If customers are the nutrients of business growth, why do only 26 percent of companies have a differentiation strategy to improve their customer experience? 

Lack of tools, knowledge, or urgency is usually the case, but the statistics show that marketing departments should no longer wait to influence their customer experiences.

Article Series: 5 Minutes Can Change The Way We Think & Work

Remember what it was like to rely on the Yellow Pages, almanacs, and old-fashioned encyclopedias for information updated that year and that year alone? Now envision a corporate environment where you still depended on the same structure.

Article Series: 5 Minutes Can Change The Way We Think & Work

Did you come to work dressed like a true competitive intelligence professional? Perhaps you’re unsure and feel a bit mismatched in search of direction. Being dressed for success isn’t exclusive to that new jacket you wore to work last week. It means you’re prepared to face your competition- no matter what.

It seems that marketing departments are in a cooking frenzy - trying to sprinkle equal portions of attention to the three C’s of business: corporation, customer, and competitors. And now, a fourth C has been added to the mix, costing companies up to $40 billion for their print and digital efforts in 2011 alone.

That fourth C is content, and customers are eating it all up before making a purchase decision.

Article Series: 5 Minutes Can Change The Way We Think & Work

Do you remember the day you joined the Internet?    

Think back and recall what it was like to sort through all of the junk mail and irrelevant pop up ads made famous in the late 90's, early 2000's. Thought that was overwhelming and time consuming? Compare that to today's multi-source text messages, birthday alerts, event updates, Twitter mentions, blogs, wall posts, and online bank accounts to name a few.

Article Series: 5 Minutes Can Change The Way We Think & Work 

Imagine a world without copy and paste. Think of all the time you would spend copying information from one depository to another. To only later edit, erase, or even start over.

Now think of all the repetitive tasks you would crumble under without being spared by “Undo.” It’s clear our consumption of time- a resource we cannot recycle, repurpose or reuse- would be much different. 

If the image above represented parts of the strategic marketing process, what would be missing to make it truly effective?

The answer: technology.

According to Gartner, Inc. analyst Laura McLellan, chief marketing officers will spend more on IT than chief information officers by 2017. Despite the statistic, technology is still being left out of the strategic planning process, causing drastic inefficiencies for marketing departments.