Chapter 6. Integration of Technology and Marketing

• How do you make IT the enabler for marketing to achieve top-line growth?

• Why are end-to-end processes superior to point solutions?

• How do you get a 360-degree view of your customer through the convergence of marketing and technology for holistic customer relationship management?

• How is IT integral to building brand equity to increase customer lifetime value?

Technology is transforming marketing. Historically, marketing has been a technology backwater compared with the supply side of the enterprise. Now it is emerging as the place where IT investment can generate big returns by powering brand-building techniques to drive top-line growth in new ways.

However, implementing this vision is a huge challenge. How does a function that has grown up with creative, ad hoc techniques learn to utilize technology to leverage new models and new processes? How does the organization adapt via new job functions and new forms of collaboration between marketing and IT to enable this transformation?

This chapter explores these ideas with executives from both marketing and technology who have successfully implemented this change to help transform their organizations. From their in-depth perspectives, we can scale the opportunity and define the challenge that faces marketing professionals in harnessing the power of technology.

Let’s revisit some of the basic premises of our thesis in this book to frame the case for the integration of marketing and technology:

• Customers—specifically, deep insights into the motivations behind customer behavior—are at the beginning of the brand-led growth process.

• The availability of new types of data, vastly greater volumes of data, and new ways of processing the data can generate new insights.

• The volume and complexity of the data require a new combination of process and technology to accelerate the insights-generation process and to make it repeatable and highly productive.

• The job of marketing is to use these insights to create innovations and initiatives to change attitudes that cause changes in customer behavior that are monetized in purchase, loyalty, and share of requirements. Technology is the enabler.

From Backwater to Mainstream: Why IT Hasn’t Served Marketing Well to Date

We asked Jeff Wysocki, a leader in the field of marketing technology, to explain why technology has not fueled a demand-side productivity surge to equal the achievements on the supply side, and why the situation will change in the future.

Jeff has been a pioneer of enterprise marketing in the consumer packaged-goods industry. At Kimberly-Clark, he was a member of a cross-functional marketing and IT team that designed and implemented new enterprise software called Brand Builder. This software supported marketing productivity in four areas:

• Knowledge management and sharing: All marketing and sales practitioners, researchers, product scientists, and anyone passionate about understanding the customer could access the latest information and insights about consumers, customers, shoppers, and users of Kimberly-Clark brands. The information was kept up to date, and new insights and findings were pushed to subscribers to keep them informed and inspired.

• Work flow and process management: Processes such as long- and short-term brand planning, annual marketing plan development, new-product launches, and communications campaigns and promotions were all types of plans that Jeff’s team envisioned would be managed via Brand Builder. Marketers, ad agency personnel, and salespeople involved in planning could access the software to align the target audience, strategies, tactics, and budgets. Upon approval of the plan, managers could activate the appropriate work flows.

• Measurement: No plan or tactic would be “closed” without an attached measurement, tightly related to its objectives and goals. This created success models—complete packages of marketing objectives, goals, strategies, and measures with the associated outcome results.

• Budgeting and integrated finance: Both estimates and actual expenditures for marketing activities could be linked directly to the appropriate codes and line items in the enterprise budget management software so that marketing budgets were no longer separated from operating budgets.

Having been a part of launching this prototype of more advanced enterprise marketing management systems at Kimberly-Clark, Jeff moved on to Coors Brewing Company, where he is applying technology to the integration of marketing and sales as IT Business Partner. The U.S. brewing industry is a promising development lab for this innovation because it must integrate demand generation from a large-scale enterprise center. It plans and budgets major initiatives like sponsoring the Super Bowl and buying millions of dollars of TV advertising, through activity to the individual distributors, delivery routes, and bars where the most competitive marketing of beer takes place.

Jeff tells us why marketing has not been well-serviced by technology to date.

“Over the years, I’ve observed these characteristics of marketing that are barriers to adoption of significant technology:

• Inherently, the marketing organization has more complicated areas, and to build systems to traverse the various areas is difficult.

• Marketing personnel turnover is faster than other parts of the organization. So, you have trouble finding anyone in the marketing organization that wants to take on and own a large-scale technology implementation project because of the duration and the amount of effort required. Unless a Marketing Program/Project Office is in place, your typical brand marketing function does not have the corporate longevity to take this on. There are usually one or two key people within the marketing organization that you can work with to build point solutions; however, usually there are no champions who will want to implement a system across all areas.

