At yesterday’s excellent BIMA Breakfast Briefing I joined agencies PhD and We Are Social to debate the future of customer centric marketing. You’d be hard pressed to have come away without recognising the massive impact gamification can have for data led marketing.

To keep you in the loop, I’ll paraphrase the key points here:

1. Customer centricity is about rolling out the red carpet to your best customers (Peter Fader)
2. Not all industry sectors suit a customer centric approach but B2B certainly does
3. To be effective, Customer centricity requires us to know who are our best customers
4. Existing segmentation tends to lack the necessary detail to create a ‘best customer score’ for each customer
5. There are 6 sources (at least) of behaviour data we need to create the best customer score:
   1. Online Engagement
   2. Purchases
   3. Marketing Attention
   4. Physical Visits
   5. Social Media
   6. Product Usage
6. Not all data is available today – we are hampered by:
   1. Poor campaign property to central CRM data exchange
   2. Rigid privacy policies creating data silos
   3. Legacy marketing systems without adequate data exchange
   4. No ability to track check-ins in store or at events
   5. Unlinked customer identities – i.e. not linking a twitter account to an email address
   6. No feedback from customer on actual usage of product
7. So, we don’t know who our best customers, so we can’t be customer centric.
8. What’s the big idea? Get customers to manage their own ‘best customer score’
9. Nike has obtained the data it needs with Nike+ where consumers see their score, link social identities, register purchases and record usage
10. Facebook has obtained the data it needs by gamifying social behaviour in its entirety
11. Gamification is the technique being used – it’s about a Win Win for both player and manager
12. Rise offers a ready to roll platform for running these data exchange for feedback programs on a trusted 3rd party.
13. Gamification solves the problem of not enough data to know who are our best customers.
14. Getting started I recommend focusing on social media as its light, public and easy to use
15. With Rise you can start with small, simple projects that can flex and grow into the future programs you want them to be

The full slide deck is available on slideshare. 

So there you have it, the ideal companion to your Customer Centric marketing program is a gamification program. What and who you gamify is very much up to you!