Yesterday I was interviewing someone for a job at Harris Partners (side note – what a great candidate!). I strongly believe that the culture of the company is the single biggest determinant of the success of any company in the long term. I was trying to explain to her the type of culture we have at Harris Partners – one that promotes extreme ownership. As a follow-up to the interview I wanted to leave her with some materials that shaped my thinking on the topic over the past

The ability to collect, synthesize and act on data has made Real-Time Retail a possibility, but it is the competitive threat from eCommerce players that makes it an imperative for brick-and-mortar retailers. Your brand is under consideration from customers at any number of highly specific moments throughout their week. The challenge for you as a retailer is to identify, understand and react to these moments in order to drive customers from consideration to purchase, and from

Digital has changed the game for many businesses. The most drastic examples are the ones that are no longer with us, or are shadows of their former selves - Kodak, Blockbuster or Nokia. But almost all companies are threatened - not by new business models, but by rising customer expectations driven by the likes of Google, Netflix and Amazon. Your model might be perfectly safe, but suddenly the customer starts to expect that the interaction they had with your brand through emai

I frequently meet with CMOs that truly and passionately believe that their organisations are already performing at the peak of their capabilities. I tend to ask them a single question that tests that belief: "how many tests do you run per week?". The levels of sophistication of organisations they lead is very much correlated with their answers. The companies that are in the biggest need of improvement tend not to even know the answer to my question. The best ones I have encou

Digital transformation has swept across the globe like a tsunami. Whole industries have transformed at a pace never seen before. The impact is most visible from the customer's perspective, and this is the lens that most C-level executives like using when talking about digital transformation. What is missing from this view is the impact that digital transformation has - or should have! - on the internal workings of departments responsible for shaping customer engagement, norma

A big part of digital transformations is creating omni-channel customer experiences. One of the confusions we often face when presenting to CEOs and other C-level executives (thankfully less often from CMOs…) is that they tend to think “omni-channel” as a concept is synonymous with “multi-channel”. This is a big mistake, and one that is likely costing those companies a lot of money. What’s the difference? Multi-channel marketing means that your customer experiences happen acr

Someone from the hospitality industry recently asked us about the organizational structure of the marketing, sales and revenue management teams: should those teams be combined, or run independently? Org design as communication architecture We love the way Ben Horowitz, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the Valley and an accomplished entrepreneur himself, talks about organization in his incredible book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: “The first rule of organi

The ability to collect, synthesize and act on customer-level data is transforming customer experience across all service industries. We see retailers, travel companies and hotels moving toward omnichannel and data-driven approaches to customer experience. Yet the restaurant industry, an industry completely reliant on delivering high-quality customer experience, strangely lags behind in capturing and using data to improve the experience of diners. This may be due to the decent

This is a guest post by Mark Abay, Content Director at Ashton Media. The article covers the case study of a digital transformation supported by Harris Partners which was presented at the Data Strategy Symposium in November 2015 by Stephen Eyers, Head of Strategy and Innovation at 7-Eleven. It was originally published on Ashton Media website. Ten months ago, 7-Eleven was “virtually nowhere” in the data space. Digital transformation wasn’t even on the agenda. That was despite t

Much attention has focused over recent years on how new technology and data tools fundamentally change the way brands communicate with their customers. We see the “art of possibility” painted in a series of one-to-one engagements between brands and consumers through an omni-channel digital experience, backed by advanced analytics, and tied to a measurable return on investment through detailed campaign tracking. This vision builds on full utilization of the technology tools th

The Prime Minister is doing what many Australian companies have failed to do, putting digital transformation at the strategic core of government. The original of this article appeared in Australian Financial Review The Prime Minister has made a great show of consulting business and is fluent in all its buzzy phrases. But this is not a government swooning passively into the arms of the economic doers. Turnbull has cast himself as the new CEO of Australia and feels among peers

The challenge of owning moments Google has recently shifted the focus of their thinking around advertising by adding “micro-moments” to the marketers’ dictionary, thus highlighting the importance of key moments in customer decision making. This is a clear shift away from the orchestrated sales funnel and the more comprehensive framework of the customer decision journey into the mindset of the impulse purchase. Alex, a modern female consumer, with the world of e-commerce and t

The original of this article appeared in Business Spectator When Richard Umbers unveiled his $600 million strategy to turn Myer around in the next five years, he gave it a human face. “Eva” is a fictional character, a data-generated ideal customer. She is between 20 and 50 years old, and she likes to indulge in mini shopping sprees and celebrate with a glass of bubbles. Eva is a construct built out of the richest customer loyalty databases available to a non-grocery retailer

In the 1980’s, Qantas Airlines relied on one single channel to drive customer engagement – a vast network of sales agents providing fare information and booking services. After the company established a call centre and, in the mid-90’s, embraced the tools propagated by the rapid development of the Internet, Qantas made the flight quotes available to the wider public. In 1999, Qantas was the first company in Australia to successfully use e-mail as a marketing tool. The marketi

Online sales have been dramatically increasing for a while: their compounded annual growth rate in the U.S. between 2010 and 2014 reached 9.2% [1]. However, they still make up a small proportion of overall retail sales. Now, compare that to the 85.5% compounded annual growth rate [2] of online-influenced sales made in-store, in the same time period and in the same market. A clear trend is visible: people are influenced by the online channels, but rely on the offline media to

We normally use a pyramid to picture the elements required for digital transformation, and the organisation is the bottom layer of that pyramid for a reason. It represents the solid base required for successful implementation of technology and robust data and analytics, and for delivering targeted content across digital and offline channels. “Organisation”, in this context, means much more than the actual structure of the company, with its hierarchy of responsibilities and de