Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Mastering Marketing Architecture for Strategic Gains
Ever wondered how to transform marketing technology into an effortless experience? Join us as Mishel Justesen, DCX Principal of Marketing Technology at Capgemini Americas, shares her groundbreaking journey from marketer to marketing technologist. Learn how her mission to create an "easy button" for marketers has revolutionized the way we think about unifying disparate marketing functions into a cohesive, data-driven system. Mishel breaks down her unique approach to experience architecture, revealing the essential steps and insights needed to build a supportable and functional marketing technology stack.
Mishel dives into the intricacies of aligning technology solutions with marketing goals, addressing common hurdles like shadow IT and technical debt. Using the Customer Data Platform (CDP) as a key example, she illustrates the importance of centralizing customer data for improved marketing insights. An experience architecture audit can reveal hidden strengths, guiding organizations toward a more integrated and sustainable tech ecosystem. Discover the value of visualizing customer journeys and the significant role of AI in enhancing marketing efforts.
In the final segments, Mishel emphasizes the necessity of customization and understanding end-user needs through relatable analogies like baking a cake. She discusses the evolving landscape of marketing technology, highlighting how AI simplifies data management and audience segmentation, enabling targeted campaigns with ease. Gain practical tips on overcoming data silos, accessing data for personalized marketing, and fostering strategic partnerships through experience architecture. This episode is packed with actionable insights for marketers looking to leverage technology to its fullest potential.
The top one that is always consistently number one and part of every single conversation data, data silos. I don't understand my data. I'm not able to query my data. I want to be able to get in as a marketer with a tool that's really easy to use, go through and start building segments and understanding how many people I have in Wisconsin that like cheese.
Mike Giambattista:Today, on Customer Land, michelle Justison makes a return visit, which I'm very happy about. Michelle, for those of you who missed the first episode of her appearance here, is DCX Principal of Marketing Technology at Capgemini Americas, which is a giant title, but it's also a giant remit, and what you may have missed and I'm just going to encourage you to go back into the archives and find that one, because it was a really exciting conversation about new ways to conceptualize CX and the terminology that Capgemini has now developed to encompass all of those functions. So I'm going to be quiet and let you describe what you do at Capgemini and just say thanks for this.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah Well, thank you for having me back. I'm very excited to kind of come back and talk about how this experience architecture point of view is going. So what do I do? I do a lot of things, but at the core of what I do is I am a marketing technologist. I'm a marketing technology geek, as I like to call it. I was a marketer for a long time before I went to the dark side of technology, and I've never looked back.
Mike Giambattista:I think my goal in life I would just say, if I may, you made it out of the dark side, I think you oh, I made it out of the dark side.
Mishel Justesen:Yes, you did.
Mike Giambattista:You escaped, well done.
Mishel Justesen:Oh well, thank you. I think I like both sides of the fence, but the technology side has just really captured me and basically the reason why I do what I do is as a marketer. I was super frustrated with the technology that was out there. Now I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was, because I've been in MarTech land since before it was even called marketing technology. But yeah, before it was a thing.
Mishel Justesen:But my goal in life is to have an easy button for marketers to use the technology, and that's what I base everything I do on. And you know, marketers don't always understand what the heck I'm talking about if I go into ones and zeros and and code and all that stuff which I like equally stuff which I like equally. So I think my secret sauce has been really being able to translate what marketing wants to do into technology speak so we can actually build a marketing technology stack that works for the marketers and is supportable by the IT teams. And that's been like the golden ticket for me and for the industry as a whole, and so I'm just really excited that I've figured out this formula. It seems to really be working for me.
Mike Giambattista:Well, let's talk about the formula for a minute, because in our last conversation it was my introduction to the idea of experience architecture. May the term may have been around for a bit, but I just missed it, but but that and the way you describe that term seemed to encompass all of the critical functions that are just they're laying out here in disparate, semi disconnected areas of the universe, and I think you figured out a way to tie them all together functionally.