• Marketing managers may have 200+ data sources of information they use to make ongoing business decisions. Tracking and integrating all these sources of information to make the marketing function easier may be more than IT departments would want to take on.

• Marketing leadership has typically never seen IT as strategic. They see finance, sales, and operations groups as partners, but the IT group has traditionally not delivered for marketing.

• Marketing does not have common processes in place and tends to be very ad hoc in comparison with supply chain management, who follow standard processes. Auditing ad hoc activities is very difficult.”

The result is that marketing has adopted what Jeff calls “point solutions” and never moved toward an “end-to-end solution.” A point solution is a request for a recurring report, such as reporting around sales and shipments or supermarket checkout data. At a higher level, but still point solutions, are campaign planning and budgeting, analytics and dashboard tools, knowledge management systems and digital asset management (DAM), marketing mix analytics, and portals. These are all individual tools. One or two of them might be used to manage a specific project, but they do not integrate to create a complete end-to-end solution for the marketing function.

Travel websites are an example of an integrated end-to-end solution. Users can obtain information, set up notifications to receive special-offer alerts, make reservations, buy tickets, and keep a personal profile of their travel preferences. These sites should both increase marketers’ technology aptitude as users and support their inclination to build similarly integrated enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions.

Jeff sees the end-to-end solution as building on these components:

• Knowledge management, data management, and advanced analytics to improve the insights function: The system should be able to track and build consumer, shopper, and wholesaler insights and feed downstream processes such as planning with the insights.

• More integration of the sales and marketing functions via integrated and synergistic solutions: An example is an integrated sales and marketing calendar. To see what marketing programs each of six company brands are offering to ten different customers across twelve months of activity, a marketing manager may have to consult six or ten different systems or sources of information. By the time the data is gathered, it’s out of date. People give up and don’t even expend the effort. But as soon as such an integrated system is built, synergistic opportunities emerge that just weren’t thought of before.

• Use advanced analytics and modeling for integrated forecasting, planning, budgeting, and ROI tools: This enables marketing and sales to assemble credible fact-based plans, budgets, and scenarios and prove value via metrics and ROI. Sales promotion and marketing prove their value and stop being the first budget item to cut when the quarter is below forecast.

• Integrate CRM (customer relationship management) and DAM, and roll them into an EMM system: This is the heart of marketing—the external face to customers and the communications assets (logos, package designs, program art, advertising, product sheets, and catalogs). Today, CRM software is not contributing as much as it should to growth because it is not integrated with insights, analytics, best practices, and measurement tools. It’s a transactional software that must become knowledge management and process management software. DAM can contribute by ensuring that the right face of the brand and company is presented to customers. An example is enabling a retail customer who is composing a circular advertisement to access the DAM database and select graphics that are guaranteed up-to-date, rather than reusing dated ones from an old storage file on the customer’s own computer.

A good example of the potential for an end-to-end system can be found in an activity that is very important to growth in both consumer-products companies and high-tech companies: the launch of a new product. In an end-to-end marketing and sales system, the following are true:

• The insights about the need for the new benefit that’s delivered by the new product are developed in the software via the integration of research and analytics. Every downstream participant in the product launch has access to and full understanding of the insight and the benefit. Sales and marketing communications materials are much more consistent and much better informed.

• Product development and product testing results are stored in the system and are linked to the insights.

• Design developments, such as physical form and packaging graphics, reside on the system, fully linked to all other product launch information.

• Product launch success models reside in the system to inform tactical planning so that the right messages run in the right media at the right time. For example, if the success model indicates that four weeks of television advertising are optimal to build awareness of the new product before issuing a coupon for consumer trial, system governance can ensure that the integrated event calendar is guided by such a “rule.” If the distribution window in retail stores is narrow (such as for a seasonal product), timing and dependency alerts throughout the system can help ensure that all preparation is timed to meet the window appropriately.

What does it take to transition from point solutions in marketing technology to the end-to-end system approach? Jeff believes that the issues are not technological; they are organizational. He cites the following key factors.

Leadership

“You must have your number one marketer on board. That person needs to understand and champion IT and the program vision. They also need to be a huge supporter of standardizing and simplifying the marketing processes.”

Process First, Technology Second

“Map marketing processes and implement the process improvements first, and then deploy the organization structure/changes needed to support the processes, along with the technology solution. Increased ROI comes about with well-executed processes to leverage synergies between sales and marketing. Sales groups can better leverage some of the marketing activities compared with just going off and executing independently. The ability to conduct pre- and post-analysis on your activities is critical, and building in processes to ensure these analyses are done and acted upon helped improve ROI.”

