Bloom Partners is proud to contribute the feature article on how to prepare for a digital-first future in the latest issue of the Global CMO Magazine.

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Implement Or Die
Andrew Vesey ggmn
The Chairman’s Report
Ian Derbyshire fgmn
Three Requirements
For CMO Longevity
Laura Patterson
Issue 2 | Volume 1
April 2013 - REPRINT
Markus Pfeiffer:
Are You Ready
For A Digital-First
Future?
50 Marketing Leaders
Over 50
Alan See
Trend Report:
Clean Slate Brands
trendwatching.com
Global CMO™
is the Official Magazine of Global Marketing Network, the
Global Body for Marketing Professionals. www.theglobalcmo.com
Meet GMN’s
‘Digital Doctor’

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Are You Ready For A Digital-First Future?
How To Make Customer Agility A Key Success Driver For Your Organisation
Markus Pfeiffer fgmn & Vincent Aydin
Is your organisation experiencing the impact of increasing
digitisation? Most likely. Have you noticed your competitors
employing digital tools to communicate with their
customers and market their products? Probably. Have you
thought you have to tag along and also “go digital”? Does
your company have a Facebook and Google+ profile, a
Twitter and Instagram account and maybe even a YouTube
channel? Sure thing, you’re mastering the digital world. The
truth is – you still have a long way to go.
Employing digital tools as a form of marketing and brand
presentation is just the initial stage on the path to Digital
Readiness, the starting point where most CMOs and
their co-executives are stuck not utilizing digitisation’s
full enabling power. Many executives fail to understand
that there is much more Digital has to offer beyond just
presenting your brand to customers in a unilateral fashion.
This article will familiarize you with the importance of
becoming digitally ready – as it is essential for developing

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Customer Agility, which constitutes the pinnacle of
fully utilizing digitisation’s enabling power, offering both
benefits for your customers and satisfying your business
goals supported by an organisational strategy. It’s the
new battleground for success in the fight for customer’s
attention, their satisfaction and ultimately loyalty.
Digital Readiness:
The Study
In order to explore the background behind the vast
differences that still exist among organisations regarding
their utilization of Digital, Bloom Partners conducted a
breakthrough study in 2012 to evaluate Digital Readiness
across leading brands in Germany. Our goal was to
analyse the underlying organisational drivers and success
factors that allow some firms to better take advantage of
digitisation and reap its benefits than others. We employed
a hybrid study approach, consisting of qualitative interviews
with C-level executives from blue chip brands operating in
the German speaking markets that were validated through
quantitative questionnaires entailing more than 300 upper
and middle managers from a total of eight industries
including FMCG, Telco, Automotive, Banking & Insurance,
Retail, Healthcare, Travel and Energy allowing us to draw
cross-industry conclusions.
Our findings support our initial notion: There is still much
confusion and insecurity regarding how to trim and prepare
one’s organisation for the increasing digitisation, steer it
towards Digital Readiness and create value for customers
while building on one’s business goals. More than half
of all participants can identify barriers to successfully
undergoing digital change – however those listed sound
more like excuses than true roadblocks hindering managers
to get their organisations fit for the digital world. Or would
you consider “technology and security issues” as the real
reason why many organisations are not yet making full use
of digitisation’s opportunities?
The items we used in interviewing participants revolved
around three major organisational drivers that can lead a
firm to achieve Digital Readiness and eventually let it profit
from higher firm performance. Across the board Digital
Leaders manage to outperform Followers and Laggards on
every major KPI – ranging from market share to profitability
to customer satisfaction. Regarding the latter category,
90% of Leaders state their customers are more satisfied
and loyal to them than to their strongest competitor. The
same is only true for 40% of the Digital Laggards.
Top Management As A Key Driver For
Digital Readiness
First, we found that strong top management advocacy
is needed to kick-start an organisation’s transformation
towards digital change – it explains 88% of organisations’
adoption of “Digital” by their Marketing departments.
Often times the real reason behind the gap in attempting
to adopt Digital is a lack of commitment but also a lack of
know-how on top management level to actually drive the
transformation that is needed. From the examples we have
seen we believe that full top management commitment

