As a marketer, I am going to assume you will often put yourself in the shoes of the person you are marketing towards. When you go there, do you feel like you are receiving the information you need or want to receive and how you want to receive it? “I think so” or “I hope so” are responses I have heard when this question has been asked. This is not a huge surprise to me. Most marketing communications are directional messages geared to a target audience that have general similarities. Organizations conducting their marketing efforts using the “think so/hope so” approach are probably seeing some results and have come to dismiss these results as the baseline… and this becomes the norm. It is at this point that complacency kicks in, and it continues for years with the customer experience being just “ok.” The key to this story is don’t be complacent. Put effort into getting your data quality right, focus on advanced analytics and modeling to help draw out trends and correlations that help you create tighter target audiences, use A/B testing to find the right mix of personas and content to drive your message or call to action, build a holistic consumer engagement platform to support message delivery through the various channels required and back it up with reporting to support message attribution and performance reporting. I know it may seem like a lot to grasp, but if you want to change the impact your marketing is making on your consumer, you will need to push the envelope and strive for 1:1 engagement with highly personalized content that can be delivered seamlessly across all the channels. Your customers are expecting it, your competition is either doing or planning to do it, and you can’t afford to see customer shift...