Process-Centric Marketing:Transforming Audience Insights into Improved Customer Experience and Outcomes

By Harry Blunt

Updated March 2023

Early in my career, I came to learn that companies that fully understood and influenced the business processes underlying their products and services could positively influence and dictate future business outcomes.

Building on this insight, I began to apply a process-centric audience methodology, first in sales and later in marketing to harness this unique intelligence. That marketing framework, I call Process-Centric Marketing, leverages business process analysis, and audience segmentation data to capture the unique customer knowledge, often lying beneath a customer's products or services.

As demonstrated throughout this eBook, Process Centric Marketing principles can be used successfully to address a myriad of business challenges. The strength of the methodology lies is in its simplicity and timelessness.

Acquiring unique market and customer knowledge has and will continue to lead to greater innovation opportunities and a better customer experience. Successful marketing happens when a company improves its understanding of its market and customers. PCM’s mission and benefit are to improve a practitioner’s knowledge in those two areas.

The PCM methodology always works because it places its priority first on learning to ensure business and customer relevance. The goal is not only to understand how “something” works today but to identify more importantly what is missing or presently not considered to improve on what is there now.

As illustrated throughout the book, this “something” can be a new product, GTM process, service, customer message, solution position, organizational structure, etc. It doesn’t really matter what kind of problem, if you take the time to deconstruct the problem and reformulate the solution, leveraging process-centric marketing principles.

I decided to write this eBook because the methodology is so basic and cerebral, it can be difficult to understand and further appreciate. There is no immediate physical evidence produced like a piece of content.

Yet, as demonstrated, it is a proven and highly repeatable methodology that is timeless, leveraging specific tools and following specific processes. Its only true limitation lies with a company’s willingness to explore beyond what it can readily see!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harry Blunt
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005665203

Harry Blunt

Harry Blunt is a recently retired B2B marketing director with demonstrated success in creating new business for a broad range of technologies, industries, and audiences, successfully leveraging the Process-Centric Marketing methodology.Harry has held roles in major account sales, marketing, product development, sales management, new business commercialization, and field marketing, and has worked for multinational corporations and smaller firms. His work experience includes being a small business owner and working as a marketing consultant.He has a lifetime passion for innovation and understanding the processes and audiences impacting product choices and business outcomes.

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Why a Process-Centric Audience Approach Always Works

Businesses are under siege. Former customers and partners are now potential adversaries in a market characterized by market disruption and limited product differentiation. Given these challenges, a company can only gain its competitive advantage through its improved customer understanding.

To meet this objective, a company must focus less on their individual product or service features and more on the underlying business processes that influence and impact specific audiences and behaviors.

When this knowledge is acquired successfully, companies gain unique customer insight that leads to greater innovation and improved customer experiences.

By consistently applying process-centric focused principles toward different business processes and audiences, companies gain competitive advantage through the unique market and customer knowledge they capture.

Requiring no capital investment or a large staff, these principles can be successfully applied by companies of all sizes to address a myriad of business challenges, as illustrated by the case studies covered throughout this eBook.

Chapter 2:

Welcome to Process-Centric Marketing (PCM)

Early in my career, I came to learn that the companies that fully understood and influenced the business processes underlying their products and services could positively influence and dictate future business outcomes.

Building on this insight, I began to apply a process-centric audience methodology, first in sales and later in marketing to harness this unique intelligence. That marketing framework, I call Process-Centric Marketing, leverages business process analysis and audience segmentation data to capture the unique customer knowledge, often lying beneath a customer’s products or services.

By improving a company’s knowledge of these underlying business processes and the impact they have on specific audiences and behaviors, it acquires the kind of unique business insight seldom discovered when only operating on the product surface.

Successful organizations rarely define their business solely by their products; instead, they focus on the process improvements and positive business outcomes their solutions deliver. A company is less likely to succeed and weather the storm of change if it limits its business opportunities and market conversations to promoting its product features.

By leveraging PCM principles, companies mitigate future risk while gaining a competitive market advantage by acquiring a much deeper understanding of their customers’ business and desired outcomes. Acquiring this improved customer insight naturally leads to greater innovation and a better customer experience.

As articulated so well by Albert Einstein, Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Chapter 3:

How PCM Leverages Customer Knowledge for Competitive Advantage

When PCM principles are applied successfully, it naturally captures unique customer knowledge with its focus on answering three specific questions:

1. What is the business process or function underlying the product or service provided?

2. What functions or roles have the most to gain or lose associated with this process?

3.