Mishel Justesen:I think I did and I think the success you know since the last year I've talked to you is really demonstrating that. So I'm really excited to be able to share that with with the audience here. So what does experience architecture? Where did it come from? When you and I talked a year ago, it was just a baby mention on the internet somewhere, right, and when I, when I came across the term, I was really looking for a way to describe how I do the type of work that I do, right, in a way that made sense to normal people, and I'm going to share a cute little story with you about what I mean by normal people. But so experience architecture?
Mishel Justesen:I think, hopefully, you know the work you and I have done the podcast, the articles I've written. I think it's made it more of a thing, but what it is is very simply how do you take the experience that a marketer is trying to create online or anywhere? Like you know, marketer's job is to get someone to be interested in and buy a product or service, right, so there's lots of different ways that a marketer can do that. How do you take that experience they're trying to create and map it to the technology that's going to light up that experience. So experience plus architecture, right? So I think the term itself is really easy to understand. However, implementing it and getting everybody aligned and making sure that you can orchestrate, that is a completely different animal all by itself.
Mike Giambattista:Oh yeah, that's. You know. Careers are made and broken on those on those tasks.
Mishel Justesen:Absolutely.
Mike Giambattista:So the way you described it I think it's worth just spending a few more minutes here is you're mapping the technology to what marketers are trying to accomplish, which seems really sensible and like, yeah, duh, of course. But the honest truth is, as you and I both know, most marketers don't approach it that way. Most technology providers don't approach it that way.
Mishel Justesen:We don't.
Mike Giambattista:It's kind of I have a problem, where's my solution? And these tend to be one-off additions to an already Frankenstein stack of technologies that, um, you know, end up producing just as many problems that they saw as they solve. So what's your approach there?
Mishel Justesen:Well, um, a lot, of, a lot of my approach, to be honest, is, you know, the way I, the way I've developed this point of view together with my you know team. Of course, it's not all about me, um, but, uh, the way, the way I've helped guide the point of view is, um, we're going to run into shadow IT, we're going to run into technical debt. We're going to find brilliant people on the client site maybe a technical marketer who's got a friend in IT, who's built something really cool, right, that fixes a niche thing. And so a lot of what the experience architecture format does is. It helps kind of reveal the band-aids that have been put onto the technology stack the screws, if you want to call it a Franken stack and understand the functionality that they're trying to get to and to really see if we can help them build that out in a technical format that's sustainable, supportable and can grow. A prime example of that.
Mishel Justesen:Let me just put that into more realistic terms here. We've got all different types of people listening to this, right. So let's talk about CDP, right? Customer Data Platform. What is that? It's just, it is a place where you put all of your information, your data about your customer into a central location so that you can understand what they're engaging with, what they're doing, and you can, you know, use that information to market to them better. Right, there's all different sorts of CDP flavors out there.
Mike Giambattista:They do different things and I would say there are even a handful out there that probably aren't real CDPs, but but love that they can call themselves that and get some attention.
Mishel Justesen:Oh yeah, it's been a buzz term for a while, and I think, I think, um, I think, just as a little sidebar, that the industry meaning marketers and the business side not the technology side per se are starting to recognize that it's. It's been a buzzword, right and it's I. I see CDP functionality in a tool that does a lot of other things, but because the industry is now starting to understand the value of what a customer data platform can do, they're using that to sell their platform, right. So, yeah, I have lots of opinions on that one. That could probably be a whole separate podcast by itself.
Mike Giambattista:Okay, let's book that one.
Mishel Justesen:That's going to be good, well, that's a good one, right. But for me, what the focus is with the experience architecture is let's just get all the data that the organization has that's useful to marketing in a place where it can be usable for marketing, right. So I want a marketing CDP, and what I'm seeing in a lot of you know and I'm always another thing that's really good to mention here is that I'm always I'm not focusing on a single slice of functionality, I'm focusing on the entire experience, so the entire technology stack. So I am never going to give a client a boutique-y CDP that doesn't work with the rest of their technology stack right. But that's what you see internally. If you have a really brilliant team internally at a client who knows how to do that, they can build some really cool technology that does one thing really well. And so that part for me, the experience architecture really helps highlight that. I always put it in a positive light because I love it when I see that stuff.
Mishel Justesen:It helps me understand the team understands what they need to be able to do, so it helps them understand the value of let's bring that functionality, that thing that you've built, into a bigger ecosystem that'll work for everyone Right? So the experience architecture process really helps highlight that and bring it out.