Marketers Are Creative People; IT People Are Not

“You need a ‘sexy-looking’ solution. Your standard SAP entry screen usually does not cut it for marketing people.”

Standardization Is a Benefit and a Necessity

“A Kimberly-Clark marketer, when he was transferred between brands, remarked to me that it felt like he was leaving one company and going to another. The required processes on the new brand were completely different than the brand he came from. Simplification and standardization are critical. A good place for that is the marketing annual planning process. We developed templates and combined tools so the marketing people spent their time on the content rather than on the look and feel of the presentation. With a standard format, senior management received the critical pieces of information in a consistent format, so world-class-caliber brand plans were developed.”

Efficiencies Can Come from Surprising Places

“You can increase efficiencies for improved compliance procedures for SOX (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and improved forecasting accuracy of sales and marketing events, such as coupon redemptions.”

Jeff articulates how the integration of sales and marketing should be accomplished from an IT perspective. Now we turn to the Wachovia marketing and IT team, who have led an actual integration, very much spurred by the business strategy of high-volume M&A (mergers and acquisitions) and the integration of acquired businesses. The Wachovia management team has managed one of the most successful brand-building efforts in consumer financial services in the last decade.

Transforming a Financial Services Brand with a New Marketing and Technology Platform

Technology provides the capacity for better insights and the capability to move more rapidly to implement them. You must have a process to make sense of this expansive data and then integrate it into your marketing plans. Wachovia shows how the confluence of data and marketing can achieve a 360-degree view of the customers’ attitudes and behavior and can affect their choices to increase wallet share.

Ten years ago, none of this was possible. Marketers in the consumer financial services industry did not have

• Magnetic strip cards widely dispersed throughout the consumer base to capture people’s behavior. The data did not exist because the collection methodology did not exist.

• The hardware and software to interconnect the information in a useful, timely manner.

So, a confluence of four factors facilitates Wachovia’s ability to market effectively through a new understanding of consumers:

• Sheer availability of data

• Hardware that can store it

• Software to manipulate it

• Analysts to make sense of it all

The marketer’s new focus is on knowledge as a tool that, through technology, can be effectively implemented quickly into all the marketing touch points. Wachovia defines this as a platform: the confluence of software, hardware, data, and marketing professionals.

The power of the platform comes from the confluence and cross-pollination of data flowing horizontally between Wachovia departmental functions and divisions. The ability to cross-pollinate helps every department and product group understand not just its own business but, more importantly, “the domain of the consumer”:

• How do customers’ overall life needs affect their needs and behavior in the financial domain?

• Which customers are more valuable to the brand than others?

• Which customer groups represent the biggest parts of the profit pool?

• What actions on our part will move them up the loyalty ladder to choose Wachovia for more of their requirements?

This platform enables predictive modeling. For example, suppose that credit card purchases reveal that a family is acquiring baby products. Historical data analysis shows that having a baby is a trigger for buying life insurance. With the aging of the child, the data tells us to anticipate the need for college tuition. A person aging beyond 55 can trigger a need for long-term care insurance. This allows Wachovia to anticipate need states and extend the customer lifetime value.

In the old marketing paradigm, attitudes toward the brand and product and service categories were the purview of marketers and market research. The new marketing paradigm has an interaction between attitude and behavior that can be calibrated using technology. By understanding the linkage better, Wachovia marketers can increase consumers’ tendency to deepen their loyalty and relationships with Wachovia.

Here is how you make the connection between technology and brand building:

• Understand consumer behavior better using the new data streams gathered by the new technologies.

• Apply the new analytics to the data that powerful software can manage—mostly multivariate analyses and cross-pollination of data streams to reveal “if this, then that” analysis.

• Align the insights from analytics with marketing to work on shaping the consumer attitudes that will result in the desired behavior.

• Track behavior to create better advertising and more relevant consumer contact.

Technology enables the tracking of customer behavior while market research captures their attitudes. Marketing professionals can leverage the resulting customer insight to position the brand and communications.

Technology also creates new options for how the consumer chooses to receive the information, and this changes attitudes and behaviors toward the brand. In doing so, technology both creates a new problem and solves it at the same time. It creates the problem of fragmenting the old marketing model; marketing is no longer as simple as it used to be because of this hard-to-manage fragmentation. But technology pays you back by providing more data about the consumer. It also gives you the new channels and capabilities to reach the consumer when the consumer gives you permission to use them—the Internet being the primary example.

