Solving a Problem All Marketers Have

Today it was announced that I’m joining the team here at Treasure Data as CMO to continue to drive a leadership position in the emerging Customer Data Platform (CDP) and IoT Analytics market. I’m excited and energized to join the team!

What’s a Customer Data Platform?

Think of it this way: Now more than ever, marketers need a unified view of the customer, and understanding and utilizing the data about each customer is critical. The customer in 2017 is everywhere, and data is generated from seemingly everything these days. So what’s a marketer to do? Constantly cobble together prospect and customer data from disparate systems and hope for insight? Yes, that’s what we all end up doing, but we’ve hit a wall. Too much data, too many systems and too little time before customers defect.

A Customer Data Platform aims to solve this problem with a unified, persistent database that a marketer can manage and that’s open and accessible to any data. But, you guessed it—there’s more than one solution out there. I joined Treasure Data because I’m convinced their approach is unique, differentiated, and the best-kept secret in the market.  

Treasure Data talks about the Customer Data Platform in our whitepaper and a few webinars.

Marketing at a Crossroads

Marketers have seen our profession completely upended in the last few years: The fragmentation of the customer experience…the explosion of marketing channels…the availability of affordable, powerful SaaS solutions…and of course the ubiquity of mobile experiences. All this translates into an explosion of data unlike anything we’ve ever seen or been able to wrangle. And that leads to two possible outcomes: it can either paralyze marketers, or it can help them deliver amazing, unique customer experiences while their competitors struggle to understand their data.

If you are in marketing or the data space, you’ve seen the scary one-pager from Scott Brinker: The explosion of marketing technology (last count is over 5,500 solutions) has bred an environment of easy-to-use but disconnected, fragmented systems that hold a truly connected customer experience hostage. Lest I sound dramatic (but why not?) we have a responsibility to our profession to harness and simplify this abundance of solutions so that marketing can be the unifying force for an organization to make sense of this chaos, and of their customer.

Is this problem really a big deal? I think it is—I’d venture to say that the future of marketing is at stake. We need to stand up and chart a course across silos, tech landscapes and channels to show the real value that marketing can deliver to the business—as a revenue-generating machine driven by deep, unprecedented customer intimacy.

Marketing must be the force within an organization—of any size—that balances the art and science—but leans more on the science and technology than ever before. Marketing must be a silo-buster across the organization that drives, curates and protects a profitable customer experience.  

Next Up

I’m honored to have the opportunity to join Treasure Data. If you’re at MarTech this week in Boston, please stop by booth #39—my team and I would love to meet you.