Mike Giambattista:So the experience architecture process really helps highlight that and bring it out. Can you, without giving away too much of the secret sauce, can you break down what that kind of experience, architecture audit for lack of a better term might produce? What does that look like? Is it 10,000 post-it?
Mishel Justesen:notes. Is it a narrative of functionality?
Mike Giambattista:Anyway, I'll shut up and let you kind of just talk through what that looks like.
Mishel Justesen:I wanted to give away some of the secret sauce today.
Mike Giambattista:Okay.
Mishel Justesen:So your question is I'm not going to give away anything I wasn't willing to give away today? I'm not going to give away anything I wasn't willing to give away today. So, top to bottom, the experience architecture point of view at the top level is you need to have that customer journey and, honestly, you'll have hundreds of customer journeys because there's hundreds of experiences that you'll want to create, depending on the size of the organization, the marketing teams, et cetera. Right, but just take one of your main customer journeys and map it out. If it's not already mapped out maybe it's in Figma, maybe it's in PowerPoint, you know whatever but there has to be a visual representation of a customer journey. That is your top level.
Mishel Justesen:From there, you need to dig into each step of that customer journey and it's an exercise of taking that customer journey. First step who, internally, are the people that need to support this? What are the tools that they're using? What are the processes that are broken or great? Do you have the data to enable this customer journey and what is the marketing technology that is pushing it out the door? And basically, you follow this customer journey and what is the marketing technology that is pushing it out the door? And basically you follow that customer journey and you come up with an overall map for that experience that reveals the gaps, it reveals what you already have and it gives you a way to build a roadmap for what you need to do to fill in those gaps.
Mike Giambattista:Picture your organization as a solitary island amidst a vast churning sea of opportunities. On the horizon lie other islands, relationships waiting to be built, partnerships waiting to be formed, but between your island and those distant shores stretches a turbulent expanse filled with uncertainty and risk. You're going to need a bridge or bridges plural to span this divide, connecting you to new horizons. Those bridges are strategic partnerships. Yet building bridges and partnerships is no simple task. They both require careful planning, precise engineering and a deep understanding of the terrain. Missteps can lead to collapse, leaving your business stranded on its island.
Mike Giambattista:Tectonic builds strategic partnerships, helping organizations navigate the treacherous waters, ensuring that those bridges are strong and resilient and scalable. There's a reason why some of the largest, most progressive companies in the world are retooling their revenue models and investing in partnerships. Find out more at tectonicco. That's T-E-C-T-O-N-I-Qco. So what you're saying makes absolute sense to me, but I think and that's partially I'm going to give myself a bit of a pat on the back here, partially because I deal with technology companies a lot and we talk about this kind of thing Right. But I think, though, that marketers in general really broad brushstroke here, and I hope nobody takes offense at this, but most marketers that I know of are very, very focused on their customers and their outcomes and are not very technology focused. Right, and the technology decisions often kind of hanging out there to. You know team members who might know something about something, or have a friend who knows something about something or you know.
Mishel Justesen:So I love where you're going with this, by the way.
Mike Giambattista:Well, that's good, because I wasn't sure where I was going.
Mishel Justesen:No, I just oh, and I think I know where you're going.
Mike Giambattista:Okay good, this is why we love talking to each other Exactly. You're going. Okay good. This is why we love talking to each other exactly so there's there's more of a, there's more of a challenge here than just representing what this looks like graphically. There's there's a whole education process to take somebody whose focus is not necessarily technology and introduce them to your point of view.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah.
Mike Giambattista:Can you expand on that a little bit and what that's like in the real world?
Mishel Justesen:Man, you just cued me up so perfectly.
Mike Giambattista:You like that.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah, I love that. All right, all right so. So I I'm trying to decide whether I should ask your question, answer your question directly or tell the story I wanted to share. I think I'll answer your. You want to go with the story? Okay, all right.
