I (along with everyone I suspect) am so over hearing about the GFC. At the end of the day we stuffed up and are all responsible.
We can point the finger at politicians and CEOs of invest banks all but we all benefited to a degree. We all loved the cheap interest rates, the amount of money we could borrow for our dream home as well as how much our customer spent with us.
The ability to make money from a business idea hadn’t been so easy. As Marketers we had fantastic budgets to build new websites, digital marketing campaigns and create the next kick arse iPhone app to revival Angry Birds. The only problem is we broke a cardinal rule. We forgot to stay close to the customer and listen to what they wanted.
Now I am going to be controversial here and sound like Paul Keating! I think this is a recession the world had to have. It needed a reality check to bring business back to basics. It was time to put the customer centre stage of everything a business does again.
Right now businesses need to focus on understanding their customer, their needs and preferred communications channel. So my advise is get yourself really comfortable, blow the dust of your databases, excel sheets, website log files etc and read up on your customers. You will be amazed at what they are telling you about themselves.
Of course if you are having problems making heads or tail of your customer data you could always call MoCo as we are more than happy to help!