Aarron Spinley | The Concept of Customering - Is Technology Overwhelming the Customer Experience?

Summary

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CMO Confidential with Mike Linton

Guest: Aarron Spinley

Episode: The Concept of Customering – Is Technology Overwhelming the Customer Experience?

Air Date: July 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, host Mike Linton (former CMO for Best Buy, eBay, and others) sits down with Aarron Spinley, co-founder of the Field Bell Institute and author of "The Customering Method." Together, they tackle the evolving discipline of customer management, challenging the effectiveness of digital-era tools and questioning whether technology is truly improving—or overwhelming—the customer experience. Spinley advocates for a fundamental rethinking of how organizations approach, understand, and serve customers, warning against overreliance on technology and trendy metrics like NPS.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Is Customer Experience a True Management Discipline?

• Spinley asserts that managing customers is ancient and essential:
  • “Managing customers is definitely a real management discipline. We’ve been doing it in repeat patterns since the Bronze era, right?” (01:55, Aarron Spinley)
  • Despite its longevity, modern organizations have “got a little bit lost,” especially under the weight of proliferating digital channels.

2. Defining “Customering”

• Customering as the complement to marketing:
  • “Marketing… attracts customers and builds a customer asset. …Customering is one of the most logical terms…it’s the other side of the coin from marketing.” (03:16, Spinley)
  • Marketing is about the market; customering is about managing the customer base as an asset.

3. The Pitfalls of Conflating Marketing & Customer Management

• Common Missteps:
  • Many organizations mistakenly apply marketing concepts (e.g., segmentation, targeted messaging) to customer management, often diminishing service quality.
  • “We import marketing concepts over into customer bases. That then moves us into things like targeted triggering and messaging…and there's lots of good literature that shows that will actually damage a customer base that's not service oriented.” (05:13, Spinley)
• Data Quality Concerns:
  • Tools like NPS and surveys utilize unreliable, self-reported data.
  • “You’re generating self-reported data. We’ve known for a long time that self-reported data is among the most unreliable forms of data known to mankind.” (06:53, Spinley)

4. Loyalty, Satisfaction, and the Danger of Faulty Metrics

• Empirical Patterns Over Anecdotal Metrics:
  • Loyalty is about a company’s share of category purchase frequency, not self-reported affinity (e.g., “advocates” in NPS).
  • “In most categories, they [advocates/detractors] don’t exist…It’s a useful frame if you’re trying to sell surveys software.” (08:45, Spinley)
• Banking Example:
  • John Dawes' research: The more banks a customer has, the less satisfied they report being with each, showing that satisfaction does not drive loyalty; rather, loyalty colors satisfaction reports.
  • “We know that satisfaction doesn’t drive loyalty. It’s pre-existing loyalty that has a direct impact to the way that we report satisfaction.” (12:05, Spinley)

5. Measurement: Overused and Misunderstood

• Asset, System, Measurement—In That Order:
  • “You can't build a system of management for an asset you don't understand. And you can't measure a system for an asset if you don't understand the system.” (13:12, Spinley)
  • Organizations often start with measurement before understanding the customer base’s true nature.

6. Properly Understanding and Managing Customer Bases

• Empirical Laws:
  • Laws like double jeopardy and purchase duplication govern customer behavior across industries.
  • Smaller brands lose a higher percentage of customers.
  • Service preempts sales—overemphasizing sales activation (often via Martech) erodes service and damages long-term performance.

7. The Martech Stack: Enabler or Obstacle?

• Misapplied Technology:
  • Martech is often used to automate old mistakes, prioritizing sales activation (“sell more stuff”) at the expense of service.
  • “Most Martech…takes its title literally—marketing technology. But…it’s actually not engaged…You want to be engaging with customers on a customer management basis, not on a marketing basis.” (27:14, Spinley)
• Automating Profit Destruction:
  • Automating price promotions leads to lower profits—“the number one killer of profit is price promotion…a lot of Martech is actually automating the destruction of economics.” (28:23, Spinley)

8. What Does Good Look Like?

• Needs-Based, Context-Based Interaction:
  • Rather than blasting segments with offers, true service means responding to individual customer journeys.
  • “You actually need to be able to have 3, 4, 5, 6 million different conversations, not five promotional conversations…the nuance in service has a much greater requirement than that.” (28:45, Spinley)
• Successful Example:
  • Liverpool Football Club’s reactive fan engagement model: Don’t dictate journeys—react to them.

