Marketing and customer management is full of rabbit holes. Those who burrow ever deeper into them, nose down and backside up, miss the full picture.
The Ghent Altarpiece is a 12-panel, 15th-century masterpiece by Jan and Hubert van Eyck. Painted in 1432, it’s regarded as one of the most important artworks in history – and one of the most valuable ever. This my friends, is an irony.
You see, in 1934 the original “Just Judges” panel of the work was stolen, never to be recovered. To this very day, a mere copy of the missing panel by restorer Jeff Vanderveken, created in the 1940s, stands among the master’s originals in St. Bavo’s Cathedral. It seems the full work may never be complete again, and yet, aficionados argue that the mystery of the great unsolved theft, only adds to the artworks value – incomplete as it is.
But that is art. It has its own rules.
There is no ready equivalent in management. To be incomplete here, is to be inaccurate, ineffective, and perhaps even dangerous. All systems are interconnected in nature, and so, to hold myopically to only one part of a wider management discipline – one piece of the work – is of little practical use.
I am reminded of Maslow’s posit: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail”.
Hammers, hammers everywhere
The easiest, lowest hanging example is probably the greatest source of illiteracy in the customer field. I speak of course, of survey myopia and of the feedback fallacy.
Originating from the influence of software companies and vested interests upon a fledgling and often excitable CX movement, its propaganda stuck like vegemite to toast.
False correlations about customer economics, no better illustrated than the debunked NPS claims of Bain and Co, formed one part of the pitch. Another was to obfuscate the simple survey behind more grandiose terms like ‘voice of customer’ – misappropriated and distorted from its original source and meaning in market diagnostics. The same occurred with the inflated notion of ‘experience management’, an act of product marketing imagination – but a literal scientific impossibility.
For many, the underlying idea that we can understand a customer base by simply asking it questions is a promise too good to pass up.
The fact that it isn’t true is missed, as is the inherent unreliability of such data, but they’ve found themselves in a nice warm rabbit hole, surrounded by dashboards, jargon, and other familiar rituals that keep them from a genuine understanding of the domain that they love. Like I said, damaging.
Interestingly, today the opposite narrative is emerging.
Many are revolting against the industry’s survey addiction, but they too are prone to exaggeration, as they write surveys off completely. One extreme to the next, it seems. This is a tool, nothing more, and while its real utility rests well below the rates of use that became common, it does remain the right tool for the right job. One must simply know what that is – and perhaps more pertinently, what it isn’t.
Another popular hammer is of course, journey mapping: a method of some value as it was popularised in the very early 1990s, but one that the digital communication era soon confined to history in larger companies – or should have.
We know this, because the explosion and proliferation of touch points have served to both fragment and explode dynamic customer journeys, removing general linearity, and transferring their ownership from company to customer. Thus, the dictation model (it was never mapping) became obsolete outside of pureplay business models.
By the time this century entered its teens, its determined application in complex consumer businesses became detrimental.
More latterly, the arrival of ‘journey management’ has found a popular home. By contrast to journey mapping, this is a more valid methodological frame when in the hands of those educated in it. Of course, many still conflate the marketing funnel with customer journeys, or claim not to, and then do so in every discernible way – a clear demonstration that they are trained in neither. But versed in jargon.
Yet the real irony is that many of the the most ardent champions of journey management, have simply thrown this new term over the old and failed journey dictation mindset, like a robe to hide its nakedness. While a transition is necessary into proper journey literacy, many using the term have yet to make it. Instead, they’ve found their rabbit hole and become another hammer.
There are plenty of other examples. From the dedicated disciples of the Jobs To Be Done framework, agents of the agentic era (and often, error), content strategy, CRM, asset designers, and many more. All are entirely valid – important even – when informed as part of a whole, their interdependencies clear, and critical theory their guide.
But all are reductive, sometimes destructive, when treated as an island unto themselves.
Ironically, instead of finding the proverbial security blanket of familiarity, this can cause participants to become somewhat, well, insecure. Any critique is met with a defensiveness, and an aggression, that only makes sense when you remember that these folks have bet the entire house on their one methodological, or technological, true love. They’re all in: Associations. Book writing. Blogs. Podcasts. The requisite predictions about how AI will do this, and that, and this again. Bang bang bang goes the hammer.
The rabbit hole goes too deep, too quickly.
Eventually though, without wider understanding, it turns on its occupants and even directionally sound ideas become distorted as they over-extend. They may not appreciate that of course – it’s hard to see when you’re down a dark hole – but in the real world of market laws, service economics, and operational interdependencies, such myopia fails them.
There is perhaps, no better illustration of this, than those that have joined the customer lifetime value (CLV) club. Reaching well beyond the important measurement tool that it is, they claim that it’s now a platform of insight on which to drive “strategy”. This leads to propositions such as the ill-informed idea that “growth” comes from investing in your most loyal customers. The literature proves otherwise.
In fact, CLV informs neither market strategy, nor customer loyalty.
The former is part of formal marketing management which is set upon its diagnostics pillar – not measurement – while the latter is nothing more than a company’s (or cohort’s) share of the category’s purchase frequency. CLV is the affected, not the affector.
Yes. There are many forms of rabbit hole.
Learn to value the full picture
There is some scope for specialists. Certainly, there is, but for a specialty area to work, to even be cogent in that area, it must understand the domain proper, the full monty.
In medicine, cardiologists, oncologists, or paediatricians become so, only after advanced training, predicated on having attained their foundation medical degree in the first place. We see the same in corporate finance. No matter the role or function, all possess the same underlying finance or accounting degree. Indeed, this is how all industrial professions work.
They grasp the full picture first, focus or specialise second, but never lose sight of the whole.
We are the same. A customer base is formed through the science and discipline of structured, deliberate, marketing management and then, it is sustained by market laws and service economics, leveraged by the systems of control designed by informed customer management leaders. When healthy, all the parts work together, in their proper place. It is the whole, that informs the individual pieces.
No master builder is a master, simply because they’re good with a nail gun.
Yet, these rabbit holes are nothing but a symptom of a field that feels its relative lack of formal education. Some find an area of genuine personal interest and naturally gravitate toward like-minded others to find that missing validation. That’s understandable, and it may well be their calling. But, unlike a work of art, where a skilled restorer might trick the eye, there really is no substitute for an original, educated, customer-er.
We must start there.
To be incomplete, to have key foundations absent, doesn’t add to the mystique of story, and it doesn’t inspire subjective value as the Ghent Altarpiece does. Instead, it fosters isolation and ineptitude. It builds hammers.
And it hides in rabbit holes.