The harnessing of technology for marketing requires an extraordinary collaboration between marketing and IT functions.

We know of no better partnership in the industry than Jim Garrity and Bob DeAngelis. Garrity is Chief Marketing Officer and DeAngelis is Director of Customer Analysis Research and Targeting for Wachovia. Working together, they have built a cutting-edge platform integrating marketing and technology. It has helped Wachovia become one of the fastest-growing and most successful financial services brands in a highly competitive category.

In a candid dialogue, they explain their real-world experience in leveraging technology in the service of marketing transformation.

Wachovia management realized they could not cost-cut themselves to business growth. Although this interview illustrates some of the unique dynamics in the financial services industry, that same imperative exists in virtually every business today. Every business has tried to increase its profitability by cost-cutting, but there are only so many costs you can cut. Eventually you must grow, and the only way to grow is by building brand equity using knowledge of the consumer. Garrity and DeAngelis have proven this. So although their experience in financial services may be unique, their lessons apply for all industries.

Here are their extended insights into how to make the marketing/IT partnership work to build customer loyalty.

Jim Garrity and Bob DeAngelis

DeAngelis: We began our data warehousing effort in 1997, followed by building our marketing data mart in 1998. Our objective was to have a high degree of integration of data from across the customer experience and across the company’s products. We wanted to bring together related information—transaction-related data, interrelated data, consumer-specific data, and photographic data—into a common platform to build a consistent integrated view of our relationship with a consumer across all touch points over time across all company divisions. The data platform becomes the building block of understanding how to build a customer relationship, which is the unit of analysis around which all the work is done. I don’t want to say we have a100% integration across every product, every channel, and every segment. But we do have a relatively high degree—I’d say 95%+ on the consumer side of the house and a little less than 90% on the wholesale side.

It’s an ongoing challenge. Complexity increases when we have more mergers and acquisitions and extend our product line; we need to keep integrating those local product views and new business views into the data and analytics pool.

Here is an example we are working on right now. Wachovia recently merged with Westcorp. That deal was completed at the end of last year. In some ways it was almost a reverse merger in the auto finance product area. Westcorp had a larger auto finance business than Wachovia Bank did. We need to integrate the Westcorp auto finance platform into the Wachovia platform. And until we do so, we will not understand that part of our client relationship. For example, is there an auto lending retail client at Westcorp that is also a Wachovia retail banking client? If there is, what other services can we introduce into that customer relationship?

Data and systems integration provides us with a consistent view of the customer relationship, a consistent calculation of profitability, and the ability to support our customer-centric obsession and to maintain it going forward. That’s the building block, the DNA of everything we do.

Question: How do you deal with the fact that you don’t have a complete view of your retail customer because that retail customer may have other banking relationships or other product-based relationships that are opaque to you? Are you doing various kinds of modeling that allow you to understand what that customer is doing outside of the closed view of Wachovia?

Garrity: Absolutely! Here is how we address that:

• We conduct continual market surveys by geography and product area to understand what our relative share of wallet is, and our relative penetration of the target consumer base.

• From our survey research, we understand that we might have 30% share of wallet. We can classify the 70% we don’t have into product and service categories, and the attitudinal and other consumer feedback in the survey can give us the feedback we need to understand how much future opportunity there is from a consumer-need standpoint.

• By purchasing third-party data and putting it through our database, we can infer from investments and deposits what the initial opportunity is from a market size standpoint.

That’s where the magic of marketing comes in. How do you take that data, and what do you do on the marketing side of the equation with the Wachovia brand to try and attract those users, either current customers who need new products, or consumers who aren’t Wachovia customers? How do you use the Wachovia brand to leverage your marketing knowledge to attract those folks?

Frankly, our number-one priority ever since the Wachovia/First Union merger in 2001 was to retain customers. To really focus on customer service, service excellence, and thereby keep our attrition rates at the very minimum. Virtually everything we did, including our marketing programs and marketing communications, were focused on that objective, and we were successful with that strategy. We are now the industry leader in customer satisfaction, and have been for past five years in a row, with a growing lead. We think it’s the one area where we can really distinguish ourselves in the banking category, where differentiation is really difficult.

So, we have a current advertising campaign that’s very much focused on our leadership in customer satisfaction and the experience our existing clients have (see Figure 6.1). We believe this messaging will resonate with prospects, and they may think, “If they’re that good, maybe I should think about doing business with them.”