9. The Role of AI: Accelerant or Fix?

• AI has long been a “plumbing” tool for decisioning, not a panacea:
  • “A lot of people now are talking about AI decisioning like it's new. We've had AI decisioning since the 90s.” (30:28, Spinley)
• AI accelerates your starting point—so it can speed up your errors, too:
  • “AI is first and foremost an accelerant…so it accelerates your mistakes as well.” (32:25, Spinley)
  • Agentic AI is promising but dangerous without a solid foundation; isolated agents lack essential context.

10. What Should Marketers Do Right Now?

• Step Back from the Tools:
  • “Put the tools down. Step back. Get a good solid grasp of the fundamentals…learn the asset.” (33:22, Spinley)
  • Focusing only on tools is “a finite business”—understand the fundamentals, and you’ll weather any technological shift.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If your customer base is your most valuable strategic asset, you want to be managing that on a more solid footing than that [self-reported data].” (07:00, Spinley)
• “Dead people don’t spend much money…or they move. The local bar is no longer their local bar—that physical availability is broken.” (16:54, Spinley – humorous moment)
• “If you start rolling out agentic capability on the edges, you will further collapse your service. Isolated agents are not context rich.” (32:25, Spinley)
• “If you’re a lawyer, you don’t go measuring NPS or CSAT across your client base to understand how to practice law…We need folks to get beyond thinking about customer bases as a group of measures and into understanding it properly as an asset.” (20:29, Spinley)
• Practical advice: “Learn the asset…pretend you’re an architect and you need to learn how to be an architect…You really can be a customer engineer. Learn the asset; that will inform system, and then and only then can you get to measurement, but do it in the right order.” (35:09, Spinley)

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• Defining Customering vs. Marketing: 03:16
• Problems with NPS and Self-Reported Data: 05:13–07:00
• Banking Example – Satisfaction vs. Loyalty: 09:28–13:01
• Asset-System-Measurement Sequence: 13:12–14:21
• Misapplication of Martech: 25:31–28:23
• What Good Looks Like in Customer Management: 28:45–30:03
• AI as Accelerant – Risks and Realities: 30:28–33:13
• Practical Advice “Put the Tools Down”: 33:22, 35:09

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In Summary

Spinley’s thesis is clear: Technology and metrics matter, but foundational understanding of the customer base must come first. The discipline of "customering" is about professionalizing how companies manage the customer asset—not just measuring or marketing to it. AI and Martech can help, but only if built on sound principles and a service-dominant mindset. Marketers, beware the allure of easy data and automation—step back, learn the asset, and only then pick up your tools.

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Transcript

[Mike Linton]

The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential,

[Aaron Spindley]

the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton.

[Mike Linton]

Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, ebay, Farmers Insurance, Ancestry.com here today with my guest Aaron Spindley. Today's topic the concept of customering is technology overwhelming the customer experience. Now, Aaron is a fellow and co founder of the Field Bell Institute, an organization that provides MBA level education for executives and teams on customer management and the customer experience. He has also authored a book called the Customary Method. Not surprisingly, he and his team are focused on professionalizing customer management. Welcome Aaron.

[Aaron Spindley]

Thank you. Thank you, Mike, very much. Appreciate it. Good to be here.

[Mike Linton]

Good to have you. So the first question, is customer experience a real management discipline or not?

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, managing customers is definitely a real management discipline. We've been doing it in repeat patterns since the Bronze era, right?

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

If you look at the economics of it, that's where historians first started to see these, these patterns, brand codes, things like that go back a lot further than that. But managing customers in sort of repeat patterns about 5,000 years. So we've been doing it for, for a long time. We've got a little bit lost. And a lot of that has to do with the digital era. Service really collapsed under the weight of channels and touch points and device proliferation and things like that. And so we now need to manage the customer base in a much more formal way than we used to do that. Customer experience, while that's sort of become a term, that's an umbrella for a whole lot of different things. And a lot of those things are really just digital era inventions that aren't particularly effective. Right. There's a lot of conflation of technology, product marketing with management theory that goes on. So yeah, in short, we do need to manage the customer base, but we need to know what we're doing when we're doing that. And not being so guided by our tools.

