Get to Know Markus Kramer

Global Marketing Director, Aston Martin

Aston Martin is an iconic, 99-year-old brand. How has the company evolved, and what is the present ownership structure of the company?

We’re celebrating 100 years next year, and I’d say you’d classify this as an evolutionary process that runs from the early hill climb races here in Great Britain to being the featured vehicle make in James Bond to today’s contemporary expression of the British brand. And we are in the process of becoming a truly global automotive brand. 

I think the important and really interesting key in terms of our ownership and structure is that we are independently owned, so we are not part of any of the large automotive groups. We’re completely privately owned, and that makes us extremely nimble, fast, and quick—particularly in how we design and engineer our cars and how quickly we can adjust to changing market behaviors. So it’s a very nimble organization; it always has been but has become even more so with our current ownership structure.

What differentiates the Aston Martin brand and contributes to its emotional appeal in a highly competitive, high-luxury car market?

At the very heart and in the very purest manner, I think we build the most beautiful cars in the world. I think that’s what we’re exceptionally good at. We differentiate ourselves through the beauty of our cars, so we have different lines that say Power, Beauty, and Soul. Yet, if you look at what happens when someone drives up in an Aston Martin, really it commands a lot of respect. It’s very powerful.

How is the high-luxury car category performing, and can you give us a sense of its current size and makeup?

If you ask people on the street to name a few top luxury car brands, you’ll find Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, some models of Porsche, probably other high-end German manufactured models, and of course ourselves. You’ll find Rolls Royce. You’ll find Bentleys. For us, that’s high-end luxury.

The peak really of this market globally was probably seen in about 2007, and it’s currently not at those levels. And we wouldn’t expect it to go back to those levels before at least next year, with some growth kicking back into that market. It’s a very niche market. We’re probably talking worldwide about 100,000 cars in the high-luxury segment that are sold every year.

What sponsorships and events are you participating in to accent the durability and styling of your model line, and how do you quantify the return on these investments?

We don’t really sponsor any events. We do accent the durability and performance of our lineup by being a part of the racing community. That’s where we come from. It’s where our DNA really is. For instance, in 2012 we will enter the FIA World Endurance Championship. We will start with a few pre-rounds of the American LeMans in March and April before we go to the Nürburgring 24 Hours Race and the 24 hours of LeMans. We do a lot of endurance racing. If you look at out cars on those tracks in those races, those are the cars we build and sell. They are not too different from what we actually race, and it’s all geared toward building credibility of how powerful and how good the quality of our cars actually is.

What are some of your strategies for ensuring an optimal ownership experience and connecting with the right buyers worldwide?

We are a small business, and we are also a very atypical, nontraditional automotive business. We’re a very small and nimble player out there, and I think that goes for our dealers as well. We only have 136 dealers around the globe. The Aston Martin family is small and closely knit, and we work through things as a unit, creating the best possible service for every customer. For instance, you can call and book one of our great driving experiences, or if you have anything you want to talk to us about or any feedback to offer on the product, you simply call a representative in product marketing or our events team.

How valuable was Aston Martin's starring role for the DB5 model in some of the James Bond movies starring Sean Connery?

Very valuable. James Bond is a great character that is sort of the loveable rogue—gentleman, clever, charming, and always one step ahead. It’s a fictitious and almost timeless character, and I think it fits extremely well with the Aston Martin brand. And it’s no coincidence that we are the make of his choice. When we were the featured car for the first time in Goldfinger in 1964, it highlighted and transcended us. Yes, if you ask someone what Aston Martin is, very many people will say, “Oh yeah, it’s the James Bond car.” So from that perspective, yes—it absolutely has played a very critical role to boost brand awareness.

Markus Kramer, Global Marketing Director, Aston Martin

Markus Kramer is heading up worldwide Marketing for Aston Martin. Based out of the U.K., he builds teams and full-spectrum marketing frameworks to enable powerful, consistent, and efficient brand delivery in multi-market environments. Previous work spans seven years of brand, marketing, and retail network development for Harley-Davidson Motor Company, as well as a number of automotive marketing, sales, and retail network development positions at other makes. Besides his architectural background, Kramer also holds a federal degree in Marketing Planning & Communications (Switzerland), a degree in International Project Management from the University of California–Berkeley (U.S.), and an MBA from the SAID Business School at the University of Oxford (U.K.). Kramer has lived and worked in several countries and is culturally versatile and fluent in five languages. He is Swiss at heart, but has lived in Oxford, U.K., since 2006.

The Customer Is Truly King

A Look at Why Customer Obsession Needs to be Your Organization's New Business Imperative.

By Grant Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, Pegasystems

In their classic book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema described three basic value disciplines that can create customer value and provide a competitive advantage: operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. For a long time since the book’s publication in 1983, many companies successfully adopted a customer intimacy strategy by continually shaping products and services tailored to specific customer needs.

