Consumers today are armed with easy access to information on products and services.  They place more trust in the opinions of complete strangers over those of organization’s they regularly buy from, demand more for less and expect a consistent personalized experience that matches the brand promise for the complete experience from buying, after sales service, repurchase, and disposal.  Never has so much been expected from Marketers today who have to contend with reduced budgets and widened responsibilities.  The poses a significant opportunity and threat to their very existence.

We have developed a Seven Step Market Cycle that redesigns the role of marketing and is a process for continuous learning to design, refine and implement customer–centred innovations.  The idea is to transform the marketing function by widening it to become a customer experience management function.  We identify the seven steps below and recommend that marketers follow these steps and transform their function and in doing so lead a customer-centred innovation transformation.

1)     Develop alternative ways to understand your customers

2)     Re-examine the way you see customers and how you segment

3)     Consider the whole customer experience

4)     Co-design your products and services with a sub-class of customers

5)     Develop collaborative internal practices between sales, marketing, product development / service design, operations, IT and customer service

6)     Use customer analytics and CRM technology  to personalise the experience and real-time interaction

7)     Take stock of lessons learnt, refine and repeat