[Mike Linton]

So tell me, what is customering or what is customer experience for real? Let's define it on your terms.

[Aaron Spindley]

Okay. Okay. Well, I think customary, obviously I would say this. I think customering is one of the most logical terms in the world. It's really just the other side of the coin from marketing, right. In marketing, we go out to the market to attract customers and build a customer asset. Right? So market is the root word. We now have an asset. We have a customer base that requires management. Customer is the root word of customering. So we go out to the market with marketing. We manage the customer base with customary.

[Mike Linton]

Okay, so I want to conjugate the whole verb, like I am customering you to have customerized. Or I could do the whole conjugation thing. Tell me, what is the key to customering?

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, look, it's. And often this comes around with this sort of, sort of customer science type concept as well. Right. Customering is again, simply, it's a management model. It's a management method like any other method that we have in business. It answers the question, how do we do something in this case, how do we manage a customer base properly? Right. Not from the perspective of a particular vendor's angle, not from a research industry perspective, but firstly, understanding what a customer base is. Most folks don't know what a customer base is, which sounds like a weird thing to say, but it's really nothing more than a series of economic patterns that happen broadly across every customer base in the world. And folks in sort of CX have never learned this stuff. So there's kind of this important sequence.

[Mike Linton]

So I have to interrupt because I will say the whole bunch of people will say, gosh, we do this all the time. We have nps, we have our patterns, we have purchase patterns through whatever the brand is, we have segments. Why is that not customary?

[Aaron Spindley]

So a couple of things going on there. Number one, we're conflating marketing concepts with customer concepts. We have to be a little bit careful. Market diagnostics, for instance, is appropriate. Customer research is less, less useful. Right. Because we've gone from market economics to service economics. Service is about the individual markets are about either a mass market or about the segments they're in. So we import marketing concepts over into customer bases. That then moves us into things like targeted triggering and messaging. And there's lots of good literature that shows that will actually damage a customer base that's not service oriented. Right. So when we talk about patterns and a customer base, we know broadly what the distribution of revenue will be across our customer base by heavy and light buyers. We know the sort of loyalty effects that occur, where they come from and the differentials between big brands and small brands, for instance. These are things we learn the empirical science, if you like their empirical knowledge. But so many folks in the field know that. And so you know, to your point around NPS or surveys and things like that, it's a bit of a poor man's proxy. The idea that you can understand a customer base by asking it questions is great for survey software. Vendor market cap doesn't do much for your knowledge of a customer base. And there's another problem with that, which is that you're generating self reported data. We've known for a long time that self reported data is among the most unreliable forms of data known to mankind. Now, if your customer base is your

[Mike Linton]

most strategic valuable drugs team at the most unreliable data known to mankind. Wow.

[Aaron Spindley]

Among. Among. Absolutely. Because of the way that our cognition works and the way that our memory works, we can't self report on so many areas. So if your customer base is your most valuable strategic asset, you want to be managing that on a more solid footing than that.

[Mike Linton]

Hey, can you give me an industry or product example of what you're talking about here? Like where the science or the NPS says one thing and then the customer pattern is different.

[Aaron Spindley]

Yeah. So what you'll get, there's a bunch of them. I think one of the. Probably a good example here is that when we look at loyalty, for instance. Yeah, we know. I mean, first of all, loyalty is in strict economic terms is just your company's share of the category purchase frequency rate. Right. So if someone buys something 10 times a year and they buy off you eight times, they're a heavy buyer or they've got high loyalty to you. If they buy off you once or twice, they're a low level loyalty. But the category purchase rate at 10 per year is baked in at the market level, you can't do much about that. So it's just about your share of that purchase frequency. And we know that what drives that level of loyalty, it's a number of factors, but the underlying one are brand effects. So the salience, the coming to mind of your brand, the physical availability of your brand, so how easy it is to find the brand, access it, how easy it is to work with the brand, we know those are your primary underlying drivers of that level of loyalty. Now you raised nps. NPS uses terms like, you know, detractors and advocates and those sorts of Things. The reality is in most categories they don't exist, right? They don't. It's a useful frame if you're trying to sell surveys software. It's a useful frame if you're trying to build consulting around it or sell a form of measurements like nps. But we know empirically that that doesn't exist. And so there's a big difference between customering or customer science. If you like good solid data for managing a customer base versus some of this kind of populist narrative out there like that.

[Mike Linton]

Can you give me like a category like candy bars or cars or insurance or banking and give me an example of the difference that you're talking about here?

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, look, there's what you'll typically see and there's always exceptions, right? What you'll typically see in those patterns and the reason they're called laws and law like patterns is because they are, they continue and they repeat across categories. And most of the studies done here are across categories and across geographies and things like that. So, and you tend to, you know, for them to be defined as a pattern, you tend to see them present everywhere. There's exceptions. Like for instance, in my own category where I provide professional education, you will see folks that talk about the course and things like that, and you'll get some growth from those sorts of promoters, if you like. But in most categories that doesn't exist. Another place that does exist is hospitality or where there's got new buyers that have enjoyed a level of novelty. They just discovered a product and they're excited about it and they tell someone. But that doesn't happen in your heavy buyers because they've been buying for a long time. There's no novelty there. No one goes to the barbecue and talks about the new brand of toothpaste. So there's those sorts of things. Now there's a really interesting study when you talk about industries. A guy named John Dawes, who's a professor of marketing science at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, looked again at this loyalty thing and he used banking is where he, where he, where he had a good look at the, at loyalty. And what he found is that, you know, the idea that's been very common, that satisfaction is what drives loyalty. We've had suspicions about whether that's been true for a long time, haven't we?

[Mike Linton]

And satisfaction is self reported, right?

[Aaron Spindley]

That's right, that's right. And there's a difference between, so I'm

[Mike Linton]

going to the bank, I'm going to my, you know, Aaron Spinley bank and I have satisfaction on this and I have checking there. Maybe I have some investments or maybe I have a mortgage there. Now make your. I'm sorry, I'm interrupting. But now make this dos thing totally real for me.

[Aaron Spindley]

Sure, sure. Well, here's the question. How many banks do you have?

[Mike Linton]

The reason I only have the Spindley bank because I'm very loyal.

[Aaron Spindley]

Okay, you're very loyal. You like my bank? Okay. I wish I had one by the.

[Mike Linton]

Me too.

[Aaron Spindley]

If you had one bank, you are going to be, you're going to have a level of satisfaction with that bank.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

If you have two banks. So maybe you've got a mortgage with one bank and credit cards and savings and things like that with.

[Mike Linton]

No, maybe I have three banks and I have investments somewhere.

[Aaron Spindley]

So yeah, for each one of those banks that you have, the more banks that you have, the less satisfied you are with each of them compared to someone that has less banks. So if you've got three banks, you will be less satisfied with each of those banks that someone that only works with two banks. And if you have two banks, you'll be less satisfied with each of those banks than you are with someone that has one bank. So you see again we know that satisfaction doesn't drive loyalty. It's the pre existing loyalty that has a direct impact to the way that we report satisfaction. So these are again it's a good example. This is something that applies, we think across industry but it was done in the banking sector, something we can all relate to. And you see these patterns repeat over and over.

[Mike Linton]

So satisfaction is a bad measure. What is a good measure? What should I be looking at there when I have say four banks now?

[Aaron Spindley]

Measurement. Measurement. This is one of these subjects that I often talk about. Trendy rabbit holes. And one of the things that happens particularly in sort of this sort of trendy rabbit holes.

[Mike Linton]

I like that.

[Aaron Spindley]

Trendy habit holes. One of the things that happens in the CX industry is measurement is very important, but over indexed. What do I mean by that? Well, you can't start with measurement. Right. If we're constantly talking about measurement, we've skipped two important things. The first thing is you can't build a system of management for an asset you don't understand. Right. And you can't measure a system for an asset if you don't understand the system. So there's a really important sequence. We need folks to have an understanding of the customer base as an asset, then to understand the system of management for that asset. And then you can get to Measurement. Until you're there, you don't know what you're measuring, you don't know what you're looking at.

[Mike Linton]

So let's go back to the banking thing. I have four banks and I have credit cards with some. I have credit. Tell me what I have to understand in addition to the measures that I have. Like you used your checking account this much, this card is top of wallet, this card is second. What do I need to have that I don't have?

[Aaron Spindley]

Well look, it depends what you're looking to achieve, right? If it's all about. And let's, let's just from a marketing perspective, since the industrial era we've been in market based economies and marketing is the management response to that. The objective of marketing is always either to protect market penetration or to grow it. That's what growth is. So if the objective or the question you're asking is about how do I grow that? Well, we know that's primarily through brand effects, which is about that mental availability, the salience, the fame, the coming to mind and buying in non buying situations, that sort of thing. And then that physical availability is an important piece. In other words, how quickly or how easily someone finds the brand, how they're able to engage with it. So if your question is, well, how do I drive a particular product or things like that, the first question would be, well, is your, you know, if that product is for a particular segment but you know, or is there a greater propensity in a particular segment for that product? What kind of mental availability do I have in the segment and how readily available and easy is it to access that product? So those are your first two questions

[Mike Linton]

and how do I measure mental availability? Like is that because like we've already said self reported is bad. So like how, how am I thinking about mental availability and measuring it?

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, you're getting into, into brand tracking and all of that sort of good stuff. But that's not per se my area of where I focus my expertise in to leave that for the brand managers, for the marketing managers at that level. But yeah, you're definitely looking for those kinds of things. There's been a bit of nonsense over the last few years where people have been looking at clicks and impressions and things like that. Brand managers and scientists will say they're not sort of the measures you're looking for. But if you are in your customer base, and again if we distinguish between market and customer base as two different things in your customer base, the way that we're thinking about interaction or engagement is quite different to the way that we think about outbound messaging only into a market. And so your objectives in a customer base are things like what is obviously my attrition rate and particularly unnatural attrition. You hear folks will often say we're on a mission to get to zero tune. Like that doesn't exist. You know, I have a news flash for you. People die.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

And dead people don't spend much money, you know, or people move into.

[Mike Linton]

I've heard that about dead people.

[Aaron Spindley]

Yeah, it's true. It's true. I've checked. Or they move. Right. And so the, the local bar is no longer their local bar. That physical availability is broken. Or they leave a category. I don't, you know, I've gone back into buying baby seats in recent times in my life, which I never thought I would do again before that I'd left the category. Right. You don't go buy a baby seat.

[Mike Linton]

Not for fun. Yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

Right. So you have natural churn in any market and that's appropriate. What you're looking for is unnatural churn. Unnatural churn is just about always triggered by service failure. And so when you're getting into measures, you're looking at attrition rates, particularly understanding the difference between heavy buyers and light buyers because a light buyer might buy off you twice every five years. If you're measuring tune on an annual basis without understanding that that law, you end up accounting for light buyers who haven't turned in your churn. Statistics because you don't understand light buyers versus heavy buyers.

[Mike Linton]

Right. So how do I figure this out? Like if go to the bank thing, I have NPS and I can look at my heavy buyers and other buyers. NPS will say okay, I can see them and, and, but you'll say that is not actually showing the service failure, that's showing the outcome of the service failure.

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, it's not even that. I mean you've got your leading horse to water with nps. You know, will you recommend sort of thing. It's not great. It's not great method. We know again empirically and some folks like to shoot at me over this, but I don't, I don't teach my opinion. I just teach the data. Right. We know empirically that NPS doesn't. Now it's not a pre indicator of sales performance. It doesn't indicate growth and it's not a measure of loyalty. So it doesn't do the things that's on the tin, if you, if you know what I mean. And then you have some say it's

[Mike Linton]

a good, it's a good measure for retention.

[Aaron Spindley]

No, no. And because again, we're getting in self into self reported data and what you'll see if you, if you look at retention properly and again we come back to what loyalty is. Right. Share of purchase frequency. So you can actually track that in fairly hard numbers. If you're doing that and you compare that to mps, you can see massive differences. And so we know that the correlations aren't there. There's lots of good studies on that by marketing scientists that have looked at it. If you want to understand the broad sentiment of a customer base, that's about its only really solid utility. Accepting CSAT does a better job of that because it doesn't ask you to take an action on top of your likelihood of taking an action or recommending on top. It just seeks reported satisfaction. Now satisfaction is just a proxy for sentiment. It's just an act of memory and it's a little bit. Memory is dubious. But if you're capturing a point in time, piece of satisfaction on a specific thing, you know, the gala fireworks or a product piece of feedback, that sort of thing, it's relatively, relatively accurate and relatively directionally gives you good solid data.

[Mike Linton]

Are you arguing for much more precise measures at time of activity? I want to, I want to, I want to.

[Aaron Spindley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Linton]

And I haven't done that customer lifetime value measure question yet, but I want to make sure everyone that's listening knows what you're arguing for.

[Aaron Spindley]

For versus well, look, the main argument, and I'll come back to this sequence, asset system measurement. Because folks haven't grasped the asset properly, they jump to measurement as a kind of a way to try and understand the asset. It's what should I measure in order to understand what's going on? That's not how professions work. Right. If you're a lawyer, you don't go measuring, I don't know, NPS or CSAT across your client base to understand how to practice law. You were trained as a lawyer, you know the subject. You have technical managerial expertise. If you're a scientist or you're a neuroscientist, you have an underlying medical degree and then you have specialist training. This is a science, this is a learned thing. What we need folks to understand is you can do exactly the same thing in a customer base if I'm invited right now, with no notice at all, to go into a boardroom in a company I've never met in an industry I've never worked in and brief that board on their customer base and some of the patterns that are manifesting in their balance sheet, I can do that on a moment's notice. I don't need a measurement or a piece of survey to do that because I know the subject. In the same way that if they asked an engineer to come into the room and explain to them how bridges stand up, an engineer, construction engineer in particular, could actually do that because it's technical knowledge. And so we need folks to get beyond thinking about customer bases as, you know, a group of measures and into understanding it properly as an asset.

[Mike Linton]

So let's go back to the banking thing. How would I do that for me, as a banking customer?

[Aaron Spindley]

As a, as a, as the bank itself.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah. Like, if you're trying to say. I'm trying to, like, dissect the customering view. Yeah. Of banking customers.

[Aaron Spindley]

Okay. Well, all customers we know, for instance, again, follow those, those patterns. There's laws of double jeopardy, there's purchase duplication law, so we don't deceive ourselves that there's this mystical, exclusive loyalty that's very, very rare. We know that our customer base will overlap with that of our competitors in line or in proportion to the relative market share of each of those competitors. That typically happens across most sectors. Right. Yeah. So we understand that about our customer base. We understand that if we're a smaller brand, we will lose a higher proportion of our customer base. Then a bigger brand loses. That's just. These are, again, empirical. It's not very fair. Right. Why is bigger brands get an easier job? Well, they just do.

[Mike Linton]

Because they're bigger.

[Aaron Spindley]

There's brand effects. They have better mental availability. Gravity matters. That's right. So we know those things so we can teach people those things. We also know, because we have 5,000 years of precedent from service economics, that service preempts sales.

[Mike Linton]

Right.

[Aaron Spindley]

And so if you think a lot of. And we're going to talk about Martech later, I think. But if you jump directly into sales activation, which is what a lot of Martech does, it breaks the service dynamic and actually reduces propensity to purchase. We know that. So you see, there's a lot of things you can. If I come back to that bank, you can teach folks in their customer teams and their Martech teams and their contact center teams, their digital asset teams, you can teach them how a customer base actually works. Yeah.

[Mike Linton]

So in this, in this example, and then we'll go to the Martech stack and how we feed it. But if my bank is trying to sell me a mortgage versus trying to understand what I need Is that the mistake they're making?

[Aaron Spindley]

Yeah, it can well be. It's a little more nuanced, but yeah, that's, that's 100%. Right. I mean, look, and I talked before about how we often conflate market concepts and inject marketing concepts into a customer base. A lot of folks are very, very common. To segment your customer base. Yeah.

