Marketing as You Know It, Is Dead. What now?

Marketing by definition is managing profitable customer relationships. In the era of digital disruption by emerging digital technologies and business models, it's almost impossible to maintain customer relationships using traditional marketing even before planning for profitability! The evidence is clear.

CMOs have lost it!

By losing track of new marketing tools and products in the fast pace of innovation. They are not necessarily integrated together thus not providing right data for analytics and insights to drive effective marketing activities and measuring the right ROIs. 

By not being able to link marketing efforts to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric and always talk about brand equity.

By creating lots of campaigns instead of meaningful journeys for the customers. Well, it’s like comparing two travel agencies, one dealer type of agency offering flight and excursion tickets and the other creating a personalized itinerary by knowing your personality and interests.

Customers are not the same anymore

Customers are smarter, busier and no longer paying much attention to the random ads popping up almost everywhere. They are often being annoyed by so-called blind automation and retargeting which can jeopardize brand equity and increase opt-out ratio. 

Traditional marketing communications are just not relevant in the traditional “buyers decision journey.” Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.

What now?

What to do to adapt to the new digital era and run effective marketing plans? Here some key concept to look for:

1. Delivering a personalized experience

The key is to master customer experience, knowing what customers want at the right time and exposing them to the relevant information at the right place. This cannot be achieved without doing the right customer segmentation, analyzing their purchasing behavior and foreseeing customer journeys. This will lead to a relevant and contextual experience.

2. Mastering big data and analytics

Real-time, data-driven insights from digital and social channels are key factors and the basis of offering a personalized experience. Also, they open the doors to cognitive learning and performance improvements. Furthermore, they enable us to monitor, track, and manage the effectiveness of marketing investments.

3. Selecting the right marketing technology

Marketing technology is a required to deliver on multichannel customer experiences. It can automate processes, personalize interactions, and coordinate actions. It effectively acts as a bridge between the customer experience and marketing operations.

Selecting the right technology which covers main marketing operations such as segmentation, campaign management, loyalty, analytics, omnichannel and social channels is crucial to achieving best-in-class customer experience. There are many players in this market: SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Adobe, Google and Oracle all have multiple solutions to drive the marketing technology.

Working together, SAP and IBM combine their experience, solutions, and expertise enabling CMOs to create and execute a roadmap that transforms organizations to take advantage of the digital era.

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[1] - The digital disruption is being driven by a perfect storm of new technologies – cloud computing, mobile, Big Data, social media, and cognitive computing – technologies that are disrupting how industries operate and how businesses, purchasers, and customers transact and interact, buy and sell, and market and use information. 

References

Marketing Is Dead by HBR

Technology and the CMO in a Digital Era by IBM and SAP

How digital marketing operations can transform business by McKinsey