Figure 6.1. Wachovia’s current advertising campaign.

Provided with permission by Wachovia Corporation

Now on the metrics side, we will measure the effectiveness of that campaign at the back end. It will include effectiveness of the communication strategy, changes in brand awareness, and changes in consideration, ultimately helping us to understand better the model to acquire customers.

DeAngelis: We have been tracking our brand since the Wachovia First Union merger in 2001. The goal of the new campaign and positioning was, how do we lead with our strength in service, to emphasize the superior customer experience that generates loyalty? From a domain viewpoint, how do we look at the client relationship being an asset of all Wachovia Bank products and services rather than any particular product or individual business unit?

An example might be that a customer has a profitable banking relationship that’s managed at our retail branch network. Our data analysis also tells us that the customer may be a prime prospect for our wealth management business. So there are a whole series of marketing treatments, based on the data that we can activate to extend the relationship. We started to target those relationships with great precision because we are prospecting for thirty to forty thousand out of ten million retail customers who might be good candidates for transitioning. Jim and I were part of that very large corporate initiative pioneered by our CEO, Ken Thompson.

Metrics Is a Part of the Whole Picture

DeAngelis: We’re really looking at metrics from three approaches:

• We focus our brand equity tracking on wealthier households, compared with our competitors, by market area. And we look not only at current customers but also prospects; the survey instrument gives us the insight to refine our messaging. So we track the effect of the new campaign on relative awareness, consideration, and preference within key current and target customer segments.

• We look at ongoing message testing. We compare our spots with competitors and best-performing spots and can analyze the effectiveness of messages within the campaign.

• We look at all marketing methods we use and evaluate their impact on customer value, customer acquisition, and revenue.

We learned that the distribution drivers (what happens in the bank outlet) are most important, and within that customer experience at retail, what is most important. For example, we look at the absolute number of outlets in different markets (which influences how convenient our service is for our customers), as well as the staffing level in each outlet (which influences the quality of the experience once the customer gets to the branch).

We were quickly able to learn the relative impact of drivers like this, particularly on driving acquisition and driving revenue. We find that certain factors have a much higher impact on new-account acquisitions, compared with the generation of revenue from existing clients and retaining existing clients.

It’s a very dynamic process. The model helps us understand the impact of changing different drivers in the same direction (more branches and higher staffing and higher levels of advertising), different directions (fewer branches with higher staffing and reduced levels of advertising), or any combination. It is called a contribution-to-preference model.

Management is always looking for the perfect, optimum solution. But the marketing mix and the resultant consumer engagement is dynamic; it’s inclusive of many drivers, and you can’t totally stop one driver without it having an impact on others. Our goal is to ensure we have the right level of consistency and constancy in how we are heard in terms of our advertising message and how we deliver in terms of our customer experience.

The model also tells us when we can actually reduce our investment in advertising in a particular market without negatively affecting sales, and when we can invest in another market where there’d be a higher return. Basically, we could achieve a higher level of growth in a short period of time by balancing our geographical mix. We were able to demonstrate that for the market where we reduced spending there was no negative impact on sales, and we were able to reinvest in another market and generate a preliminary indication of upward revenue movement in that market.

The Value of the Brand

Garrity: I think that five to six years ago there was not much appetite for investing in marketing, particularly in advertising. Management just intuitively felt we had to make some investments there, but none of them had any good idea of what an appropriate investment level would be. A unique opportunity for us was to build this Wachovia brand “from scratch,” going back to the launch in 2002.

Internally, we created literacy around the value of the brand, and the cost to build one, particularly because of the relative lack of awareness of the Wachovia brand. At that time, financial-services companies were becoming much more brand-oriented and investing in their brands. We felt the competitive heat to create a brand that would be competitive with others. Management now believes that we need to invest in this brand. Marketing, and advertising in particular, is now reinforced by data at this point.

DeAngelis: For the last 25 years, given the degree of consolidation via mergers and acquisitions in our industry, in essence, we all became cost-reduction-driven as opposed to revenue- and customer-focused. That began catching up with us. Deals now are usually larger. At Wachovia we consolidated a hundred mergers in 18 years with a major new acquisition every year for the last few years.

So there emerged a new imperative: The way to win isn’t by cutting expenses, but to build a brand for long-term share appreciation, incremental revenue, and year-upon-year growth in the same retail units.