Mishel Justesen:So my whole point of wanting to talk to you today and share with your listeners is to share some tips on how I've been able to start explaining what can be a very complex and complicated technology build to somebody that doesn't understand technology. Okay, now that I've heard I have lots of friends that like to use a car as an example. I use that often, like, for example, you have the Ferrari of marketing technology sitting in your garage and you don't know how to drive it. You just look at it, you polish it up, maybe you sit in it, but I'm going to help you drive it and really use it Right, you know there's I hear that a lot, I use that a lot. But I want to share a quick story with you because I think one of the hardest things that I had to do was explain to my at the time, 75-year-old stepdad what CRM was, and this and I've been on and I this conversation has influenced the way I've done experience architecture from the very beginning, before it was even experience architecture for me. I had to figure out. He's not into cars, he doesn't understand technology. I help him do text messages right at the time, or showed him how to do text messages, and the way I described it to him is, you know, building a CRM, which is also one of my other favorite tools.
Mishel Justesen:Building a CRM is kind of like baking a cake, right? So you know this, the term out of the box. Let's take the cake out of the box and make the general, you know, the vanilla cake mix, whatever flavor you've chosen, right, vanilla cake mix or whatever flavor you've chosen, right. And then we, knowing who we're going to feed it to, we need to, um, make sure that we maybe don't put nuts in it but we put chocolate cream, right, cause maybe mom likes chocolate cream. Maybe we need to throw some raspberry filling in there. And these are all of the language, by the way.
Mishel Justesen:I know chocolate and raspberry yum, right. Maybe you know that that is the custom part that you put into the CRM, so the people will actually eat it, right. And then let's make it look pretty and usable and edible Right. So we're going to decorate it with some sprinkles and some buttercream flowers and you know that sort of thing. So the conversation was much more in depth than you know this quick little rundown, but he got it.
Mike Giambattista:He understood it.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah, and this was maybe 10 years ago, maybe not quite that long, but he still talks about that conversation with me and he still gets it.
Mike Giambattista:Interesting.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah, so that that really influenced how I try to um communicate and and make things as simple as possible with a real world example, right? So now let's get back to your question, right? Maybe what I can do here is practice, right, the way that I explain the experience architecture process to a marketer, Right, and I can use the cake example.
Mike Giambattista:Sure, I'm a recovering marketer, so this could work.
Mishel Justesen:Okay, Well, yeah, I've not. I've not tried the cake example yet, so but I usually use the Ferrari example, but it just depends on the type of audience I have in the room. But experience architecture is. Architecture is really about building a cake that everybody loves, right, and wants to come back to and wants the recipe for, right. So.
Mishel Justesen:But you got to know what kind of cake you're going to make, and that's what that customer journey really does, right, it's what is the cake experience that you want to create. You also have to have the right people involved. This is huge. You have to have a person who knows how to bake the cake. You have to have you know the chemist that can tell you how all of the different cake ingredients work together, because you can't put too much baking soda in. You know work together. Because you can't put too much baking soda in, you know it'll not taste good and it'll be hard and flat, Right. So a big thing about experience architecture is making sure that all the right people are involved from the beginning, and getting marketing and it into a room is is epic, Right.
Mike Giambattista:And it's usually really helpful for our next, next episode. Love that.
Mishel Justesen:But? But you know, my audience audience is usually the marketers, and I'm explaining to them that hey, listen, you already know the experience you're pushing out there. You already know where your pain points are. You do not have to be anything but a marketer. You can just tell me what you're doing today, what your goals are. Tell me what you're doing today, what your goals are, and as we go through this process, it's going to get translated into the language of IT so they can support you properly, Right?
Mishel Justesen:So what this forces us to do is it forces the marketing team to really take a look back and document how they do things, how they can explain in their own language what they're frustrated with, because it'll map to the customer journey. They say this is the customer journey I want to do, but I can't do this step because I have a manual process that's stopping me, or I have a blocker all the time, or it takes me two months to get the data I need. Right? So it gives them a way to explain, you know, the different aspects of the cake that they can't get. So the cake is not baked, I'm buying it.
Mike Giambattista:Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm serious. I think it's a brilliant way of explaining something that I'll bet you a giant majority of marketers struggle with.
Mishel Justesen:Totally.
