The Future Marketing Organization Will Include Engineers

In 2019, McDonald’s announced that it was acquiring Dynamic Yield, a firm committed to providing “personalization anywhere”—from mobile apps to drive-thru menus and call centers—for leading global retailers including IKEA, Stitch Fix and Ocado. I sat down to talk to Dynamic Yield’s founder and CEO, Liad Agmon, an entrepreneur who has developed and sold three companies. Dynamic Yield’s vision is to help firms, and in particular marketers, do a better job of creating a superior consumer experience. In our discussion, Agmon brought up several mistakes he sees marketing making regarding resource allocation. Having worked with a number of CMOs, Agmon provides insight on how marketers can shift their effort to have a bigger impact.

4 Ways Marketers Can Have Bigger Impact

1. Too much emphasis on developing the perfect creative.

Some marketers end up spending a lot of time on developing creative. Whether it is an email or content or product description, every word must be perfect. And, yet, there isn’t enough time spent on reverse engineering the customer experience.

As an example, go through the following process. Go look at the website of a large insurance company that has been around for years and pretend you are searching for insurance. Come back two days later. You would find yourself starting the search all over. In contrast, in most cases, if you went to look at a car, left, and came back to look again the next day, the car salesperson wouldn’t start at the beginning of the relationship with you. They would know that you had been there, the model you were interested in, and would have picked up the relationship where it ended. Not so on most websites. For the insurance company, the experience would start over. The website wouldn’t pick up where you had left off.

Now, go look at a startup called Lemonade. This is a very different experience, one that helps the customer work through the process of finding and selecting insurance. And, yet, how many marketers at the large insurance company are worried about dotting every i and crossing every t on their creative… spending hours and weeks agonizing over commercials and email campaigns?

As a CEO, this seems to be an opportunity to reallocate more resources toward understanding and solving customer pain points. Developing creative does little to accomplish this.

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