How should modern marketing leaders think about driving peak performance in customer innovation?

As a competitive endurance athlete and both a leader and advocate of performance-focused customer innovation at Jivox, I see data as the essential “fuel” for achieving peak performance.

In sport, granular metrics — from VO₂ max, power output, nutrition intake to recovery — help me identify exactly where and how to improve in multi-sport competition.

In performance-driven customer innovation, the same approach applies.

What Is Performance-Focused Customer Innovation?

Performance-focused customer innovation is a strategic approach where businesses prioritize solving actual customer problems and delivering tangible value to them through innovation, with the ultimate goal of improving business performance and achieving growth.

Through our product innovation DaVinci, customers can use first-party data to scale personalized commerce media ad campaigns across channels and media networks to drive “peak performance” — in today’s environment, it means incremental return on ad spend (ROAS) and sales lift through acquiring new-to-brand customers.

As AI has become an integral part of the tools we use, data is the key to optimizing performance.

In my sport, that means AI’s personalized training recommendations based on my performance metrics over days and weeks allow me to see incremental improvements towards reaching my performance goals.

In customers’ commerce media innovation, it means data-driven personalized content or creative for product offerings enables brand customers to differentiate themselves — by targeting precise audience segments using first-party data combined with SKU-level product data.

To design a product using AI as the foundation requires a whole new way of thinking and approaching product design, support, marketing and selling. It behooves us to re-think change at the fundamental, organizational level.

At Jivox, an AI-driven company building an AI-native platform, we’ve totally transformed our organization from the traditional functional silos to a hub-and-spoke model. This new growth-oriented model strategically balances centralized data flow, insights and learning with decentralized agility and innovation within each function.

Whether in competitive sport or in business, it’s the same approach. For peak performance in customer innovation, I ask:

  1. What does peak performance mean at the campaign or the organizational level?
  2. Do I have data precision and the right metrics to point me towards peak performance?
  3. What AI-powered tools can help me “peak” at speed and scale?
  4. What organization do I need to build to adapt to change all the time, in real time.

Peak performance happens only by deliberate design. It is a series of internal innovations–from the edges of product, marketing, operations to the core organization itself – that drive customer innovation. Let me know what you think.