Mike Giambattista:I don't know what the percentage would be, but it's more than half, I know just because these are really smart people focused on this aspect of executing their jobs and the other stuff. What's underneath the shell that people keep moving around or behind the curtain or whatever the analogy is, is completely foreign and that's totally okay. You know, they don't need to know that stuff, but they need somebody who can kind of broker the information between IT and marketing.
Mishel Justesen:Yes, well, that's like someone like me, a marketing technologist. That is what a marketing technologist needs to be able to do, right? So you know the step from. You know understanding the ingredients and the goal. Like, here's the kind of cake I want. Now let me hand it off to you. It, because they've shared their recipe. It is now able to understand better what the end goals are. Now, there's always that's again where the marketing technology person needs to come in and help do the translation right, because, like, I'll come in and I'll say, okay, so, my IT friends, we're going to bake a vanilla chocolate marble cake with raspberry and lemon, you know, and some chocolate buttercream on top, which doesn't sound that great, but that's what's needed, you know. And along the way, we're going to make all the flavors work right. So there, these are some of the processes that I've found that they that's not working properly. These are the tools I know that you're doing using for these processes, and here's the tools that are gonna help make this better.
Mike Giambattista:So the way you're describing this, the whole effort starts on the marketing side, by getting marketing to help map out what really is a theoretical journey of the ideal processes and outcomes. Right, it's not what is now. You can layer that in later. It's really what they want it to be.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah, exactly If it's a net new journey to be. Yeah, exactly If it's a net new journey. But that's the beauty of the experience architecture process, too, is that you can bring this process in at any point in the journey. So I've found in really large enterprise marketing organizations they have whole UX teams that have already documented the process and they've got screenshots and they're designing what the experience should look like. Those can be used. I don't have to come in and do any of that. I can bring people to come in and do that if they don't exist and we can help set that marketing team up with a process for figuring out how to do that. But a lot of times these things are already documented and just following the flow of the experience architecture process allows us to get it into a place where everybody can understand it and we can communicate it and we can repurpose what's already been done and then fill in the gaps of what's missing.
Mike Giambattista:I'm just curious, just from your experience, having done this for a while, what are the most common pain points a marketer might feel? And the reason I'm asking that is because, if, whatever those are, it's probably the starting point for a conversation with somebody like you, Like, oh my gosh, I wish I didn't have to or I could, or what are those things? What are some of those things I didn't have to or I could, or you know, what are those things? What are?
Mishel Justesen:some of those things. The top one that is always consistently number one and part of every single conversation data, data silos. I don't understand my data. I'm not able to query my data. I want to be able to get in as a marketer with a tool that's really easy to use, go through and start building segments and understanding how many people I have in Wisconsin that like cheese or Swiss cheese Right.
Mishel Justesen:Right, maybe there's an audience that just likes the Swiss cheese and in other states you know where else do I have pocket audiences that are fans of Swiss cheese so that I can give them an offer or a coupon to go buy a new Swiss cheese product we're putting out there.
Mike Giambattista:Right.
Mishel Justesen:Right. So I pulled that idea right out of my head. I don't know where it came from.
Mike Giambattista:Let's explore that in the next episode. I know.
Mishel Justesen:I know right, but that is the top pain point that I run into is, marketers just want to have an easy way to control their data, and one of the things that I love about where we're at with the MarTech industry right now is how AI is coming in.
Mishel Justesen:A lot of the tools that we work with or build for our customers are starting to have AI functionality built right into it. You know, for example, one of the big platforms that I work with has a whole data infrastructure that used to be really only IT-friendly or developer-friendly. That used to be really only IT-friendly or developer-friendly, and the developers would have to take some requirements and build the list for the marketer. Well, this particular tool now has an AI interface built over the top of it, so a marketer can literally go in and use it, almost like ChatGPT. Right, I want to know who all my Swiss cheese lovers are in Wisconsin, and then the AI will literally say here's all your Swiss cheese lovers. But guess what? You have an audience in California, texas, and if you were to expand your, your, your build here, um, you'll get 3 million more people that you can market to right it's huge um, and you know, I mean I could go on and on about ai in general.
