Your journey through times that are a-changin’
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
With apologies to Charles Dickens, it’s not A Tale of Two Cities. It’s our modern-day tale of marketing and marketing technology in managing the customer journey at the dawn of the Era of AI.
It’s the best of times because we are lucky enough to be working during a period of incredible disruption in marketing and business more broadly.
Why is disruption our good fortune? It’s an opportunity to break the status quo and forge the future. Great careers are not made from yesterday’s playbooks. They’re made by pioneering new ideas. A generational moment of disruption — such as we’re experiencing now — gives us the chance to innovate better ways of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers.
You can help pen the playbook that others will follow.
It’s the worst of times because, yikes, things are changing fast! Just keeping track of the weekly updates of what’s possible with AI — and the ways in which it can affect customer expectations — is an exhausting, full-body workout. But deciding which changes to embrace, when and how, and then actually driving their successful adoption throughout your organization is, frankly, the quintessential management challenge of the 21st century.
This struggle between the exponential rate of technological change and the much slower rate of organizational change is known as “Martec’s Law.” Picture yourself with one foot on a dock and one foot on a ferry as it’s pulling away. That’s what Martec’s Law feels like.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to overcome Martec’s Law. Operating in an environment where the pace of change will forever exceed our capacity to completely catch up is the new normal now. Sorry.
But don’t despair! This is actually an opportunity, as all great challenges are.
Because you’re not the only one wrestling with Martec’s Law. Everyone else is too, including all your competitors. To win, you don’t need to escape Martec’s Law. You only need to be better at managing it than they are.
And you can manage it.
You have two big levers to pull:
- Be strategic about which changes you embrace.
- Be more agile in how you embrace them.
With the first, you simply can’t chase all the changes in the market at once. Fortune favors the focused. It’s important to continually explore new possibilities on the frontier. But you get your leverage by exploiting those that show the greatest promise. What’s going to be most impactful for your customers? What’s going to best harmonize with your other strategic bets? Make a few clear choices — which necessitates clear omissions — and put your weight behind them.
This will give you an edge over competitors who waffle too long or peanut butter their time and resources too thinly across too many choices.
The second lever is all about how you operationalize those strategic choices. Being more agile isn’t a euphemism for “work faster” or code for doubling the amount of task switching everyone does. Such naive approaches have the opposite effect and end up dragging you down. Real agility is developed by building more adaptable approaches to technology, tactics, and talent.
Insist on open and composable technical architectures that make it easier for you to quickly add, change, or remove components, capabilities, and use cases. Implement legit agile management practices in your processes, workflows, and customer journeys: short feedback loops, iterative refinement, and dynamic prioritization. Invest in greater training, enablement, and empowerment for teams and individuals to fully tap the power of the new tools and technologies you give them.
These two levers aren’t magic. They’re muscles that can be developed. And they will help you win.
This report from SAS contains a wealth of insights to help you chart your journey through these changing times, to enable you, and inspire you to shape a new generation of customer journeys. As you move forward and modernize your martech capabilities — technology, tactics, and talent — for this era of AI-powered marketing and customer experiences, I encourage you to seize the opportunity to also develop your meta-level muscles for mastering change.
That will be a truly durable competitive advantage in an age of continuous transformation.
Best wishes on your journey,
Scott Brinker
Editor, chiefmartec