But in this web/mobile/social-driven era of customer empowerment, a customer-focused approach alone is no longer adequate. Those who don’t agree will find it increasingly harder to survive, much less thrive.

In their February 1 article in the Financial Times, Kyle McNabb and Suresh Vittal observe that technology-fueled disruption has undermined prior approaches to customer focus, saying, “Old models of channel-and product-specific command and control just don’t cut it. These anachronistic approaches, in which channel owners can’t see beyond the channel du jour and product owners build from the inside out, don’t set the organization up for success in a customer-driven world. Customer-obsessed marketers [must] rethink business structures, reward methods, and organizational design.”

Due to this fundamental change in the balance of power, which has shifted irretrievably to the customer, the authors propose that marketing should lead the company shift to becoming customer obsessed. Marketing has traditionally led cross-functional strategies and tactics around the customer life cycle, from contact to acquisition to cross-sell and retention. But leading an organizational shift to customer obsession is a much bigger consideration than who leads the charge; it’s the new business imperative defining what all functions in a company should do about it, both from a philosophical and operational perspective.

Some companies understand the difference between these two perspectives and some don’t. In his recent book, The Ultimate Question 2.0, Fred Reichheld provides a wealth of examples of companies that confuse their profit obsession with customer obsession and don’t value the difference—thus becoming obsessed with profits, (i.e., adopting “customer-unfriendly” business practices to maximize profits) and producing what he calls “bad profits”—that over time can undermine customer loyalty. By embracing both the philosophical approach (i.e., following the golden rule and treating customers how you’d like to be treated) and the operational perspective (i.e., continually adapting business processes and practices to create and increase net promoters), companies such as American Express, Charles Schwab, Verizon, and Farmers Insurance have become truly customer obsessed and distanced themselves from the competition. This chasm will only become larger over the next several years.

At the Forrester Customer Experience Forum last June, Jim Bush, Executive Vice President of World Service at American Express, delivered a keynote titled "A Relationship-Driven Approach to Service," where he talked about when he took over World Service. He drove the company’s transformation of customer service into a customer-obsessed organization that delivered extraordinary customer service as opposed to a traditional call center previously focused on reducing average handling time and cutting costs. To accomplish this goal, American Express adopted a holistic approach of “serving relationships, not transactions.” This encompassed a philosophical shift to regarding customer service as a source of competitive advantage rather than being a cost center; each “moment of truth” or customer interaction became an opportunity to compete and improve service delivery. Bush also flipped the traditional approach of concentrating 70 percent of a rep’s training on technical content to 70 percent dedicated to customer handling training, and the results have been extraordinary. Between 2006 and 2011, his group more than doubled their net promoter score, delivered a 20–25-percent increase in card member spend, lowered attrition six-fold, and despite not focusing on reducing expenses, decreased service costs by 10 percent. Those achievements are even more impressive when you consider the size and scale of American Express, which boasted $25.6 billion in revenue for FY 2010.

In his October 3, 2011 research note, “CMOs Must Lead the Customer-Obsessed Revolution,” Forrester analyst Chris Stutzman writes that in “the age of the customer, empowered customers are disrupting traditional sources of competitive advantage.” In order to thrive in this new era, companies must abandon the outdated customer approach where “workgroups focus solely on their view of the customer to develop silo-based strategies” and replace it with a customer-obsessed approach where “the customer’s needs permeate the company’s culture and operations facilitating the sharing of customer insights across the enterprise to develop a cross-discipline strategy.” It’s clear that the most successful companies today, and in the future, will fully embrace the philosophy and practice of customer obsession. They are not satisfied by merely focusing on the customer, but by relentlessly adapting their customer engagement strategies, investment priorities, business processes, and policies to ensure they create more net promoters and engender fewer detractors. Before Web 2.0 and the power of social media and mobile channel proliferation, traditional customer focus approaches may have worked. But today, any company that fails to adapt their business process to serve the customer specifically how they demand to be served will likely suffer the consequences. The smart companies have figured this out and are busy creating competitive distance. Meanwhile, those in denial of this new customer reality are falling behind faster than they can run the numbers. By the time they realize just how bad things are, their customers will have already defected in droves.

Grant Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, Pegasystems

Grant Johnson is Chief Marketing Officer for Pegasystems and is responsible for global marketing strategy and execution, including corporate and product marketing; industry solutions marketing; customer, field, and partner marketing; communications; communities; industry analyst and press relations; and web presence. Previously, Johnson was Vice President of Marketing at Guidance Software. He was also the Vice President of Marketing and served as an officer for FileNet Corp., a $400 million enterprise software vendor acquired by IBM in 2006. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Marketing for FrontBridge, an email management vendor acquired by Microsoft, where he led the company's re-naming and re-launch, built the marketing team, and delivered integrated marketing programs to support significant and sustained revenue growth. He also served as Director of Marketing for Symantec, with worldwide responsibility for the Norton brand. Johnson received his bachelor of arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MBA from Pepperdine University. He has also published several articles on best practices in high-tech marketing and co-authored the book PowerBranding™.

