Apple Retail unifies physical and digital into a seamless experience. Is your firm doing it too?
Angela Ahrendts, DBE, is one of the most clear and insightful minds in marketing. She is also a hell of a manager who can execute the most daring moves with elegance and precision. She led the turnaround of Burberry (as CEO between 2006 and 2014) and now the customer experience unification at Apple Retail (as Senior Vice President, Retail and Online Stores).
Angela is the archetype of the marketer for our times: a manager taking care of the organisation; a thinker who grasps the whole picture and each detail too; an impeccable executive who gets the right things done with impeccable timing; and one who does not break the firm while implementing bold actions.
Last November, at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival Ms. Ahrendts gave insights on what she is doing to improve Apple Retail. In a nutshell, she is unifying the physical and digital experience. Her reason is simple, the experience was fragmented and that is a mistake. As reported by Fast Company, at one point she asked Tim Cook about why Apple.com, the Apple Store website, and the physical stores were all separated experiences?
“I asked Tim a very simple question: Why do we do it this way?” she recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t know — we’ve always done it this way.’”
— Angela Ahrendts’ discussion with Fast Company’s Rick Tetzeli at the Innovation Festival
That is precisely the sort of situation that a marketer seeking to unify the customer experience must identify and home in on — with laser sharp focus. Angela did it right away.
Here comes the clever part, Ms. Ahrendts started by getting to know her team, by listening to what they had to say, by learning. She used the culture already in place to unite her team and to get them to collaborate with each other. She started with the people. This is because Angela sees them,
“… as executives in the company who are touching the customers with the products that Jony [Ive] and the team took years to build. Somebody has to deliver it to the customer in a wonderful way.”
— Angela Ahrendts talking about leadership on the February 2016 edition of Fast Company
In her mission to unify the customer experience, Angela Ahrendts is making the most of her team of 60,000. She is investing in them, trusting them, and making sure they have everything they need, for the benefit of the customer.
What Angela gets is that it is not only “the physical” and “the digital” (“offline” and “online”) what needs unification but the people, the processes, and the technology. Delivering a frictionless and unified customer experience along the lifecycle is an organisational challenge that breaks the boundaries of any single department or function.
That is why, for example, when plotting how to best deliver Apple Music she sought Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue (who run that part of Apple) and co-ordinated with them. She understands that the stewardship of the customer lifecycle is nowadays a critical marketing objective and that effective stewardship requires a tight integration and co-ordination with all those teams who create and deliver a firm’s products and services.
Angela Ahrendts is proving to us that in order to create a seamless customer experience, we marketers need to think not only about how to build bridges between physical and digital experiences but, most importantly, that we need to focus on aligning our people and processes — within our marketing teams and with the rest of our organisations.
Convergnce looks at its clients’ marketing challenges in a similar way. Marketing maturity is our approach for helping your marketing organisation to become most effective and at the helm of it resides our unification practice. If you have an interest in working with Convergnce, just reach for us.
Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3053380/the-fas...
Originally published on Thoughts, the blog of Convergnce|Marketing Maturity:http://www.convergnce.com/thoughts-marketing-maturity/2015/11/12/apple-retail-does-unified-marketing-is-your-firm-doing-it-too
