In July, Kay Lemon began her two-year appointment as MSI’s Executive Director, succeeding Kevin Lane Keller of Dartmouth College. She is Accenture Professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.

Her expertise is in the areas of customer experience, customer equity, and customer-based marketing strategy. She has received numerous awards including, most recently, the 2015 Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award. She has served as Editor of Journal of Service Research and on several editorial review boards. 

A long-time friend of MSI, Lemon has been an Academic Trustee and a frequent speaker at MSI conferences as well as the author of a number of MSI working papers, including two that received Robert D. Buzzell MSI Best Paper Award.  

Q: What are the critical challenges for marketers today?

There are so many challenges facing marketing today. Marketing isn’t just marketing anymore. To be successful, marketers must understand and coordinate with frontline service, information technology, operations, finance—all these aspects of the organization that they may not control or even influence.

Designing, understanding, and managing the customer’s experience through the entire process—from before your customers even think they need the product or service all the way through consumption and usage—has gotten so complex. It’s not even clear where you start!

When our customers are looking for our products or services, we need to be there. We need to have our messages there. We need to be there in all channels.

For a long time a marketer’s goal was to find or “get” customers. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s not clear that customers are necessarily receptive or responsive to that anymore. Instead, when our customers are looking for our products or services, we need to be there. We need to have our messages there. We need to be there in all channels. We need to have our information technology and our channel interactions seamlessly coordinated, so that it’s all integrated for the customer who is searching on a mobile phone, then buying in a store or contacting a sales rep, and looking for after-sales services on the website. Or the doctor who’s looking for the drug to prescribe to her patient while the electronic medical record is up—right there when the decision process is happening: we need to be there.

Q: How do you see MSI addressing these challenges?

In lots of ways! Let me just highlight a few. First, our roundtables have been a really successful initiative. I’ve seen this as the academic facilitator for the Customer Experience roundtable. Like all the roundtables, it is a group of members from noncompeting companies, and it is great to listen to participants share their challenges and their successes and serve as resources for others who are at different places on the journey. And I hear this about our other roundtables as well—they provide a wonderful place for members to learn from each other and improve their capabilities.

Second, our monthly webinar series is another great way that members get insights and “quick wins” that they can easily apply to pressing marketing problems. In September, for example, we had approximately 200 participants join in for Mike Hanssens’ webinar on “Empirical Generalizations about Marketing Impact.” What I find fascinating is our member company participants’ depth of knowledge and understanding. Mike was able to quickly jump into advanced topics, and to provide substantial, generalizable insights in a short period of time. It was awesome!

Third, MSI is always looking for ways to enable members to expand their tool kits in innovative ways. For example, in our upcoming social media workshop (spring 2016), the goal is to give attendees hands-on experience in maximizing insights from social media by integrating insights from in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses.

The workshop leaders will be two top academics: Rob Kozinets, an expert on netnography and qualitative and cultural analysis of social media, and Wendy Moe, an expert in using data analytics to gain insights from social media. Participants will open their laptops, dig in, and use hands-on tools to identify key actionable insights. This is something we hope to do even more of: equipping our members with the state-of-the-art approaches that enable them to deal with this dynamic, complex world our customers live in.

We see an opportunity and a desire in our member companies and the academic community to collaborate to move the needle forward on significant marketing challenges.

In addition to our current initiatives, we are seeking new and innovative ways that we can help marketers be more effective and accelerate the pace of new knowledge. We can look at big issues that are transforming customers, companies, and marketing organizations, and we have leading scholars and smart member companies who are wrestling with these challenges in their organizations.

We see an opportunity and a desire in our member companies and the academic community to collaborate to move the needle forward on significant marketing challenges faced individually by the companies or faced by the marketing field as a whole. Thus, we’re identifying new ways that we may be able to attack big, messy (yet tractable and researchable) problems. It’s early days, so stay tuned for further updates on these exciting new initiatives!

Q: What are your impressions of MSI after three months as executive director?

Making sense of the complexity—that’s something MSI does really well. We bring the big picture capabilities that marketers need moving forward as well as the highly actionable, detailed, sometimes even technical approaches that can help them do their jobs better.

One very cool initiative, launched by my predecessor Kevin Lane Keller around our most recent Research Priorities, exemplifies how MSI makes sense of complexity. Kevin asked pairs of world-renowned academics to identify the key learnings and insights on each of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 topics and to outline a strong pathway for future research.

These academics presented initial findings at our “Frontiers of Marketing” conference in July. It was an exciting event. The papers will be considered by the Journal of Marketing for a special JM/MSI issue. We are providing our members a managerial report on the important takeaways as well.

This initiative strengthens marketing practice by clearly setting out key, actionable frameworks and insights that marketers can implement. It also creates an opportunity for collaboration on unanswered questions.

As busy as they are, [our members] recognize the value of stepping back for a moment, gaining new insights, connecting with others, and then going back invigorated and armed with new tools.

I’ve also been struck by the extent to which MSI members truly recognize the value of investing in new ideas, and new ways of thinking. As busy as they are, they recognize the value of stepping back for a moment, gaining new insights, connecting with others, and then going back invigorated and armed with new tools.

Most recently, this was evident in our September Immersion conference. People came from all over the world to listen to top scholars give five “deep dives” on critical marketing topics. These are folks who’ve been identified by their companies as rising stars, and they are hungry and thirsty for new, usable knowledge in marketing.

I am also impressed by how much impact the work of MSI has in member companies and across the academic world—especially given that it’s such a small (but mighty!) organization. We’re the only organization of our kind. I hear this all the time from people who are not in the marketing field. Because we’re not housed inside a university or company, we have an opportunity to sense new ideas and identify key problems and then find the best people to address them. It’s such an exciting time to be in marketing, and a very exciting time to be at MSI!