You can talk Social Media or Customer Engagement but if your organization rewards your people on the basis of short term metrics, employees – regardless of CEO directives – will gravitate towards the activity that gets the promoted and prevents them from getting fired.
If your organization places a premium on ARPU, for example, your attempts to build dialogue through social media will naturally gravitate towards list building, press release 2.0 and direct marketing.
When your metrics are focused on the short term the organization will view activities such as customer service nothing but a cost center. Committing the organization to long term initiatives that focus on dialogue, intiatives that develop community around social values are, for example, impossible in a brand that lives in the 90 day sales cycle.
If your KPI are geared towards delivering market share, awareness and net additions you’ll be stuck in the cycle of new customers for your products rather than deepening the relationship with existing customers and discovering how you can broaden your product offering.
Short term marketing by definition carries marketing externalities. A campaign that returns a 4% CTR but annoys 10% of the base is deemed by the metric to be a success despite effectively increasing the cost of future marketing efforts.
Under the 90 day model concepts such as Trust and Attention cannot be earned because developing a relationship with the customer cannot bear fruit within the 90 day window. Within these parameters they have to be bought through high viz advertising and at a high price. The conversation will always be interrupted.
Short term marketing is campaign led; the goodwill generated in the marketing does not outlive the campaign itself as creating a legacy naturally falls out of the 90 day.
Agents of change need to have the freedom to operate beyond the 90 day and that is the challenge facing the CEO in liberating these intrapreneurs from the very DNA that binds the rest of the organization. The patient brand will win out and the required long term focus can only be afforded by a CEO that supports these intrapreneurs through metrics such as Lifetime Value, NPS, Churn, Loyalty or Trust Quotient.
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