In high tech, the real innovation is real value.

Change or die!

Ever since it was co-opted by Innovation magazine in 1970, this phrase — along with its siblings “innovate or die,” “grow or die” and so on — has been a mandate, a motivator and sometimes a noose for tech companies.

As Chris Townsend of Imaginatik said in Wired, “In creating a sustainable, enterprise-wide innovation discipline the road is long…and fraught with difficulties and complications. But the alternatives — irrelevance, bankruptcy and oblivion — are much scarier.”

But innovation is hard. It doesn’t just happen. And it “never happens in a vacuum,” Townsend says. In order for tech companies to “change” instead of “die,” they need to bake innovation into every part of their company, from the technology to the organisation to the culture, which as Townsend says, is a daunting task.

And to make things worse, change for change’s sake — or worse, just because everyone else is doing it — isn’t the answer. For innovation to work, it has to be driven by something, has to have a purpose. For high-tech companies, that purpose is becoming increasingly clear: it has to be for the customer.

“The high-tech companies that are succeeding in the digital economy are those configuring their technologies around what human wants and needs are,” said Paul Roehrig in an interview with CMO.com.

“That may sound simple, but that’s really an important starting point because if you’re going to design a technology solution, the first most important step is to understand what people want and need.”

Roehrig is the chief strategy officer for Cognizant Digital Business, a world leader in digital innovation, so he’s on the front lines of the digital revolution. And he’s not alone in his assessment.

“Digital transformation forces businesses to not just think about how they leverage technology to do things better, faster, cheaper,” Gary Verdino, managing partner at content consultancy Verdino & Co., told eMarketer. “It is [also] about using technology as a means to an end, to innovate and do something they’ve never done before.”

“Don’t chase shiny objects,” he continued, “but instead understand what you’re trying to achieve for your customers and for your business and how you can create new value.”

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, sums it up nicely: “Technology is about enabling human potential.”

No silver bullet.

Townsend is right. Innovating not just your technology but your entire company is hard. “There’s no silver bullet,” he says. Part of the reason technology is so challenging for high-tech brands is that there’s significant complication on both ends of the innovation equation.

Many big high-tech companies have evolved over time, so they have complicated infrastructures often made up of legacy and sometime incompatible technology. As new capabilities emerged over time, these various technologies were often adopted — or not — in opportunistic and haphazard ways.

At the same time, many of these same companies are courting disruption by stepping into a world driven by the “Everything-as-a-Service” model, the Internet of Things and experience-based marketing. This evolution requires the ability to recraft business processes and manage enormous amounts of data coming from a huge variety of sources that, again, are varied and not always obviously compatible.

The obvious places to start are social and mobile channels, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. As companies move more and more into the cloud and offer customer-focused services, especially through the ever-widening Internet of Things, the complexity seems to grow almost exponentially.

For example, according to Bloomberg, GE is exploring the value of connecting lightbulbs. These connected lightbulbs could be used by retail customers like Wal-Mart to keep track of feet traffic through a shop, by cities to monitor street lights or even by the police to track the location and direction of gun shots so they can respond more quickly.

“The lighting industry has become somewhat commoditised,” said Beth Comstock, vice chair and head of the business innovations unit that includes lighting, in Bloomberg. “We like where we are, but the focus on our future really is on the smart, connected, commercial space for lighting.”

This kind of evolution is a monumental shift in complexity. And this is where purpose really matters.

Knowing that you’re innovating into the cloud, into services or into the Internet of Things explicitly to deliver experiences with real value to your customers gives you a place to start.

“The smartest organisations focus their transformation efforts around the customer,” Martha Mathers, marketing practice leader at CEB, told eMarketer, “beginning with customer buying behaviours and then use that understanding to shape strategy. Only then does the strategy guide technology investments.”

Starting with the value you can deliver to your customers makes it easier to prioritise the changes you need to make. For example, consider the following questions:

• Do you understand your customers well enough to know the experiences they need?
• Have you got the ability to design and deliver the right experiences through the right channel at the right time every time?

If you want to offer real value, you must be able to answer “yes!” unequivocally to both of these questions. If you’re not totally there yet, the next step is to figure out why not and take steps to fill those holes.

In many cases, one of those holes is technology. At the highest level, these questions are all about understanding the unique value you deliver to your customer and there are organisational and cultural changes that allow you to make better use of these two pillars of experience marketing. But without the right technology, both are nonstarters.

The questions above can be easily restated with a technology focus — “Have you got the ability to gather, analyse and act on good customer data?” and “Can you use that data to create effective content?” Data and content. These are the twin drivers of experience and both rely on the right technology.

From stranger to customer.

Let’s start with data. Experiences breathe data. It was the advent of big data that gave experience-based marketing real life. So the first step is to look at your data. But again, it can’t be data for data’s sake. It has to be customer data, data that reveals to you the value you can offer.