Mishel Justesen:like generative ai is a big thing too like how do marketers um and that's part of the experience architecture process too how can we help marketers really not be scared of what this whole ai thing is, or generative AI, understand the difference and really educate and teach them? We're in the phase right now where we're educating and teaching marketers about how generative AI and AI can be used within their tools. There's still a lot of trepidation out there.
Mike Giambattista:There's still a lot of you know. I don't know if I'd go as far as fear, but you know, if you don't know what it is, your tendency is to be a little standoffish about it.
Mishel Justesen:Exactly and that's exactly where I'm at in the journey of AI. Overall right now is hey, don't be scared, Let me show you, Let me teach you and let me enable you. That's a big piece of that front end, that top level part of experience architecture is really helping the marketers understand where their pain points are and driving opportunities to really educate and help them understand. Take the fear out of it.
Mike Giambattista:Right.
Mishel Justesen:But those are the power of having that and being able to query data with that easy button that I talked about earlier. Ai, generative AI the concept, the capability is really making my life as a marketing technologist almost easier to provide technology that is more user-friendly, rather than having so much overhead with a big IT team to support and slowing things down for the marketer who just wants a bit of information.
Mike Giambattista:Right, right. So you mentioned a minute ago that the top frustration was the data silos and, you know, not being able to access or really use what was probably existing somewhere else in the company.
Mishel Justesen:That's one of the problems. Yes, one of them.
Mike Giambattista:Yes, I'm just wondering, you know, is it more of a? The data's there, but it lives over in this area that I don't have access to and therefore IT needs to get involved in order to X, y, z, or is it more a function of? I'm just a marketer here focusing on my marketing stuff and I don't really get this interface. I don't know how to create these segmentations in OpenTable or whatever happens to be. So is there some some easy button.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah, it's both to be honest.
Mishel Justesen:So, and and that's that's where, in the experience architecture flow, there's a data and integration process that we go through. Because, well, first of all, marketers have to be able to articulate what is it they want to be able to do, right. And then you have to look at on the IT side is okay, they want to do X, y, z. Do we even have that data right? Do we even have that data Right? Do we need to buy data? How can we get that data into a place that marketers can use it Right, being able to to map that again, you could go right back up to that customer journey and map everything down here's, here's the journey point, here's the people that are responsible for that journey within marketing. Here's you know, the technology that's being used or been built. Here's the data that's needed. All of it maps together right, and so I'm seeing both.
Mishel Justesen:To answer your question is you know, marketers need an easy way. Marketers need an easy way. That's again a great, a great call out for you know AI based interfaces, because I'm we aren't there yet. We're still, you know, as marketers, I'm going to wear my marketer hat right now. I'm still dependent on the IT folks to help me query the data, help me get the data where it needs to go. That's, that's always going to be there. But I just want to be able, as a marketer, to be able to get to the data of just friends, just my it friends. Just put it in a place where I can get to it, put a tool on top of it and I'll go in and do what I need to do, rather than having to do this whole brief about what I need you to do for me.
Mike Giambattista:Over the next six weeks.
Mishel Justesen:Right, oh yeah, weeks right. I've seen months. It's like you know it's it, it's it really kills the whole ability to drive personalized experiences right which is also the holy grail for what marketers are trying to get to, and again, it all comes down to that having access to that data and having all of the technology integrated properly to be able to do what they need to do.
Mike Giambattista:So this conversation makes me think that well, first of all, what's the little cogs in my head are thinking? I really want to see what one of these journeys looks like. I want to be able to see what an experience architecture map looks like.
Mishel Justesen:Yeah, an experience architecture map looks like?
Mike Giambattista:Yeah, and I'm betting that listeners and readers will be wondering the same thing. So maybe that's something our respective teams can work on. You know, either it's another episode of this podcast with some visuals or we do something else, but I think showing that is going to be a big deal. Having said that, though, I want to thank you again for this.
Mishel Justesen:You know every time we get together.
Mike Giambattista:This is not twice. It's always an eye-opening process for me. I love hearing how you and your teams are thinking about solving these complex and heretofore unsolvable problems for marketers, and plus, it's just a lot of fun. So thanks a million.
Mishel Justesen:You're welcome. I'm happy to be on this journey with you.
Mike Giambattista:Thanks, michelle, let's do this again.
