Eduardo Conrado, who was kind enough and is the chief innovation officer at Motorola Solutions and wrote the book-- to Carla and my book, Experiences-- the Seventh Era of Marketing, said this really well. He did a really interesting thing. He said, if you're able to invest in systems of engagement, IT technology then becomes a differentiation in the marketplace. It's a really interesting point, right.
And what he did was he combined those two things. He said, sales, marketing, IT, you're actually all in the business of doing one thing-- creating a better customer experience. So guess what, you're all one department now. You're in the customer experience department.
And as the chief innovation officer, he runs all of that. And so it unifies those groups together into a function that focuses on creating better customer experiences. Or how about Stephen Quinn, who is now the former CMO of Walmart who had created, as he said, our customers need innovation. And they need a customer focus. And so we have to focus on that.
As he says his job is to protect the next from the now. And what he meant by that was he said he had the 70/20/10 split of investment of time, where he said 70% of the stuff we do is focused on today. 20% of the stuff we do is focused on tomorrow. And 10% of the stuff we do, the bandwidth, the hours that we spend, is focused on the future. And that's a really important thing as we start to think about how are we spending our time.
From the way I see most marketing departments these days, 100% of our time is spent on yesterday. It's already late by the time it fits onto our desk-- that blog post, that white paper. We're already late with the social media thing. We have to get it out. We can't focus on tomorrow. We can't focus on the future. We can't event focus on making it great because it's already late.
And that's what needs to change in the process. As Beth Comstock, who is now the vice-chairman of GE-- the vice-chair of GE-- as she said, which is so important, innovation is often deprecated at the expense of what is predictable. And we don't have to.
Creativity doesn't have to be something that we put down. It is something we don't have to pit against the strategy of the business. And that's an important thing when we start thinking about this new thing called content marketing and how we make it an effective function in the business.
We have to require the mental and physical space to be able to shape and smash these things to smithereens so that we can create new things. But here's the thing.
We are still stuck in these old patterns. We still focus on reach and frequency as sort of the main drivers of content and how we use marketing strategies. We still think if a customer touches something three or four or five or six or 10 times, it's better. We do lead scoring by saying, how many times they touch a piece of content. If it's more than three, now they get a call from a salesperson.
This is proving to be inefficient because what it's encouraging us to do is produce more content in the hope that people will touch it more, not that it means anything to their lives. The CEB actually found this out where they said it is a myth that the more that people touch your content, the more sticky or the more loyal that they become.
And in fact, it works quite the opposite. As we create more content and then bombard our customers with more content, it adds the reason for them to become less sticky, less loyal. Without realizing it, we're adding to this information bombardment that we're putting onto our customers and suffering as a consequence.
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