“Knowing the customer journey from awareness, through interest and desire and finally to action has long been the most sought-after piece of information for marketers,” Econsultancy writes. “If you understand how one person has gone from being a stranger to a customer of your brand, then, in theory, you can work to repeat the process on another.”

As we already pointed out, however, the challenge for many tech companies isn’t necessarily gathering customer data, it’s integrating that data into a single customer view. Tech brands are often dealing with so many channels, technologies and platforms that bringing that data together can be a serious barrier. This is apparent in a 2016 Epsilon report that shows the lack of technology to integrate data and the ability the integrate multiple sources and technologies as the two main challenges to creating a single customer view. And yet, according to eMarketer, bringing data together to create a marketing-ready single view of a customer was chosen in 2016 as the data-related strategy with the greatest ROI.

So bringing it all together in a single platform that allows you to actually understand what your customer is doing and what they want is crucial.

“Our marketing ecosystem includes more than 40 separate internal and external systems but that central foundational layer — where everything feeds in, where it all comes together and analytics intersects with personalisation…is the key to the effectiveness of our digital marketing,” says Christopher Marin, director of digital marketing platforms at IT service provider CSC.

The same is true for Dell Technologies, which integrated its existing data-collection tools and survey software into a unified platform. This single platform collects all data from Dell.com worldwide, with about 1 billion visits annually from 170 countries and 28 languages. It covers all customer interactions with Dell.com, from browsing, learning about solutions, configuring, purchasing, order status and product support.

A single, unified data platform sets you up to grow as your customer needs you to as well. As you branch out to the cloud or the Internet of Things or whatever comes next, these new sources of data will enrich your customer intelligence instead of confusing it.

Not only personalised.

As critical as understanding your customer is, customer data is only as good as the content it inspires. This returns us to our second question — have you got the ability to design and deliver the right experiences through the right channel at the right time every time?

“Experience-based, high-tech B2B companies are looking at the customer journey and making sure that not only is it personalised and consistent across different channels and devices, but it’s providing value,” Jill Steinour, director of high-tech industry strategy at Adobe told CMO.com. “After all, personalisation is nice, but providing value is really the priority for them. They’re thinking about how they can help to helping you, the consumer, solve a problem or smooth out a cumbersome process.”

Great content also begins with unification. First, implementing digital asset management is essential. This allows you to quickly access, manage or modify the right piece of content and deliver through the right channel. But just as important is ensuring that your digital asset management platform is integrated with your data platform to create a single, unified experience engine that powers your entire business.

For example, Dell customers receive information only about their approved system configurations on Dell.com, as well as focused computer support and software details. Corporate customers also get business-specific information on purchasing systems and are limited to only buying approved configurations. Additionally, the site experiences are continually tested to provide even more refined experiences and take into account an organisation’s specific preferences.

Likewise, CSC creates compelling, personalised experiences early in the sales cycle by feeding company demographic data into their analytics engine. It can then leverage the data to personalise pages for visitors based on their industry, then report and filter engagement data concerning target companies or industries.

And again, one of the key benefits of this unified platform is that it allows you to grow. If you’re ready to branch into connected devices beyond mobile or to expand your ecosystem of partners, an integrated data and content platform will make it possible.

A dramatically changed business model.

This digital foundation is important to high-tech companies not simply because of the technology it demands, but because the customer insights generated by that same technology enables the right organisational changes as well.

“High-tech companies can now shift their models around customer journeys rather than designing customer journeys around their entrenched structures,” Suzanne Kounkel, US technology leader at Deloitte Consulting, told CMO.com. “If you’re truly an experience-led business in the high-tech B2B world, that means your business model, operating model and all your underlying infrastructure have changed pretty dramatically. One important example of this is can be seen in how the back office has become the front office and a lot of the functional boundaries that used to exist for very real reasons no longer exist.

Nowhere is this existential crisis more obvious than in the relationship between sales and marketing. In these days when huge portions of the buyer’s journey happen long before a salesperson gets involved, the two teams must work hand in hand like never before. Gone are the days when marketing was considered “terra incognita” — today, according to eMarketer, 77 per cent of CMOs agree that marketing has a crucial role to play in innovation.

That role can be seen at CSC. To address these upheavals in the buyer’s journey, CSC created a clear cross-channel view of all pre-conversion events, including what ads a prospect saw, what content they looked at and what actions they took. Integrated data from their marketing automation, CRM and analytics platform allowed them to tie together all the events leading to conversion, from retweets to emails, display ads to click-throughs. All of this led to a 265 per cent year-over-year increase in marketing lead generation and drove additional sales.

Change instead of die.

The imperative to innovate is real. But high-tech companies that focus on understanding their customers so they can deliver experiences with real value rise above all that. Starting with the customer helps you to understand what you need from your technology. And by unifying your technology into a single, unified platform, you’ll see how the benefits of that technology — deep customer intelligence and personalised experiences — can transform your entire company.