I’ve just wrapped up my first teaching cycle at the Istituto Europeo di Design, where I taught CRM.
It was genuinely interesting to watch a subject that most people still consider technical, cold, or the exclusive territory of data nerds reveal itself as one of the last truly creative disciplines in marketing.
With students aged 20 to 22, we covered CRM, KPIs, CLV, loyalty, omnichannel strategy, GDPR, and prize promotions. But more than anything, we talked about people: relationships, behaviours, desires, retention, and brand identity.
A highlight was the contribution of Silvia Covi, who shared how you can arrive at CRM from a creative background — and how fashion and beauty approach data in profoundly different ways.
For me, it was also a personal exercise: imposing order on years of hands-on experience and turning it into something teachable. Perhaps even the seed of a future book. A thoroughly malevolent one, naturally.
And maybe that’s precisely the point: there comes a moment when just being an executive isn’t enough anymore.
You’re sitting there and it hits you — you won’t be there forever, you’ve made it further than you ever thought possible, and now what? Do you keep all that hard-won experience to yourself, or do you feel the pull to give something back? To share the tools, open up perspectives for the people who will inevitably come after you?
Because the new generations may have plenty of flaws, but they have one enormous quality: they haven’t yet learned to take the wrong things for granted.
And besides — if it’s true that I’m the contrarian voice in the system, beloved by few, despised by the many dinosaurs I’ve already sent off to push up daisies, and feared by those still standing — why not play the ultimate trick on them? Train a cohort of mini-mes directly, and unleash them as the meteor of renewal on Italian marketing.