This imperative focused us on the unified view of the total customer relationship—both current product usage and the insights that customer research could bring us about future and unmet customer needs and preferences. M&A consolidation is a business strategy, but our customers don’t care about that. They are focused on basic human aspirations such as wanting to be known, and to feel valued.

We found, through our data analysis, that the majority of our customers transact through multiple channels (retail, mail, phone, Internet, etc.). Those who use financial centers tend to be very attractive to us. We believe the in-person experience, even in this age of automation, really has a lot to do with customer satisfaction in building our brand.

When we were high on the cost-reduction strategy, there were programs in place to encourage customers to use alternate channels. Now we realize that bricks and mortar and our employees’ smiling faces, with their well-trained approach to serving customers, are a huge brand-building asset for us.

Books of Business

DeAngelis: We use a tool we call the book of business to provide a fully integrated view of the customer relationship across products and channels. The goal is to equip the frontline salesperson, or customer relationship management person, with a holistic view of the client relationship. The idea is that the client expects us to know them whether they just dropped in at the branch, but half an hour ago they were online.

The book of business is a ledger that can track six years of all our contacts with a customer. We can then model from this customer database all the transacting patterns of all those households. And we look at what branch, if any, they are most likely to use for transactions. We also know their primary address, and we take the clients that are most likely to be transacting and are in close proximity to a particular branch, and we assign those client relationships to a team at the branch. We do an annual analysis, and then we assign that book to the branch once a year. On a monthly basis, we share with the branch changes in the customer relationship, as well as a lot of interesting marketing information, and all sorts of marketing leads. We also generate reports of how much the business grows—in terms of total balances, in terms of numbers of new relationships, and in terms of retained relationships. The results are reported versus goal as part of the incentive compensation system. What we’ve done is leveraged the underlying information and patterns in a way that directly affects the pocket wealth of the branch staff based on how well the customer portfolio performs. So there is a continuous information and compensation loop that supports this retail process.

Now let’s look at the employee behaviors. The employees recognize over time, once they understand this system, that it is no problem for them to personally know every member of every family in the book of business. They can go out of their way to ensure that the customer has an extraordinary experience—to know them by name, to recognize them when they walk in the financial center, and so on. It’s kind of like the old friendly banker on the corner, but one that’s really smart, and enabled through the technology platform.

The technology is set so every teller has the screen in front of her/him. When the customer comes into the branch, there is a fair amount of information that could lead to a discussion that will be perceived as a benefit to the customer, because the bank service person can offer suggestions for additional services or advising services they might want.

The Changed View of Marketing at Wachovia

DeAngelis: Much of this development in the sophistication of our marketing and IT systems stems from a defining moment that transformed the perception of marketing. We were faced with two kinds of customer attrition as a result of the mergers in which we had participated and the customers’ perceived issues with branch service. Through IT and data we were able to measure the problem, and through rigorous analytics we enabled the process to understand it. That was the impetus that gave rise to the corporate centers of excellence in customer analysis and marketing. It would mitigate future losses through the frontline staff at the branch and through customer contact. We were able to develop metrics and refine solutions, and we’ve been able to measure the incremental fiscal benefit in the billions of dollars on a regular basis. Senior management supported the investment, and they became aware of the critical nature of the brand in the success of the Wachovia/First Union merger and the building and maintaining of the brand equity in the post-merger period.

Garrity: During the formative month, when we were putting together the Wachovia/First Union merger plan, we knew how many millions of dollars were required to build the new brand, pretty much from scratch.

This was considerably more than either company had ever spent. We were totally accountable for this large amount of money, and I think that was an early catalyst for the partnership across three functions: the customer analytics group, the finance group, and the marketing function. At the same time we presented the case for the investment, we also presented a case for centralizing governance, a case for how we would be accountable, and demonstrated the return on the investment over time. I think that was the beginning of marketing credibility, which we’ve built and strengthened ever since.

The CEO Commitment

Garrity: Bob and I have had a great experience under the leadership of Ken Thompson, the CEO, who’s been in charge through this whole process. He had a vision that inspired us to become the leader in customer satisfaction. We all perform according to that vision, so every employee understands the importance of taking great care of our customers.

Ken’s vision also foresaw the potential benefits of a First Union-Wachovia combination. He had been chairman at First Union. Ken clearly gets the credit for the leadership that has driven Wachovia to be so successful over the past five years. His vision was for Wachovia to be the most admired and trusted financial institution in the country. And I think by many metrics we have been able to achieve through his leadership.