A seismic shift from marketing efficiency to marketing effectiveness

The 2010 Forrester Marketing Forum focused at a high level on adaptive marketing.  What does that really mean?  Responding to the market, performance based decision making, or understanding and integrating emerging platforms such as social?  Triple yes, and the Forum covered them all.  But all of these tactics, while making a marketer more efficient, may not necessarily make them more effective. 

What's the difference?  You can improve budget efficiency by managing channel performance to drive down CPL, CPA, or whatever your campaign metric may be. Dell did it for a decade before they hit a ceiling. Then they realized they needed a new weapon, customer intelligence. You cannot truly achieve sustainable program effectiveness, regardless of campaign or channel, without it.  As a result almost every analyst and guest speaker at the Forum either touched on the topic, or built the focus of their presentation around it. 

At first I was disheartened that this is still the centerpiece of industry dialogue after more than a decade.  But then I thought, great! customer intelligence is still the centerpiece of the dialogue after more than a decade! (it's all in the italics and punctuation)  The two most important words there are "customer" and "dialogue".  Even though the label hasn't changed the approach has.  We are no longer talking about the most efficient segmentation-based acquisition campaigns, but real insight that comes directly from the customer, through mediums such as social, to change the very nature of marketing.  We no longer pitch products through one-way communication, but we listen to customer feedback about our brand, our service, their communication preferences and we respond to their needs.  On a good day, we may even anticipate their needs.  And then we are effective.