One thing that I love about conference season is that it breaks me out of my office and out into the real world. Not that I don’t get a lot of interaction on the phone and via web conferences, but there’s still nothing like in person. Part of the reason I value going to conferences is it gives me an opportunity to get some candid feedback about whether we are hitting the mark with our research.

This conference season, two reports in particular came up as the ones that people cited as their favorites: Pricing, and Marketing (specifically, Retail Pricing in a Post-Channel World and Marketing in Retail: Making the Case for the CMO). Of the reports that I’ve helped write this year, I’d say those two have struck something of a nerve.

So I thought it would be worthwhile to give you a peek into some of the reactions to the most recent report, which is Marketing. Three “startling” things (as it says in the title) maybe isn’t the right word. “Alarming” is too strong of a word, but it could head in that direction in the future. If you want the full report, you can download it here. In the meantime, here’s what I learned:

1. The timeline that retailers are currently following for creating a true customer-focused executive is too slow.

It’s no surprise that the marketing executive has about as much cache as the IT executive in your typical retail enterprise. The two big gorillas in the room are merchandising and store operations, and for a long time retail has needed it to be that way. But the world has changed. The good news is that a lot of retailers recognize it. The bad news is that they haven’t figured out yet what to do about it – or worse yet, haven’t accepted the inevitable. Someone must own the customer experience. I know personally, I’ve even waffled on that statement, as our research has shown that retailers have been very unwilling to go down a path towards a “Chief Customer Experience Officer” or something like it. But our latest marketing report has crystalized my thinking.

Now, in the report, we found that retailers seem to be preparing themselves for some of the major organizational changes that concentrating power into a customer experience executive role would require. That’s good news. But any organizational changes, especially to that degree, take literally years to take hold, and retailers really just don’t have that long.

Here’s how I know why that’s true. More and more I hear from vendors that have some really cool solutions – ones with great potential to enhance the customer experience. Some have especially been focused on stores, where the customer experience is increasingly on the ropes compared to the online experience. Their primary frustration is that they have no one to sell their solutions to. Store ops nods their heads and says yes this is great, but their primary objective is trying to squeeze as much productivity out of a dwindling or already dwindled labor budget. They don’t have any room to consider investments into customer experience. And the marketing organization doesn’t have nearly enough sway (or budget, really) to make an investment decision that would impact store operations to any great degree.

So retailers can argue til the day is long that they may or may not need an executive focused on the customer experience, but when the reality is that great solutions languish simply because the person who should champion those initiatives just doesn’t exist – now, we have a problem.

2. Retailers need to put aside arguments about behavioral vs. demographic targeting.

One of my favorite findings from the marketing report: the more that retailers collect and “learn” about their customers, the less they feel they “know” their customers. This is some kind of corollary to analysis paralysis – the more data you have, the harder it is to know what kind of insights to look for. But at the same time, we saw a pretty big split between a group of survey respondents who felt strongly that the best data is behavioral data (“I know the right way to talk to my customers based on what it is they are doing when they interact with me”) vs. the group who felt strongly that the best data is demographic (as in, “the more I know about who my customer is, the better able I will be to anticipate and respond to their needs”).

While I want to be careful of the minefield that is inherent in “the more I learn, the less I know”, the truth is, there shouldn’t even be a debate over behavioral vs. demographic. Retailers need both. Behavioral data provides tactical context – what is my shopper trying to achieve right now – and demographic data provides strategic context – what might my shopper want from me in the future, and maybe even a beginning towards answering the question of why the shopper wants something to begin with. Over the last month or so, I heard quite a few kudos from people fighting the battle on both fronts, so I just want to make my own position clear: I’m not supporting one over the other. They’re both important.

But even if you get past that argument, don’t get bogged down. There are a lot of levers that can move customer behavior. But some of them are big, heavy levers that require a lot of effort to move – and result in very small changes. And some are small levers that take nothing to move and result in big changes. As you’re collecting more and more customer data, of all kinds, keep in mind whether that data helps you move hard levers, or easy ones. That’ll help you focus on the right kinds of data.

3. Marketing does not spend enough time on customer engagement.

In our report, Brian and I chastised retailers for marketing departments that spend too much time on driving sales and traffic (near the top of the list, in terms of where they spend their time) and not enough time on customer loyalty or engagement (near the bottom of the list). It’s not surprising that marketing doesn’t spend as much time on customer engagement as some of these other things, because in fact, they don’t own customer engagement in the enterprise. That gets back to #1 on this list. No one actually owns customer engagement – what I would argue is the centerpiece of customer experience.

So here’s a radical thought. What if store operations was divided into two pieces – operations, and customer experience. Some retailers do this, where their “red shirts” or “blue shirts” serve customers and their “gray shirts” stock shelves and generally keep the product moving and the store running. But what if all those customer experience people reported to marketing instead of operations? Let’s throw in the customer service reps that answer the phones and chat requests online, too. Seems radical, until you really think about it. Outside of retail, most marketing organizations are actually sales & marketing. Marketing tends to own all those people managing their social media properties (even if that is actually one intern stuck in a corner). Isn’t that a major interaction point for a lot of customers? Isn’t it an opportunity to at least sell the brand, if not some specific product? And by extension, aren’t sales people in stores also theoretically selling the brand alongside specific products?

I know, I know, that’s not going to happen today, or probably even in this decade. But I want to plant the seeds now: sales people that are oriented to stores sell stores and deliver products. Sales people that are oriented toward marketing sell the brand and deliver an experience. In this day and age, it’s the latter – brand and experience – that is differentiating. And soon to become a minimum requirement for survival.

So there you go – the three surprising/startling/not-quite-alarming things that I have learned since we wrote the marketing report. I encourage you to download the whole thing – there’s a lot of good stuff in there. But my biggest hope is that this helps spark the desperately needed conversation internally in your own company. We made the case for a CMO who is the customer experience executive. I’m sure I will see that in my lifetime, but it sure would be great for retail overall if that happened much sooner rather than later.