Marketing Technology: It's All About the People

By Steve Calde, Managing Director, Cooper

Technology has transformed the way we reach and excite our customers. But with tools and trends changing seemingly overnight, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. As a marketing executive, you may find yourself asking which technologies you should use to reach customers, what products and services you can build that will truly inspire them, and whether or not your customers even want you to engage with them on Facebook.
                        
Fortunately, not everything is a moving target. In my 20 years in the software industry, I have learned that while technology changes rapidly, people’s primary goals and motivations change very slowly. Gaining a deep understanding of these goals and aspirations gives you a powerful constant in a sea of ever-changing variables, providing a powerful tool for evaluating how to use technology effectively. The best way to achieve this understanding is to conduct effective, executive-sponsored, qualitative user research.

When I talk about research, I am making a distinction from traditional quantitative market research or customer segmentation. Let’s distinguish them by separating user research—insights about how people use and consume products and technology—from customer research—insights about how people buy products and respond to messaging about products and brands.

Qualitative user research can be a powerful complement to quantitative market research, but I’m not suggesting that it is a replacement for it. Customer research is invaluable, and the insights gleaned from it are necessary in order to conduct a successful, targeted qualitative user research study. Just last week, a marketing executive I know told me that she will no longer conduct customer segmentation without also doing qualitative user research and personas.

User research studies don’t have to be exhaustive. Specific numbers vary based on your target market and what you are trying to accomplish, but I’ve found that talking with between 15 and 40 people yields enough information to see patterns of behavior in most domains. Interviewing and observing users one at a time for about an hour yields far more accurate results than conducting focus groups, as you get a richer interaction that is specific and not colored by group dynamics.

As a product and service design consultant, I’ve had the pleasure of working in a wide range of industries, including financial services, medical devices, consumer entertainment, media, information technology, telecommunications, and even golf course irrigation (now that was some fun field research). Regardless of the domain, I’ve learned valuable insights in each case. As a product designer, these insights into user behaviors, goals, and aspirations help me make good decisions about what kind of user experience to design. Marketing executives can use the same information to help them evaluate what kinds of products and services their customers want in the first place. It also gives them a way to create a goal-directed marketingexperience for their customers.

The goal of user research is to get a crisp understanding of users’ behaviors and goals by identifying patterns among the users you interview. Alan Cooper, my mentor since the late ‘90s, invented “personas” as a way to capture and communicate these goals and patterns of observed behavior. Personas have been much imitated (and often misunderstood) over the years, but when done with rigor, they remain a great way to cut through technology distractions during conversations about what is best and most appropriate for your customers from their point of view.

When trying to excite customers, it’s important to show them how the promise of your product or service will help them be the person they want to be (or how they want to be seen). After all, 17-year-old girls don’t read Seventeen magazine; 13-year-old girls read Seventeen magazine. Qualitative user research can provide a unique perspective on users’ goals and aspirations in a way that quantitative data-gathering techniques cannot. 

User research has a reputation for being expensive and then sitting on the shelf. This happens when organizations view research as a tactical activity rather than a strategic one. When done effectively, though, user research isn’t just about giving your teams a leg up on designing better campaigns and products. It’s also about minimizing business risk and validating—or challenging—the current strategy. Typically, I find that the insights gained by talking with and observing users directly help clients look at their business goals through a different lens. This new perspective helps them make better decisions about the long-term trajectory of their product and marketing strategy.

For example, Fitbit makes a great exercise tracker that keeps track of how many steps I’ve walked, flights of stairs I’ve climbed, and overall activity during the day. A dashboard lets me see my progress, and I can easily post my achievements to Facebook or Twitter. This functionality appeals to the goals of people who are trying to stay fit, as they can share positive accomplishments (feed the ego) and leads to a spirit of friendly competition within the community. And it’s great for Fitbit, as they get some positive viral marketing out of it.

Compare that to an iPad video game targeting teens that lets users post to Facebook or Twitter that they have just made an in-app purchase for a weapons upgrade. While the company has the same goal to get viral marketing within their target market community, this use of social media is not desirable for a gamer, who, in essence, is publicly admitting that he couldn’t beat the game on his own. It’s the same functionality that Fitbit has, but it fails because it doesn’t help users achieve their goals or aspirations.

Of course, companies can only make these kind of strategic pivots if they have the appropriate decision-makers engaged in the initiative, with time set aside in their decision-making process for integrating the input that comes out of user research.

Steve Calde, Managing Director, Cooper

In his role at Cooper, Managing Director Steve Calde has been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Calde has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. He also teaches Cooper's Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Calde was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).