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In 2019, McDonald’s announced that it was acquiring Dynamic Yield, a firm committed to providing “personalization anywhere”—from mobile apps to drive-thru menus and call centers—for leading global retailers including IKEA, Stitch Fix and Ocado. I sat down to talk to Dynamic Yield’s founder and CEO, Liad Agmon, an entrepreneur who has developed and sold three companies. Dynamic Yield’s vision is to help firms, and in particular marketers, do a better job of creating a superior consumer experience. In our discussion, Agmon brought up several mistakes he sees marketing making regarding resource allocation. Having worked with a number of CMOs, Agmon provides insight on how marketers can shift their effort to have a bigger impact.
4 Ways Marketers Can Have Bigger Impact
1. Too much emphasis on developing the perfect creative. Some marketers end up spending a lot of time on developing creative. Whether it is an email or content or product description, every word must be perfect. And, yet, there isn’t enough time spent on reverse engineering the customer experience.
As an example, go through the following process. Go look at the website of a large insurance company that has been around for years and pretend you are searching for insurance. Come back two days later. You would find yourself starting the search all over. In contrast, in most cases, if you went to look at a car, left, and came back to look again the next day, the car salesperson wouldn’t start at the beginning of the relationship with you. They would know that you had been there, the model you were interested in, and would have picked up the relationship where it ended. Not so on most websites. For the insurance company, the experience would start over. The website wouldn’t pick up where you had left off.
Now, go look at a startup called Lemonade. This is a very different experience, one that helps the customer work through the process of finding and selecting insurance. And, yet, how many marketers at the large insurance company are worried about dotting every i and crossing every t on their creative… spending hours and weeks agonizing over commercials and email campaigns?
As a CEO, this seems to be an opportunity to reallocate more resources toward understanding and solving customer pain points. Developing creative does little to accomplish this.
2. Too Afraid to Take Risks and Be Bold. Many companies are afraid to experiment and be bold. They are so afraid of risking the brand. However, they need to be less afraid of breaking the experience. Look at all of the examples where brands have broken the experience temporarily… Twitter was down for hours, but it didn’t break the brand. In some cases, marketers are overly risk averse and too focused on getting things perfect. Consumers have very short memories. Make sure you put guardrails in place, but so what if you have a bad looking landing page? What is the cost of not taking risks?
3. Making Bad Decisions Because of Misinterpretation of Data. Marketers do a lot of A/B testing. Assume that they find that one landing page has 15% better performance over another and put that one into play. Six months later, the business hasn’t changed. Why? Because 30% of the traffic is bot traffic, but the A/B testing results didn’t account for bot traffic. I see this regularly: plenty of data but inaccurate analysis of the data.
4. Not Having an Engineer in the Marketing Department. The marketing organizations that will succeed in the future will have engineers reporting to the CMO. One of the key pervasive problems in firms is that marketing and IT aren’t aligned. This is exceptionally difficult to solve. For example, I was meeting with the CMO of a very large firm and asked her what she wanted to do. She told us. Then she said that her hands were tied and that IT didn’t have any time to work on any projects. To win in the future, you have to move faster and find a way to communicate and collaborate with technologists and engineers. One way to solve this is to have expertise embedded within marketing to help liaise across the departments and/or go outside of the firm to solve problems.
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