Thirty years into the digital revolution, we still act like it’s 1995.
While other business critical disciplines like Manufacturing, Logistics, and Accounting have been transformed by digital solutions, Marketing repeatedly stumbles trying to capture the performance and efficiency gains digital solutions promise. No matter how hard we try, we still struggle to deliver “the right message to the right person at the right time.”
And Marketing is not alone.
Sales, Product Design, Customer Experience, and Service face the same challenges. The result being billions of dollars spent and years wasted – all while technology, and customer expectations, continues to evolve and move further and further ahead.
It’s not surprising Marketing, Sales, Product Design, Customer Experience and Service are suffering. The source of our pain is the same.
We are all in the relationship business.
The disciplines of Marketing, Sales, Service, and Customer Experience are all about establishing and leveraging relationships with audience members to encourage behaviors that support specific business outcomes. Relationships are built from past engagements, and the effectiveness of any one engagement depends and builds on the quality of every previous engagement.
Understanding engagement history is critical to delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time and place. It can also improve operational efficiency, as components of previous engagements can be reused and repurposed for future engagements.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
The disciplines of Marketing, Sales, Customer Experience, and Service operate independently. Each consist of many teams with different perspectives, practices, and ever-expanding set of technologies to help them meet their responsibilities.
This variety creates confusion when trying to capture and interpret engagement history. Confusion that drowns effectiveness, magnifies expenses, and hobbles innovation.
The answer isn’t to force a single solution on every team. What is needed is a way to “translate” the engagement data and context each team generates into a language all teams can understand.
That language needed to describe for audience engagements is called the 6Ws.
Why Now?
The challenges that the six W's framework addresses are not new. In fact, they are as old as language itself.
For effective communication, both parties must share an understanding of the terms and relationships being discussed. Without a shared understanding, or context, the parties could end up having entirely different conversations.
Creating and maintaining context is not easy. It requires constant care and attention to adapt to changing circumstances and priorities, and to keep the context at the forefront. In business, this need for coordination is evident in the endless meetings, memos, phone calls, and hallway chats aimed at aligning efforts across individuals, teams, and departments.
This approach worked well enough until the advent of digital technologies.
Digital technologies offer nearly instantaneous communication, automation of thousands of tasks per second, and machines capable of making human-like decisions. But machines still require context to function effectively, and providing context to a machine be tricky.
Machines lack shared experiences to flesh out context, cannot “read a room” to capture visual and non-verbal nuances, and cannot take advantage of chance encounters to reinforce context. Machines only know exactly what you tell them.
So how does an organization share the accurate, timely, and complete context required for digital technologies to help manage relationships with their many audiences without spending an unsustainable amount of time and effort inputting it? By doing three things:
Describing context using standardized, consistent, and universally understood terms.
Capturing context whenever and wherever it is created.
Minimizing manual effort to capture context and providing direct and immediate value in exchange for any required changes.
This is what the 6W's Framework is designed to address.