Andrew Lucyszyn
From an unloved, hardscrabble upbringing in a remote boarding school, Ebenezer the web analyst was forced to grow up isolated and self-reliant, inventing metrics imagined only with the light of a pitiful candle before finally being rescued by a loving sister.
Then, bursting with promise under Master Marketer Fezziwig’s apprenticeship, Ebenezer blossoms into a man of business. He works tirelessly for the understanding and advancement of his customers, only to succumb to greed and the singularity of his online purpose. His colleague Belle, fearing Ebenezer’s bloody-minded pursuit of his own digital goals at the expense of their mutual goals, stops coming to his weekly four-hour reporting recitations, leaving Ebenezer in a customer intelligence silo of his own making.
Ignoring the entreaties of Jacob (his old college roommate), Bob (his intern), and Fred (his annoying, but well-meaning, nephew), Ebenezer is eventually visited by the Three Spirits of Customer Intelligence, gets the pants scared off him, and reforms his hard-hearted spirit, aligning his personal metrics with the overall business objectives of his company, using the voices of his customers as a two-way engagement channel to develop new insights and purposes, and attempting to assess the attribution of both his and his company’s successes across multiple touchpoints.
And ever afterward, it was always said of Ebenezer that he knew how to keep his customers well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.
Ebenezer’s story is a COMPLETELY ORIGINAL cautionary tale of redemption in the age of multichannel marketing. While the perception within the marketing community can often be that it’s the old school marketer who needs to evolve and adopt digital, the reverse can be true as well.
An exclusively digital focus can often ignore the broader corporate objectives that keep the coal scuttles full and the smoking bishop flowing, and integration that fails to incorporate online behaviors, e-mail metrics, segmentation and modeling, and customer satisfaction, can be thin gruel.
Mankind’s business is always a multichannel business, and the dealings of your trade but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of your customers’ business. At the close of the long calendar of the year, recognize that your reclamation as a marketer acknowledges that the customer is simply loaning you their business from a mong a myriad of choices, with the power to render you happy or unhappy, depending on how you treat them.
P.S. This is obviously a painfully flippant metaphor for a beautiful and wonderfully entertaining tale of the reclamation of the soul at this joyous time of year, so do yourself a favor and read your Dickens! Happy Holidays!
About the Author:
Andrew Lucyszyn is the Director of Web Analytics at SIGMA Marketing Group.
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