, and the art, of marketing must originate with what customers say about their expectations and which aspects of their experience with products and services deepens loyalty and sharpens a competitive edge. To help the entire company avoid the downside of technology -- distraction -- the CEO must tell the story of the customer.

Some leaders of a certain generation are uncomfortable with the idea of technology-powered marketing and assume that it puts more distance between people. I emphatically disagree. Technology has equipped us to get close and stay close to each other. The challenge is to calibrate the company's performance, at faster speed, to align value with customers' preferences. Strong CEOs have always known how to do this. It's just something they now can do more accurately and even more intimately.