Authors: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Reviewer: Beth Gladstone, marketing manager, Codegent
Code Halo: the digital imprint surrounding a customer, made up of past and present information on their preferences, behaviour and buying history. This is a concept which every marketer should be familiar with and this book does a good job of explaining why.
Through three parts it explains what a Code Halo is, the technology behind it and how to achieve and anticipate success. It is probably the first chapters in part one: ‘Digits over Widgets: the next age of business and technology’ which are the most relevant from a B2B marketing perspective. Here, the authors stress how important it is to decipher insight from customer data and use this as a foundation to build new products and services. Through interesting, albeit slightly martyred, examples Netflix versus Blockbuster and Amazon vs. HMV, it shows what happens when companies ignore this data and find themselves on the ‘unrecoverable path to irrelevancy’, against their more digitally savvy counterparts.
This definitely left me thinking about the use of data in our marketing strategy and how better to harness it to anticipate the needs, preferences and behaviour of our customers.
The second and third parts of the book are less relevant to marketers as they are more of a playbook on how to apply the right business methods to harness digital disruption. This would need to come from the top down but it’s not difficult to see how you would apply a similar method to your marketing and sales strategy.
All in all, this is an easy read on an interesting topic. At worst, it will give you insight into using data more effectively and at best, it will help you to predict and prepare for changes in the way your company does business in the future.
Star Rating: 4/5
