Businesses need customer data to differentiate products, pricing and scale. But how much does freely available data from entities like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. help them? To stand out, they will have to own and fully exploit their own data, said Marta Federici (pictured), global head of Customer Relationship Management B2C and B2B at Royal Philips of the Netherlands.

“Customer obsession is really at the core of any of our marketing activity right now,” Federici said at Oracle Corp.’s Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

To integrate the most granular customer data into its business processes, it is necessary to get different departments talking to each other, so to speak, Federici told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of  theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (*Disclosure below.)

The company’s customer relationship management system is the language for achieving this. “I have a portion of the team that is focusing on business-to-consumer CRM, a portion of the team on business-to-business CRM,” Federici said.

In addition, there are two layers in between — one for CRM technology and another for insights. “I would say all of them work together,” she stated. “They can enrich each other, sharing challenges and really learning from one another.”

Royal Philips has integrated CRM as a core marketing capability with help from Oracle and its channel partners, said Federici, who will speak at tomorrow’s Oracle’s MME keynote with Catherine Blackmore, group vice president of global customer success at Oracle Marketing Cloud.

The company’s health tech division is expanding into Internet of Things, which Federici tied back into CRM. “We also build products which are connected to apps — and what’s the best way to engage? CRM,” she said.

The devil’s in the data

A company’s data strategy is only as good as the data itself. If a company feeds its analytics platform the same data all of their competitors have, they are just treading water, Federici explained. This is where a unique CRM database can help.

“The value that every company should build alone is owning its own data. Every company should really care to build an extremely good database to start with,” she said. “That is the game-changer for sure.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. The conference sponsor, Oracle, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE