Last week at Forrester's Forum For Marketing Leaders in San Francisco, we bid farewell once and for all to old marketing — the marketing of campaigns, outbound messaging, and funnels. In its place, we unveiled a new and improved customer life cycle: the blue print for customer obsession. Attendees got a sneak preview of the content, but all clients have access as of today to a new report, which elevates the life cycle from its marketing home and into the whole enterprise. As your customers take a very nonlinear approach to getting what they want out of their brand relationships, companies must put the customer at the heart of everything they do to create contextual, useful engagement. The customer life cycle involves the entire brand experience, from messaging to product usage and ongoing interactions, and incorporates the ongoing relationship firms must have with customers, making it the marketing vision that will drive CMOs' success in the age of the customer.

The new version has two new phases — use and ask — that, with the original four phases, more completely captures the entire relationship a customer has with a brand.

Forrester clients can find data supporting this framework and examples of companies making this transformation a reality in the report, "The Customer Life-Cycle: A Blueprint For Customer-Obsessed Enterprises." And folks attending our next Forum For Marketing Leaders in London in May will see me talk about this live.