Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research's weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
It's no surprise that the marketing executive has about as much cachet as the IT executive in your typical retail enterprise. The two big gorillas in the room are merchandising and store operations and, for a long time, retail has needed it to be that way.
But the world has changed. The good news is that a lot of retailers recognize it. The bad news is they haven't figured out yet what to do about it — or worse yet, haven't accepted the inevitable. Someone must own the customer experience. I know personally, I've even waffled on that statement, as our research has shown that retailers have been very unwilling to go down a path towards a "chief customer experience officer" or something like it. But our latest marketing report has crystallized my thinking.
In our report, Marketing in Retail: Making the Case for the CMO, we found that retailers seem to be preparing for some of the major organizational changes that concentrating power into a customer experience executive role would require. That's good news. But any organizational changes, especially to that degree, take literally years to take hold, and retailers really just don't have that long.
Here's how I know why that's true. More and more I hear from vendors that have some really cool solutions — ones with great potential to enhance the customer experience. Some have especially been focused on stores, where the customer experience is increasingly on the ropes compared to the online experience. Their primary frustration is that they have no one to sell their solutions to. Store ops nods their heads and say, "Yes, this is great!" But their primary objective is trying to squeeze as much productivity out of a dwindling or already dwindled labor budget. They don't have any room to consider investments into customer experience. And the marketing organization doesn't have nearly enough sway (or budget, really) to make an investment decision that would impact store operations to any great degree.
So retailers can argue till the day is long that they may or may not need an executive focused on the customer experience, but when the reality is that great solutions languish simply because the person who should champion those initiatives just doesn't exist — now, we have a problem.