[Mike Linton]

Right. Yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

It's not really good practice. It's good practice to segment and market, but a customer base operates on service economics and that's based on individuals. What happens when we start to segment a customer base? We import that idea of targeting and sales activation and we constantly live in that world. So we think about a customer base as kind of the bottom of a marketing funnel, as opposed to the nuanced customer journeys of individuals. When you move into nuanced customer journeys of individuals, that's a service dominant logic. That's a mindset that is quite different. Use technology different. You measure different things. And so there's a big distinction between those, those two elements or those two.

[Mike Linton]

Let's talk about the Martech stack and the information you get that is providing different experience or different information. So for, for the folks.

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, look, the. Whenever we use technology, we tend to use it to advance the thing that we understand or the belief system that we have. If we are predisposed to constant sales activation in Martech, we will do that. And so we will use the data that we see.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah. And sell more stuff.

[Aaron Spindley]

To try and sell more stuff. And that's totally understandable. Right. If I come back to marketing for a moment, this concept of market orientation, which underlies all market diagnostics, is the simple idea that you have to be oriented to the market. And when you learn about market orientation, you learn about the enemies of market orientation. Advertising orientation is an enemy of market orientation because it says I've got to constantly be advertising them up. Which isn't necessarily untrue. But the mindset is about messaging at customers, not understanding what customers need and building products and aligning the business to those needs and then speaking to that or positioning based on those needs. Right. Another enemy is sales orientation. And ironically, lots of studies will show that a company that has a sales orientation will underperform in sales compared to a company that is properly oriented to the market. The same parallel happens in the customer base. Most Martech, one of the challenges that it has is it takes its title literally marketing technology. Right. But it's actually not engaged. You think about where all the automation happens. It's an. It's to existing customers within existing customer channels. It's not out in the wide market a lot. There's exceptions like ad tech and things, right. But generally you're in customer channels and so you want to be engaging with customers on a customer management basis, not necessarily on a marketing basis. And if you're in a marketing mindset, you're in a sales mindset and you see the erosion of service. We know service preempts sales performance, so we have it backwards.

[Mike Linton]

So what's a good example of someone that's doing it the right way?

[Aaron Spindley]

Well, a lot of the key tools, you know, tend to actually not be new. So for instance, decisioning is a really important capability and what that allows you to do is ask the right question. More than anything, a lot of marketing automation is classic segment sale. Right? So Mike abandoned cart, put Mike into segment, send Mike new offer.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah, give Mike 10%. Yeah, yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

And what that does though, it erodes profit massively. The number one killer of profit is price promotion. Right, Unnecessary price promotion. So a lot of mastic is actually automating the destruction of economics and a customer base without understanding it. But you're asking what, what good looks like?

[Mike Linton]

Yeah, what does good look like? Because I get all the problems with the sales and the marketing people, but what's good?

[Aaron Spindley]

What good looks like is needs based, context based interaction. So it's rather than, you know, how do I sell to this particular group of people? How do I make sure I get the right message to the right group of people? Which means you're starting in a limited basis. Right? You might have five different promotions or offers and you want to make sure the right one gets to each customer. Actually you could have a million customers and there could be three or four dominant journey paths for all of them which have different nuance for each of them. And so you actually need to be able to have 3, 4, 5, 6 million different conversations, not five promotional conversations. The nuance in service has a much greater requirement than that. And so you see that in companies that have much more, they tend to have a more complex ecosystem. Right. So lots of channels, complex consumer businesses. And there's, you know, I've seen it in places like Liverpool Football Club, for instance, when they looked at fan engagement across different journeys. They don't predefine or dictate the customer journey, they react to journeys. That's, that's a service mindset. You can only do that with the right tech.

[Mike Linton]

And then will I supercharge this competency? Because what I hear you saying is this is the more I understand what you want and I deal with your situation versus what I want to sell you, the better it is. And the faster I get that to you from a service perspective, the better you will reactive to me. Is AI a supercharger for this?

[Aaron Spindley]

It, it is and it has been for a long time. The, I mean, a lot of people now are talking about AI decisioning like it's new. We've had AI decisioning since the 90s, right. It's just an underutilized capability. I regard it as plumbing.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah.

