Correspondence: Gary Katz, Marketing Operations Partners, 2079 Fordham Drive, Santa Clara, CA 95051, USA. Tel: 408-243-7881; E-mail: gary@mopartners.com

¹is a visionary and thought leader in the emerging Marketing Operations field. He is a veteran, with more than 20 years of marketing and change management experience in the technology industry in corporate, agency and entrepreneurial positions, where he directed corporate marketing, communications, public relations, lead generation and qualification, investor relations, and employee communications programs. Gary holds a Master's degree in organization development from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor's degree in public relations from San Jose State University. Gary is past president of the Silicon Valley Chapter, Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), an Accredited Member of PRSA and has been certified as a strategic planning process facilitator by the Institute of Cultural Affairs. He is currently vice president of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA), a national board member of the Business Marketing Association (BMA) and a member of the BMA Thought Leadership Committee. He has served as a track chair for the Henry Stewart Marketing Operations Management Symposium since 2005, has frequently spoken and moderated panels on Marketing Operations and Marketing ROI-related topics and has published several articles on Marketing Operations in MarketingProfs, Automate and other publications. In 2006, Gary started Marketing Operations Evangelists, a growing group of leaders dedicated to advancing the profession of Marketing Operations. Gary is the founder and CEO of Marketing Operations Partners.

Abstract

The Internet is a great equalizer in leveling the playing field for buyers and sellers. Today, customers have more power than ever and, together with investors, are holding enterprises to new levels of accountability to deliver on the representations they make to the market. Transparency and trust are intricately intertwined. Web 2.0 amplifies and reinforces this shift from selling to naive prospects to building trusted relationships with savvy customers. While products were once key business differentiators, a slippage in brand loyalty indicates that few companies today can build a sustainable business strategy on technology differentiation alone. The experience a customer has while interacting with the company through each phase of the business relationship is now paramount. Managing customer experience, especially on the Internet, is a tenuous endeavor. Web 2.0 may create some uplift in two-way communication, but it also contributes to increased liability exposure. Anyone — even a company's own disgruntled employees — can use blogs, wikis, forums and other vehicles to circulate information on the Web that can substantially help or hinder an enterprise's credibility. Gary Katz, founder and CEO of Marketing Operations Partners, believes that CMOs, supported by their marketing operations (MO) teams, are in a unique position to help enterprises manage this transition. The evolving discipline of MO addresses the customer relationship continuum end-to-end — from first touch through outbound marketing to nurturing through the sales funnel, from building customer affinity through voice of the customer and loyalty programs to leveraging that affinity to engaging the most evangelistic customers in the sales and marketing process. In this interview, Katz shares his insights on the areas MO addresses, why it is increasingly important in today's world, and how it can help enterprises deliver on accelerating customer expectations and business objectives.