| Good morning, Marketer, may all your customers be loyal. âYou can never know your customer too well.â A key piece of advice I got from P&Gâs legendary former CMO Jim Stengel. This was back in the day, when CRM solutions were the hot new thing. He dispatched anthropologists around the world to find out how people washed their clothes and hair and cleaned their homes. The cultural differences were fascinating even if you werenât selling detergent. (Stengel said that in Japan people wonât buy large containers of Tide, even though itâs less expensive. Homes are smaller and storage space is at a premium.) Stengelâs dictum may feel odd to marketers who have information coming at them out of a firehose. How do you figure out what data is important and what is not? Get to know your customer better. Understand whatâs important to them and youâll know which metrics matter. Which reminds me of what a garbage bag brand manager told me: âDonât overthink it. Itâs important to you, but itâs a two-second decision for them.â Constantine von Hoffman,
Managing Editor | 