[Aaron Spindley]

You can't deal with a complex customer base or a complex consumer business without decisioning. Otherwise you end up effectively automating spam. Right. That's essentially what you do. Decisioning gives you the ability to approach that in a much more sophisticated way and a much more service dominant way. So we've had decisioning since the 90s. We've had behavioral orchestration, which is the evolution of that, for over a decade now. None of that is agentic or generative. Right. That's been around for a long time. That's core AI and ML. And we are seeing now more adoption of that because of the explosion of generative, ironically. But it's not generative, it's core plumbing. AI has been around for a long time. What we are seeing is some new areas of AI. Obviously, agentic is a good example. And what you're seeing there is a bunch of mistakes at the moment. The thing that folks want to understand about AI is that it's first and foremost an accelerant. And it always accelerates where you are, where your starting point is now. So whatever your mindset is, whatever your approach is, you look for ways to do that better or faster or more efficiently. Right. And so it accelerates your mistakes as well. And we see that a bit with agentic. If you don't have a core centralized orchestration capability in a complex consumer business, and you start rolling out agentic capability on the edges, you will further collapse your service. And the reason for that is because isolated agents are not context rich. They don't know what happened a month ago or last week or what's happening currently in other channels, in parallel journeys, things like that. They operate in largely in isolation, maybe with a connection to one or two others, but they don't deal with some of the complexities of decisioning that you need. At the core, things like decay concepts and things like proper journey context, which is behavioral in nature. Because behavior occurs over time and it occurs over channels and touch points. It doesn't occur at one place. It's not an isolated data point. And so agentic use cases are exciting, but you've got to have a foundation first.

[Mike Linton]

So what. We're almost out of time. So one question before our traditional last one. What should listeners be doing now to set up.

[Aaron Spindley]

Oh, look, you'd expect me to say this, Mike, so I'll say it. You know, I often say to students, put the tools down. They're just tools. Put the tools down, Step back, get a good solid grasp of the fundamentals. And I think this is even more important than it's always been. And that's ironically, an extension of the AI conversation. If you look at folks in research, the rise of synthetic data is challenging that space. And it'll reinvent itself, probably, but it probably won't employ the number of people it has now. If you're on the customer side and you've oriented your career and this idea of customer research, you know, you're going to have some job and security issues as well, as AI effectively starts to replace those things that an algo can deal with. Right. So, and this happens in different areas of martech and things like that as well. We've got to put the tools down, because if our careers based on tools, well, that's a finite business. Right. You want to understand the asset. And so I always say, if you had no tools today and you had a great chat with Tom Goodwin about, you know, whether CMOs were better in the 1950s before all this digital clutter, I think he answered the question that he believes it is. I. If that's what his answer was, I would agree with that.

[Mike Linton]

No, he said they'd be fine because the principles are the same.

[Aaron Spindley]

That's right. And that's the same basis and customer. So we got to get people to put the tools down, learn the fundamentals, and they'll ride whatever waves come our way technologically. That's the main test right now.

[Mike Linton]

Got it. So this brings us to our traditional last question. Funny story you can tell on the air or piece of practical advice we haven't discussed yet. You have to take at least one of those, but you can take both.

[Aaron Spindley]

Okay. All right. Well, I will. I will take the pragmatic one because, you know, I practice jokes and I don't deliver them well. Look, I'll come back to what I, what I said earlier. It's such an important thing for folks to grasp. The most practical thing is learn the asset. Right. It's a little bit of what I just said before. Put the tools down. Step away from the conference associations for a moment. Learn the asset Pretend you're an architect and you need to learn how to be an architect, right? Or an engineer. You can be a customer engineer. You really can. Learn the asset that will inform system and then and only then can you get to measurement but do it in the right order.

[Mike Linton]

Yeah, got it. All right, well that's a great way to end the show. Thank you Aaron. Thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, please like share and subscribe. New shows drop every Tuesday and you can find all of our more than 165 shows on Spotify, Apple and YouTube which include Agency Economics in the Age of AI. What your CIO wants to tell you but won't Marketing at Meta, the view from the eye of the storm and the confident B2B marketer. Are you one of the few? Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential.