The Agile Marketer

Chapter 13Beyond Agile: Marketing’s Role in the Customer Experience

We've discussed product management's role as the steward of product strategy and innovation. Now let's turn to the marketer's role as the steward of the customer experience. According to a Gartner survey, by 2016, 89 percent of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36 percent four years ago.¹ I believe that the best way to start is to examine the customer experience your company creates across touchpoints, map that experience, and make it visible to the rest of the company. This exercise will reveal the gaps and the disconnects in a hard-hitting way.

Managing the customer experience across touchpoints can have a profound effect on your business. There is a 1 + 1 = 3 effect that takes place when you align experience across touchpoints, such that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This is based on Gestalt psychology, the central principle of which is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies.² This idea was championed by the artist Joseph Albers, who explored chromatic interactions with flat, colored squares arranged concentrically on canvas. In Figure 3.4 (an example I drew in the style of Albers) there are only four squares, but their positioning and interaction creates additional shapes and content. There is a sense of depth that creates the impression that one is looking down a tunnel.

Figure 3.4 Example In The Style of ...