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Donovan Neale-MayExecutive DirectorCMO Council |
In today’s complex and competitive digital world, rapidly developing technology is changing how consumers interact with brands. Customers are empowered to research and make decisions on their own terms, and they quickly ignore companies that cannot supply the experience, engagement channels, and immediate service they require.
As this new consumer-centric landscape impacts all technology and digitally driven business processes, marketing specifically has a chance to elevate its performance. Digital media provides marketers countless touch points and channels to reach consumers, as well as the ability to customize messaging for a targeted audience. Equipped with data-driven insights into consumer behavior, marketing can increase its productivity, ROI, and measurability. To seize these digital opportunities, however, chief marketing officers (CMOs) must forge greater synergies with their counterparts (chief information officers (CIOs) in a traditionally divergent business group–information technology (IT).
In its new report, “The CMO-CIO Alignment Imperative: Driving Revenue Through Customer Relevance,” the CMO Council explored the state of collaboration between marketing and IT in corporations worldwide. Though their cooperation has never been more crucial, neither marketing nor IT thinks they are highly effective partners. Traditional differences between the business units too often leave them polarized and adversarial. Consequently, many companies are struggling to keep pace in the digital revolution and cannot connect with consumers fast enough or efficiently.
According to the research, marketers and IT professionals closely agree on the value and impact of evolving engagement channels. With more than 500 million Facebook users worldwide and high-speed 4G wireless networks amplifying mobile connectivity, customer experience and connection is clearly focused in interactive digital media space. Marketers need IT to accurately and effectively utilize these new tools to create a sustainable business advantage. “You can no longer separate business from technology or technology from business,” said Faisal Hoque, author of Sustained Innovation.
There is also consensus on the need for improved customer data aggregation, segmentation, and analytics to support these customer-centric campaigns. If marketing’s core mission is to improve customer relevance and profitability, then IT can help by extracting key customer and market data from digital platforms and translating it into actionable insights. When aligned together, both sides can build on their unique talents, strategy, and abilities to achieve digital innovation unachievable individually.
While most marketing and IT organizations try to move in the right direction, they are simultaneously falling behind. Digital marketing and consumer analytics are simply changing faster than companies can adjust to the opportunity. Influenced by the tough economy and depleted budgets, many organizations are approaching marketing and IT collaboration incrementally, even as digitally savvy competitors move quickly and further ahead.
Perhaps another unavoidable challenge lies in the conflicting backgrounds of marketers and IT professionals. Numerous executives who participated in the study attributed their organizational differences to right-brain vs. left-brain thinking. With their more creative backgrounds, marketers have trouble relating to who technologists thrive in more pragmatic, objective situations, and vice versa.
Finally, CMOs and CIOs appear to diverge when determining what should be on the CIO agenda relative to improving marketing effectiveness. Within IT, CIOs focus on automating customer interactions, improving customer care, and handling and furthering the use of social media for online listening and interaction. Meanwhile, marketers would prefer IT to improve the links between functional marketing, sales, and channel groups, and also create better marketing execution platforms and operational systems. Factor in conflicting budgetary controls to these contrasting core objectives, and the two business sectors frequently end up further apart than together.
Despite these institutional challenges, the joint recognition of the value of effective digital capabilities should still encourage CMOs and CIOs to forge more effective partnerships. To do so, they must give up their individual agendas and focus on advancing the success of the overall enterprise. On a fundamental level, CMOs and CIOs should meet regularly to outline basic systems of communication and governance. CMOs must explain to CIOs how marketing can benefit from IT innovations; similarly, CIOs should be present for conversations about overall marketing strategy and objectives.
Companies need to invest in talent, technology, and processes to overcome the natural marketing and IT divide. Integrated marketing services platforms, multichannel campaign management, ROI modeling, content management systems–all of these solutions and platforms must be designed with input from both CMO and CIO and geared toward customer-centric engagement.
Whatever the initial cost, both leaders should understand that successful collaboration is likely to achieve significant paybacks in efficiency, adaptability, cost effectiveness, and measurability. More specifically, CMO-CIO cooperation is crucial to the segmentation, targeting, and customization of the customer experience that is so crucial to compete in today’s digital world. Failure to transform and deliver relevant engagement will lose current customers and burn future prospects. Therefore, to survive and excel in the digital age, the ultimatum is clear: Spend now on integration or fall further away from the customer and behind the competition.
Click here for a free executive summary of the CMO Council report (registration required).
About Donovan Neale-May Donovan Neale-May is founder and executive director of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, a global affinity network of more than 5,000 senior marketing executives controlling more than $150 billion in annual marketing spend.
