This is one of my favorite quotes from the movie “Ghostbusters”.  Remember it?  Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman.  Classic.

I’m reminded of this quote every time two key marketing constructs - Campaigns and Triggers - end up in the same conversation.  For whatever reason, it seems to me like most marketers like to keep these separate.  Even Gartner classifies them separately, “basic” versus “advanced”, in their evaluation criteria for multichannel campaign management (MCM). 

But if we are truly focused on the customer (or prospect, which is really just a customer who hasn’t purchased…yet), then we as marketers have to find a way to get these dogs and cats to live together.  A customer doesn’t care about a campaign or a trigger - or a model, or a creative, or a workflow for that matter.  They, well actually we, care about relevant messages at the relevant times.  And when it’s done right, we actually appreciate it.  But when it’s done wrong, it really annoys us.

Both campaigns and triggers are important marketing tools.  Excluding one or the other dilutes the overall effectiveness of the marketing function.  But if we don’t reconcile them intelligently then we risk producing inconsistent, irrelevant and potentially ill-timed messages. 

To be fair, in many ways, campaigns – at least traditional campaigns - and triggers are different animals.  Traditional campaigns are driven by a marketer, “on demand”, if you will.  They are sometimes based on data, or even better on segmentation and/or analytics, but often on intuition.  And they are typically executed based on the marketer’s preferred timeframe and channel, not necessarily the customer’s.   

Triggers are similar to campaigns in that they are initially conceived and defined by a marketer.  However, they must, by definition, be driven by data.  And they must have pre-defined criteria to apply to the data so that the triggering system can “watch” for the condition represented by the criteria to manifest.  Now, the criteria can very simple, such as a birthday approaching, a 3,000 mile / 3 month oil change coming due or a CD about to mature.  Or the criteria can be very sophisticated, such as the occurrence of statistically abnormal transaction behavior (think applying fraud detection-like algorithms to marketing).  And finally, triggers “fire” based on the customer’s timeframe (as long as the data is right), not necessarily the marketer’s.   
 
Even though triggers may seem more attractive in some cases due to their data-driven and automated nature, both techniques are important.  There are things that a marketer knows that often won’t make it into the database – or at least not in time – to become available to the triggering system.  For example, if a regional hail storm strong enough to do damage to cars occurred, a rapidly executed, on-demand campaign from an auto body shop to attract customers with hail damage for repairs could be very effective.

Interestingly, from my experience, in cases where on-demand campaigns seem like the logical, or perhaps only, option, shortly thereafter there is usually some brainstorming about how the situation could be “triggerized”.  Given the previous example, one might ponder “if the triggering system only had access to weather data, then…hmm…”. 

But that’s enough for now; more later…

Gone are the good old days when marketing was straight-forward and simple.  A marketing director used to be able to plan out his or her budget for the year and then spend to that budget.  The job was highly visible and seen as a major contributor to company success. However, the more hyper-connected and hyper-speed society has become, the lower the tenure of the CMO. Is this related? Some report that the average tenure of the Chief Marketing Officer today is little more than 18 months. Why is that?

I postulate that one reason for this is that marketing directors have unwittingly become myopic…siloed into a functional role. Cata¹ argues that “CMO's must move away from thinking like functional executives embedded in their own siloed departments and instead think instead like operational executives." 

Another possible reason is that marketers are still marketing in silos—in multiple, individual and siloed channels without a comprehensive view of the customer's needs and interaction with the company. "Integrated Marketing" requires more complex data analysis and marketers need to catch up.

A third explanation could be because CMO’s do not fully understand that they are now, as Thomas Davenport² says, “Competing on Analytics”. Everything, including mass media, has become measureable. Marketing is now about Business Intelligence along the full marketing continuum. Those who don’t adopt a metrics mindset, cannot optimize their companies’ marketing spend. I recently heard Hanssens³ make this point clearly.

CMO’s should be the voice of the customer, driving the company toward customer-centricity. Christensen and Raynor⁴ assert that “What customers really want is for you to do their jobs for them”. I agree.  Marketers must focus on the customer and must focus the entire company on the customer if they want to last.<sup>5

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1</sup>Carlos Cata, "CMOs, Stop Obsessing over the Tenure Stat." Advertising Age 79, no. 20 (2008). 
²Thomas H. Davenport, "Competing on Analytics," Harvard Business Review 84, no. 1 (2006).
³Dominique M. Hanssens, Daniel Thorpe, and Carl Finkbeiner, "Marketing When Customer Equity Matters," Harvard Business Review 86, no. 5 (2008).
⁴Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, "What Customers Really Want Is for You to Do Their Jobs ; to Make Innovative Products That Drive Growth, Companies Must Forget About Demographics, Product Attributes and Market Size Data, and Focus on the Specific Jobs Customers Need to Get Done," CIO 17, no. 4 (2003).
⁵Jennifer Rooney, "Marty Homlish Knows Why CMOs Don't Last," Advertising Age 79, no. 14 (2008).