RAZOR to Introduce Customer-Intelligent Marketing at CMO Summit

DALLAS, May 24 /PRNewswire/ -- New multifaceted communication channels and the demands of the modern consumer have brought a new set of challenges for today's Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). RAZOR, a Dallas-based marketing agency, will offer solutions to these challenges when it introduces The Customer-Intelligent CMO: Better Decisions, Better Results in a presentation this weekend.

And what more appropriate event for the discussion to take place than at the marcus evans CMO Summit on May 23-25 on Amelia Island, Florida, where RAZOR will deliver its presentation to a group of hundreds of CMOs.  

The summit is designed to provide attendees with a compass for navigating the world of "new marketing."  Sure to be part of that discussion are the key issues facing today's CMOs:

• Complexity – Decision-making has gotten a lot tougher, given the complexity of consumer audiences.  CMOs therefore face new tradeoffs and questions about how to prioritize outreach: National versus local? Segments or one-to-one communication?  Interactions or transactions?
• Lack of Control – Consumers dictate the rules of engagement with brands; and 77 percent of consumers want to decide how they are contacted by marketers.  Consumers are "saying no" to marketing by blocking marketing mechanisms, including phone calls, spam, pop-ups and TV advertising spots. (Source: Forrester Research)
• Loss of Credibility – Consumers don't trust marketers.  They trust each other and social media empowers them to connect; 87 percent of consumers view marketing as largely irrelevant. (Source: Forrester Research)
• Increasing Accountability – There is a higher level of accountability than ever before. CEOs are demanding upfront justification of spending strategies, as well as quantifiable ROI.

RAZOR believes that Customer-Intelligent Marketing is the only way for marketers and CMOs to successfully address these issues, and recommends three areas of focus:

• Leverage Customer Intelligence – Today more data is being created in a week than in a decade ten years ago.  How can marketers determine what is and what isn't relevant?  Marketers must gather, sift, analyze, segment and predict consumer behavior.  Better intelligence creates better decisions. Better decisions yield better results.
• Increase Spending Effectiveness – Cutting costs and saving money were recently the corporate mandate.  Today, it's all about increasing the effectiveness of each dollar spent. Customer intelligence is the key to determining who, where and how to spend marketing dollars.  Customer information and analytics allow a level of precision marketing not available until recently, and which CMOs cannot afford to ignore.  
• Optimize Customer Engagement – With digital and social media now considered mainstream, deciding how to optimize spending and evaluate customer response within these engagement channels is causing sleepless nights for CMOs.  Yet new tools and agency resources are available to help provide a holistic view of customers, optimize spending and create the performance metrics needed to evaluate and continuously improve the bottom line.

These practices are the focus of the RAZOR presentation for the CMO Summit, including a case study on how RAZOR partnered with one of its clients to leverage these customer-intelligent strategies and generate powerful results.

"RAZOR is built as a new-breed marketing agency capable of excelling in today's complex and demanding marketing environment," said Michael Harrison, chief strategy officer, RAZOR.  "RAZOR's strength is in leveraging customer-intelligent marketing to help clients make better decisions and generate better results."

RAZOR's presentation at the CMO Summit will be delivered by:

• Michael Harrison, chief strategy officer, RAZOR.  Michael has more than 12 years of experience working with Fortune 500 clients across categories, focusing on maximizing customer engagement and database-marketing solutions. (http://www.razordriven.com/site/page/pg3188-as10.html)
• Tim Senz, vice president of Client Development, RAZOR. Tim has more than 10 years of experience in marketing services and new-business development.  (http://www.razordriven.com/site/page/pg3188-as882.html)

About RAZOR

RAZOR is a seven-year-old marketing agency that leverages customer-intelligence to help marketers make better decisions and generate better results in an increasingly complex selling environment.  RAZOR optimizes customer engagement across all digital and traditional media to increase customer profitability and improve spending effectiveness to increase ROI.  The company has grown quickly to projected 2010 billings of $294 million, representing brands such as Nestle Purina, Domino's Pizza, Rent-a-Center, Dave & Buster's, The Cheesecake Factory, Baskin-Robbins and Wendy's. For more information, visit www.razordriven.com.

SOURCE RAZOR