Good morning Marketer, how well do you know your customers?
“It seems counter-intuitive,” says Yamaha Marketing Technology Strategy Manager Athan Billias, “But you have to use data to know your customers, to be able to address them in an emotional way — that’s why a customer data platform is so important.”
Athan says his brand wants to know its customers so deeply that it can connect with them on an emotional level.
In recent years, Yamaha made a major shift, transitioning from being a “factual and rational” brand to become a more emotional brand. The move was part of Yamaha’s digital transformation strategy to put customers at the center of its marketing efforts.
“What we spent a lot of time doing is actually talking at our customers, not with our customers — we would give them messages that we thought were important, rather than listening to them,” said Athan. The brand reversed the way it engaged with customers, spending more time listening to them and focusing on a more customer-centric marketing model — and building up a martech stack that could facilitate this new model.
But, Athan says his brand’s path to digital transformation wasn’t about the tools — it was about the people: “One of the jobs you have as the evangelist for digital transformation is helping people deal with change — helping people to absorb the tools and helping people really change the way that they think about how to do business.”
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Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor