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to digitisation would entail assigning a designated role of
Chief Digital Officer (CDO), which combines knowledge and
expertise from both fields of the Chief Technology Officer’s
and the Chief Marketing Officer’s responsibilities. The CDO,
running his own cross-functional group of experts, can
become a key driver for identifying digital opportunities for
marketing but more so innovative new business models
that create real value added for customers.
With top management’s support backing it up, the
organisation will then be more open to adopt digital tools
and processes and their implementation across the entire
value chain. Top management needs to put a digital
strategy on the top of its agenda and build the know-how
and awareness for the related challenges in the board
rooms. The first challenge lies within acquiring necessary
knowledge and expertise around digital topics. But: you
won’t be able to acquire that externally by hiring top
talent from the pool of digital natives if you aren’t digitally
ready yourself. These potential employees tend to flock to
companies that match their digital enthusiasm and skills:
Our research shows that 81% of Leaders find it easy to
attract and retain qualified human resources, while only
24% of Laggards can say the same.
Although Digital Laggards are the ones that most badly need
top management to step up, kick off and advocate Digital
Readiness, only 28% of them state that digital topics are
regularly part of their management agenda. By contrast 98%
of Leaders make these topics a recurring theme on their
agendas. Their differences regarding top management’s
readiness to tackle the subject become even more evident
when analysing its know-how of digital topics: 98% of
Leaders compared to a mere 15% of Laggards claim their
top management can draw on valuable know-how regarding
Digital. Without top management support, Digital remains
communication 2.0 sitting in the marketing department
only – instead of being a central driver for growth.
Most importantly top management needs to radiate and
instil this digital spirit into their organisations, act as
role models, give guidance for change and foster the
implementation of digital tools and processes. That way
employees sense the true importance of the topic, feel
motivated to tag along and feed back into an organisational
culture fostering digital change.
Building on this, we define Digital Readiness as the extent
to which an organisation combines top management’s
awareness for digital topics with the adoption of digital
marketing tools and processes which are effectively used
to increase customer agility and drive digital change across
the entire value chain.
Exhibit 1: Stages of Digital Media utilization

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Increase Your Customer Agility
Secondly, our research suggests that Digital Readiness
in marketing is a major driver for a key competence we
call Customer Agility. This potential, however, can only be
leveraged when your marketing and sales departments
have significantly altered their processes to make full
use of the information from and about customers that
is gathered through digital channels like the Web and
especially social media interaction. Unless marketing and
sales departments are able to translate the information
they gather from customer interaction into relevant insights
for product and service development, digital communication
stays on the campaign level.
Therefore, marketing and sales both need to be aware
of the impact that digitisation will have on their own and
the organisation’s operations and thereby influence large
parts of their business. We have learned that 92% of
Digital Leaders state that digitisation has already altered
their processes substantially compared to only 31% of
Digital Laggards. This is much more than using the digital
channels “just” for communication and campaigns.
Amazon for example devotes great attention to carefully
monitoring users’ shopping patterns and usage behaviour
and subsequently analysing and evaluating gathered
data. Moreover, in an almost start-up like fashion, is
Amazon not afraid to trial a variety of new products and
services which application by customers the company then
specifically examines. Employing these efforts to attain a
deep understanding and sense what their customers long
for allows Amazon to respond with relevant products and
services supporting the optimization of its entire value
chain – from category management to payment to logistics.
From Communication 2.0 To New
Digital-Enabled Business Models
Overall, we see three stages of development in this context
(see exhibit 1). A first sample of companies is still using
digital as a playing field, trying different approaches without
having a clear perspective on the ROI of different activities.
They apply the most well-known digital tools “because
everybody is using them” and run Digital for its own sake.
Companies in the second stage utilize Digital with a clear
ROI in mind. This means being able to differentiate between
digital strategies that entail a positive payoff in form of
brand awareness, sales or new customers and strategies
that simply create fans or awareness that does not translate
into brand equity, thereby drain marketing resources and
do not exhibit attractive organisational benefits. Finally, at
the prime stage of development regarding the utilization of
digital strategies, organisations are able to take advantage
of digital media as an enabler for new business models.
These firms understand the potential that lies within the
connecting power of digital tools and support their activities
with a concise content strategy clearly defining how digital
opportunities are utilized in order to benefit both customers
and the top line of the company likewise.
In order to achieve this level of development marketing
departments need to understand that having dedicated
Exhibit 2: Application of digital strategies

