After the Go-Live Party: Maximizing Value From Your Commerce Platform Investment
This is the ninth article in a series on post-release best practices to maximize business value from commerce platform investments.
Your platform is a product – sell it!
How do you think about and manage your new platform? An IT application? A channel? Or a product? Your answer will have a massive implication on the success of your platform.
At the height of the dot-com boom over a decade ago, it was fashionable for organizations to anoint a dot-com czar, and essentially view the investment as a new channel, even a new business. A lot of that was driven by investor appetite to pursue e-business metrics as distinct from business metrics. In the bust that followed, companies retrenched, czars went out of fashion, and the former platform investments were often folded under a mid-level IT manager. Starved of executive focus, many of those investments languished and were then written off.
In hindsight, digital was not and is not a channel – it is a part of business, across channels and customer touch-points. Many firms fall into the trap that digital is viewed as infrastructure. The net result is duplicated investments in technology, business process and operations. The platform(s) that support digital maximize their business value when viewed, managed, and evolved as an integrated and strategic product suite across channels and business lines.
A major CPG client has invested in a global marketing platform that operates across their brands, global business units, and partner marketing agencies. It provides a common infrastructure, content administration, and analytics to support their global footprint. Product centricity permits scale and innovation – a formal innovation council, comprising representation from across the business, as well as external parties such as Facebook and Google, meet once a quarter to review consumer trends and ideas to enrich the experience and make it more compelling and relevant.
The platform team also maintains a small, full-time staff of platform account managers who interface with each global business and their marketing agencies of choice. These platform account managers combine project management skill sets with account management and business development, selling the platform features on their own merits to the business, while acting as business advocates representing the business and their agencies to the platform development team. It is a powerful model which has the focus and attention of the CMO and CIO.
The firm has moved from a customized, expensive, and disjointed customer experience to utilizing digital marketing in a way which meets or exceeds the needs of individual business units and truly makes life better for their customers. And ultimately, isn’t that our highest purpose?
This post concludes this nine-part “lessons” series. Chances are, you learned some of the lessons in the school of hard knocks, or already have plans underway to address them. If you feel that you gained some valuable insight from these proven practices – consider leading the change. With the release done, inertia sets in, production fires consume time, and making change happen takes some doing – it takes destroying some notions and creating some positive friction to do things in a new way.
Louis L’Amour provides us inspiration: “I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.”
For more perspective on marketing trends and digital technologies that will impact businesses in the year ahead, view our Insights 2012 series on the Idea Engineers blog.
