People who know me have heard me use a Wayne Gretzky quote to sum up the challenges of solving marketing and business problems with technology.
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."
Often, we spend too much time documenting current requirements and building technology solutions for these requirements that we lose sight of where the future is heading. This is annoying when we have to make adjustments to our technology foundation to adapt to new requirements. This is disastrous when we box ourselves in to rigid solutions and have to start over.
While I realize no piece of automation is forever, there needs to be more emphasis placed on emerging technologies that can alter how marketers use channels in big ways. That brings me to the (admittedly over-hyped) debut of the iPad.
What I see is a complex multi-channel marketing environment getting even more complex. Although the iPad is not yet at critical mass, the likelihood of the iPad introducing a new way of personal computing is hard to deny. It's taking the personal connection we experience with our iPhone or Android phone to another level altogether. It's the big P (as in paradigm) shift that actually warrants the use of this phrase - not those incremental changes that are often associated with paradigm shifts.
So now is the time, while you still have time, to get the marketing automation tool chest in order. If you're tinkering around with CRM solutions that still don't connect channels together, you'd better move quickly. Worse yet, if you still haven't created your 360-degree view of the customer, you're going to be falling far behind your peer group.
Soon the best direct marketers will see all interactions across all channels as they occur. They'll use real-time decisioning capabilities to rapidly respond to all the inputs across all these channels. They'll deliver personalized experiences that recognizes the personal nature of the computing experience. They'll take the current state-of-the-art mobile optimized content, applications, SMS messages and widgets delivered to Smart Phones and re-define these experiences for iPad and other tablet devices that will be flooding the market. And they'll do this with a centralized (and highly sophisticated...not today's campaign management tools) set of business rules and data that define right message, right person, right time.
Gretzky's wisdom will define winners and losers. Skating to where the puck is going to be - rather than declaring victory because your email channel is CRM-enabled - will give marketers huge advantages to efficiently acquire new customers and increase lifetime value of existing customers.