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strategies for their website, social media, mobile or brand-
building is not enough. Only if marketing can support the
whole organisation in better sensing of customer needs
and actually use the information gathered to improve their
products and services, the investments will pay off. This
level of value creation uses co-creation and customisation
tools as a highly efficient way to create valuable and lasting
conversations with customers. Our study has shown that
most organisations have strategies to define what they
want to achieve with their website or social media. However,
what really differentiates Digital Leaders is the way they
use co-creation and customisation tools (from online-voting
to crowdsourced innovation) to really alter their existing
products and services (see exhibit 2).
Defining Your Digital Strategy
So what are the success factors that Digital Leaders seem
to have a better grasp on than firms trailing in Digital
Readiness? What makes these Leaders fitter for utilizing
Digital to develop Customer Agility?
As a guideline for developing a successful digital strategy,
you need to think in terms of three dimensions that
need to be aligned to successfully act in concert. First
allow yourself to think of your own business goals and
how a digital strategy is supposed to go about achieving
those. Do you want to win new customers? Do you want
to increase loyalty of your existing customers? Or do you
want to increase cross- or up-selling opportunities among
existing customers?
Secondly, you need to create clarity about how you can
actually create benefits for your customers through digital
tools. Think about the scope of potential benefits that a
digital strategy can offer your customers. Do they want to
be rewarded or enticed through motivating features? Do
they want to engage through social interaction or can you
provide them with a positive feeling about playing on and
strengthening their identity? Ultimately you need to support
the match of both spheres, your business goals together
with benefits for your customers, with an appropriate
content strategy. Decide whether the best way to achieve
success in both areas is by employing a strategy that is
revolving closely around your core product or whether it
makes sense to develop ideas that drift away from your core
business, go beyond and open up entirely new possibilities
and business opportunities. Each matchup of business
goal, customer benefit and appropriate content strategy
can then be supported through digital opportunities, which
are defined by relevant channels as well as according
activities.
Look at Nike for example and its well-known Nike+ scheme.
Nike’s real achievement with the Nike+ iPod is using social
networks’ connective and interactive power as a basis for
setting up a new business model entailing an entirely new
and overarching ecosystem of complimentary products.
The hardware consisting of a chip built into your running
shoes (Nike or any other shoe brand) would transmit your
workout data to your smartphone and subsequently enable
you to share your daily workout log and achievements with
an online community of fellow runners. The community
would then give each other feedback on their respective
performance and motivate each other to achieve their
fitness goals. This is the perfect example of setting up a
whole new business model mounted on social media –
selling running shoes and complimentary hardware that
allows for and invites social interaction with fellow runners
from the digital community. Its success speaks for itself –
runners in the community that were using the Nike+ chip
with non-Nike sneakers are 40% more likely to switch to
Nike running shoes upon their next sneaker purchase.
This example clearly articulates the difference between
Exhibit 3: Nike+ ecosystem | Sources: www.stadt-bremerhaven.de www.wired.com

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utilizing digital channels for their own sake, like setting
up a Facebook fan-page vs. creating entirely new revenue
streams that utilize the power of social media only as an
enabler.
Therefore, it is critical to make yourself aware of the
multidimensional nature of digital strategies. Through
digitisation you are much closer to and better connected
with your customers allowing you to involve them much more
in your development processes. Integrate and motivate your
customers to create ideas, innovations and products jointly
– together with you and their fellow communities! A great
example are the crowdsourcing activities employed by Coty
Inc., a New York based fragrance and cosmetics firm. In
short Coty in Europe applied the crowdsourcing concept by
using the power of the crowd to develop innovations. This
was achieved by letting customers, mostly female fashion,
beauty and lifestyle aficionados, decide for themselves
what nail polish colours and designs they would like to see
developed and introduced to the market next season. This
was done based on a special software package provided by
Innosabi in Germany that lets companies create Facebook-
based product development environments in an utmost easy
and reliable way. Select participants of Coty’s contest would
also receive their very own nail polish creation kit which
allowed them to mix colours, invent new designs and finally
produce their very own customized nail polish at home. The
finished and final colour design would then be submitted
into a design contest and published on Coty’s homepage
where users could vote for their favourite designs that they
would like to see mass produced next season.
Within 14 days more than 800 colour designs were
created, more than 5000 comments were posted on the
event homepage, more than 10,000 ratings submitted and
20 “winning” colours selected for final production. This
co-creation strategy achieved three tasks: On a business
goal side, Coty was provided with a massive amount of
ideas coming straight from existing and new customers –
allowing the firm to win future customers, create upselling
opportunities for their existing ones and likely even promote
their loyalty. In terms of customer benefits, users could
Exhibit 4: Coty nailpolish design contest | Source: www.unseraller.de
cydonna/photocase.com
Find out more at www.digital-readiness.com

8. 48 | April 2013
Exhibit 5: Digital Readiness Model
Markus Pfeiffer fgmn
Founding Partner, Bloom Partners
Dr Markus Pfeiffer is the GMN Programme Director of Digital Strategy
and Innovation and Founding Partner and CEO of Bloom Partners (a
GMN Strategic Partner).
Markus brings a combination of strategy and Marketing experience,
deep knowledge about research methodologies, and expertise in
working with top-level executives across many industries.
Recently, he has led major growth initiatives for consumer brands
within the Nestle portfolio, the energy conglomerate EDF, electronics
giant Philips, and many others. His experience from working for large
organizations as much as start-ups is vital for the tool development
and expertise about digital business models at Bloom Partners. As
an angel investor and serial entrepreneur Markus is also involved
with several startup companies in the social commerce, fashion,
telecommunication and media sector.
He is a regular invited speaker to industry conferences and a visiting
professor at the University of
Cologne, Germany.
He holds a diploma in Business
Administration from Munich School
of Management, Germany and a
doctorate degree from the Center on
Global Brand Leadership, Columbia
Business School, New York. His
publication list includes over thirty
papers and books.
express their identity through their very own nail polish
design. They could interact with other users and discuss the
latest trend colours of the upcoming season and obviously
post their ideas and inventions across their social graph.
They would be rewarded for submitting their personalized
designs to the event homepage by positive ratings and
potentially become one of the winning designers. The co-
creation activity on Facebook allowed the firm to directly
utilize its results by incorporating winning designs into next
season’s production cycle.
The lesson (marketing) executives need to learn is that
Digital Readiness is not an easy task to master, but
a highly rewarding one nonetheless. Advocacy from
the executive level has a huge impact on achieving a
transformation towards Digital Readiness. As you will
notice in the following exhibit depicting our study model,
Top Management Advocacy is responsible for 88% of the
subsequent adoption of Digital by organisations’ marketing
departments. Once you have adopted digital tools and
processes and implemented them into your organisation,
the challenge lies within realizing the scope of opportunities
that digitisation enables you to take advantage of.
Executives need to become channel-agnostic, forget about
Facebook Pinterest, Instagram etc. for a second and
instead focus on the possibilities you are offered beyond
one-way communication, display ads and other campaigns.
Simply employing digital marketing tools is not enough, as
this merely drives 25% of firm performance. Instead utilize
Digital to build deep relationships, open and adapt your
processes to the new environment and fundamentally build
Customer Agility. It is by far the most important catalyst
for achieving higher firm performance. Utilizing digital tools
adopted by the marketing department to better sense and
respond to ever changing customer needs is the driving
force behind becoming a Digital Leader, as better Customer
Agility drives 45% of today’s firm performance.
Join The Discussion:
Do you think most Marketers are
Digital Ready?

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Sample Issue
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