Nick Martin puts the brakes on customer management ‘trucks’ in favour of sleeker, more specialised vehicles.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently made a comparison between PCs and trucks, vehicles that once dominated the car market in the US, but which got killed by smaller cars as the US consumer got real.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Jobs said computers, including Apple’s own Macintosh, won’t go away, just as trucks didn’t disappear. But he suggested that sleeker portable products such as his company’s iPhone and iPad would be the equivalent of cars – offering touchscreen website browsing, droves of applications and other features not found on PCs that run Microsoft Windows.

Arch rival Microsoft reacted negatively – after all, laptop shipments are still showing double digit growth rates. Yet Jobs is simply facing up to the reality of a changing world.

And so to the analogy: in business, we have witnessed just as profound a change in the challenges that confront CMOs in the face of the mind-blowing explosion of online and interactive channels; increasingly important social media with the potential to become as significant a source of demand as Search; in short the most radical market-led upheaval we’ve ever experienced.

You’d wonder whether the same tools and platforms proposed by marketing services providers, that promised tremendous business improvements just a few years ago, might be struggling to make an impact in today’s shifting landscape. You’d be right to.

Forrester, in a report entitled Campaign Management Needs a Reboot (April 2009), highlighted how campaign management applications are struggling to keep up with an explosion of channels and are finding it hard to improve cross-channel customer interaction and make sense of the social phenomenon.

Forrester says there are too many platforms, making it hard to integrate, leading to missed business opportunities, poor customer experiences and inefficient program execution.

But the solution isn’t to create one meta marketing platform. Software rarely shines when it’s asked to do many tasks in one. Marketers hate ‘integrated’ platforms that attempt to do everything – they’re complicated and often too rigid.

Specialisation is the name of the game. Solutions for lead generation that work on demand ‘pull’ principles are a totally different proposition to campaign managers that are designed for ‘push’ marketing applications.

Suiting the business needs

In the world of multi-channel integrated marketing, the execution platforms can be managed in-house, outsourced or rented – in the form of SaaS (Software as a Service) or cloud computing. Frankly, it doesn’t matter in principle. What matters more is which platform suits the business needs best and complies with their policies in regard to security, control, strategic and privacy imperatives.

But how to integrate effectively, in order to deliver the vital operational improvements while allowing the organic and fluid nature of marketing communications to follow its customer-led path of least resistance? The answer lies not in embedding rules engines, data management et al into campaign management and other marketing execution tools. That’s yesterday’s model and simply reflects the established order: one of channel specific siloed organisational structures where marketing teams are responsible for online, direct mail, contact centres and so on.

What’s needed is a much broader marketing biosphere, comprising three key areas:

1. Data management, analysis and rules definition:

• Design of the data model, single customer view creation, activity data, semantic web data
• Analysis and segmentation
• Rules engine

2. Marketing activity management:

• Document processing
• Digital asset management
• Marketing workflow automation
• Resource management and web-based utilities

3. Marketing execution:

• Campaign managers
• Email/SMS platforms
• Networked lead generation deployment and settlement platforms
• Online advertising networked platforms
• Social network solutions, etc.

The centre of gravity in creating a truly effective, flexible, adaptable customer communications management environment lies in getting the first two areas correctly architected. Herein lies the solution to true multi-channel integration, an approach that can be orchestrated manageably.

It means, wherever the media explosion takes us, however many new and unpredictable IP enabled channels open up, the means to be able to simply integrate them exists; using the right data, content, channels, technology and people.

More specialisation around execution, not less, is likely to win out. Fees associated with those platforms will continue to fall, as users pay for what they actually need and use, safe in the knowledge that their biosphere is in place, ready to meet with every fresh challenge.

Nick Martin is a regular columnist for DMI. Email him: martin.nick@btinternet.com and read his blog here: marketingpages.typepad.com/marketingpages