Surjit Chana, chief marketing officer, IBM Europe
Things are changing: I wouldn’t say the roles of chief information officer (CIO) and chief marketing officer (CMO) are converging completely, but closer collaboration is clearly happening. In the era of big data and digitally empowered customers, the CMO and CIO can no longer act separately. It is the CMO – not just CIO – who is now being held accountable for business results tied to technology investments, and for driving long-term growth beyond marketing campaigns.According to Gartner, by 2017 the CMO will have greater influence on the IT budget than the CIO. However, they will still need the guidance from CIOs to make sure their decisions align with wider enterprise technology strategy.
It’s about collaboration: While each company will need to find its own way of working, CMOs should look in-house and use the expertise of CIOs to get a better handle on their situation and to define the right technology needs for their business. Regular work sessions are a good starting point – the CMO and CIO can look at what the business strategy is, how the marketing strategy needs to support it and then agree on the technology roadmap needed to make it come to life.
Big data can also be a hindrance to marketers: Without the right tools, CMOs run the risk of being inundated – perhaps even paralysed – by data. When you get customer information from mobile commerce, search history, social channels and mobile devices, all this data can seem overwhelming. Especially when you don’t have the right analytics or tools to make sense of it. It can be quite daunting.
What does a CMO in five years’ time look like? I think the answer all depends on our increasingly tech-savvy customers. They will all change their mobiles, social media engagement and buying habits during that time. What is certain is that CMOs will need to make sure they can predict trends and spot where opportunities lie (and don’t).
Big data analytics will be crucial because I really can’t see the waves of customer information stopping any time soon. In fact, industry predictions see continued exponential growth in data generation. Big data is going to become even bigger and marketers have to stay on top of that. What is definite is that we’ll see more CMOs with big data and analytics skills, because our jobs will become inseparable from technology.
Brian Streich, international marketing director, StubHub International
Marketing must get a grip on the technology and its capabilities: CMOs will have to understand the underlying technology running their business because they will be so heavily dependent on utilising it to provide engaging experiences to their customers across all platforms.With the introduction of mobile and so many different devices, it will be extremely important for CMOs to continue to understand new technology and ways of capturing data across platforms so they aren’t having the same conversation over and over with the same customer. The better you understand those capabilities and utilise them, the more successful your marketing campaigns will be and the quicker you’ll be able to learn and adapt.
Look at it from the customer’s point of view: Big data is the engine that drives a truly personalised experience and our goal as marketers should be to have a truly unique and personalised experience for every customer. Customers are more than willing to share data and information in return for a better experience, but you need to make it engaging and simple for them to do so.
I think it’s also important to remember that leveraging big data to create a personalised experience (both on and off-site) has now become an expectation and something we need to continuously learn from and improve.
Keep the dialogue open, and ensure there’s feedback: The relationship with our CIO and IT department has continued to grow. We work closely to educate them on what our customers are doing and what they want – and they educate us on solutions that may exist and how we can best accomplish that. Personalisation isn’t just a feature and it will never end so we need to constantly keep the dialogue open and feed back in what is and isn’t working.
Getting started: I really think you have to start with thinking about what it is your trying to communicate or do for your customer and the data you want. I would then sit down with your chief technology or information officer and try and understand what data you already have and how accessible is it. Once you understand that, you can begin to identify the missing data you want to collect and can work together to come up with a plan on how you can begin capturing or accessing that it.
Vincent van den Boogert, general manager marketing,
ING Netherlands
It’s about a good working relationship between the CIO and CMO: If there is a recipe for good relationships, the world would be a better place! Nevertheless, I think there are some things that can help. For example, understanding that the two together can solve things you can’t do alone. Another is that it’s a bonus if the CIO has spent some time of his career in the business and the CMO has an interest (and some knowledge) of IT.From personal experience, marketers have often seen IT people as ‘enablers of hygiene’ (security, maintenance), while IT people have seen marketers as colleagues who were always after new and fancy stuff. If they work more together on solving the same problem, they will both feel more valued.
Hard facts and the value of gut instinct: Gut instinct will still play a role in marketing. However, more than before you’ll quickly know if you were right or not as marketing becomes more and more fact-based. For instance, multi-channel targeting or marketing accountability may have become more complex but there’s simply no excuse anymore for not taking into account facts while doing marketing. Facts collated and analysed with good IT solutions can be used as a driver for customer satisfaction and sales – things get more transparent, measurable; often more direct.
Also, in the future customer knowledge will not be based on generic truths, but in personalised knowledge about preferences and needs. For this, data and analytics will be crucial. A good CMO will be a strong believer in the good use of IT for marketing goals – less a person who’s intuition has proved right in the past, but more a person who can handle the complexity of tomorrow with thousands of simultaneous offers refreshed real time.
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