By Gauraav Thakar
The marketing world has undergone a drastic change from 1990 to what it is today. Should one teleport a marketing professional from the 90s to today, there is no doubt that he would feel out of place. Tools and strategies like demand side programming, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Install (CPI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots, Social+Local+Mobile (also popularly called SoLoMo) marketing strategy, attribution models, localisation and hyper-personalisation are only the tip of the iceberg with regard to modern marketing functions.
Changes in the marketing scenario
The marketing landscape has completely changed, so much so that a yesteryear practitioner would be totally lost in the game today. With the age of the smartphone, customers want to be instantly gratified and always live in-the-micro-moment. This has led to a major change in customer behaviour. An explosion of technology has helped marketers cater to a seemingly endless wish-list of their customers and target audiences. AI, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and predictive modelling to name a few are new opportunities and challenges to all stakeholders in the marketing process.
Business models have also significantly changed. New age business models which are enabled by technology and driven by consumer behaviour have laid waste to the erstwhile traditional regime, insofar as that 325 Fortune 500 organizations from the 1990 to 2017 list have been rendered obsolete. For example, kabbage.com is an online platform that helps small-scale businesses by providing easy access to working capital. The popular website provides loans online in under 7 minutes.
Staying smart and relevant in the market
A smart Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is one who is constantly adapting to a dynamic market. His singular aim should always be to keep the increasingly fickle consumer happy at all times. Adopting a new-age personnel structure is an optimal way of dealing with new-age challenges. This would involve a creative mix of a traditional marketing team (public relations, creatives, events, advertisements, outdoor, etc.), and a new digital marketing team – content, search engine optimization, media, social, analytics and marketing platforms (automation, websites, etc.) The complexity of this arrangement is directly proportional to the size of the organisation in question.
Key obstacles to growth
The CMO’s challenge arises from an increasingly fragmented marketing organization where too many specialists are doing too many things. Unfortunately, customer centricity – the purpose for which any marketing structure is created tends to get lost when each specialized team focuses on their own respective Key Result Areas (KRAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This may not always necessarily translate to customer delight.
Today’s fast-paced business leaves the CMO with no time to spare. This means that a team that requires a lot of learning and training will falter, sooner or later. There is no hope of long-term success for a fragmented marketing team. Communication barriers are a key issue in todays marketing business. Different personnel teams are keen to pass the buck on assignments and refuse to collaborate with each other. This leads to a collective drop in the quality of any initiative that the organisation decides to undertake.
Tackling the obstacles
The culture of customer centricity needs to be inculcated across all teams, agencies, partners, and vendors. Responsibility to execute the task till completion must be attached to an individual or a group whose action impacts the customer or prospect. Technology must be leveraged to ensure that stakeholders are always on the same page and have a medium to communicate and collaborate. To prevent monotony in the execution of campaigns, adding diverse skill sets and engaging in cross-training of resources is always a good idea. Marketing team members must work collectively in a unified effort. Labels and divisions must be done away with. Marketing is one team, which endeavours to serve and delight one customer, in as personalised a manner as possible.
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