- People like to exchange ideas about their favorite brand – also with the brand itself. The number of visitors to brand parks, flagship stores and events impressively shows that you want to experience the brand with all your senses.
- The interaction with the brand can also take place digitally, as the fitness trackers Nike Plus and Adidas Runtastic show. In both cases, the offers go beyond simply conveying brand values. Your success depends on their relevance and results in convenience, time or cost advantages.
- Even the best arguments won’t be convincing if they don’t get them at the right time. It is therefore important for marketers to find the perfect moment.
- If you were able to get the target group to interact, you have to be quick: they expect a response to a tweet within an hour and an email on the same day.
- The interaction wishes of consumers are diverse: They can be assigned to sales, marketing, customer service or PR.
Accordingly, marketing communication today has to be personalized, relevant, contextual and fast. Their diversity requires interdisciplinary teams, as it is a complex task.
To solve this, CMOs have to enter into alliances with customer service, sales and PR as well as partners from MarTech and data brokerage. However, the volatility of consumer behavior, which has intensified with the pandemic, has a destabilizing effect. The alliances must be flexible and scalable. There is also pressure to be more efficient: In data-driven marketing in particular, the effect on sales is easy to identify. An improvement in sales figures due to investments in brand maintenance, however, is difficult to demonstrate in concrete terms.
Get the upper hand by organizing marketing as an ecosystem!
We are observing a convergence in the marketing organization. Marketeers today need to have insights into all phases of the customer lifecycle because brand and target group interact more intensely than before. Online and offline communication merge. In both cases, it is critical to merge the data that customers leave behind at all touchpoints, including business partners or third-party data. Since the sales-promoting effect can be easily attributed, marketing and sales merge. This also applies to marketing teams and their agencies, because CMOs are looking for a direct exchange with creative people for reasons of time. CIO and CMO are looking to close ranks, as the inflationary MarTech offers can no longer be overlooked.
If you channel these forces skillfully, you can create an organization that does justice to changed consumer behavior. Their strength lies in their lower complexity. We are talking about a marketing ecosystem, which has the following elements: brand management, marketing organization, MarTech, customer activation and content marketing.
The connecting element between all five parts of the marketing ecosystem is data. The marketing ecosystem is our answer to the disruption in the corporate environment.
New tasks arise for CMOs from the marketing ecosystem
Our understanding of marketing as an ecosystem gives rise to important questions for CMOs that we would like to answer in a blog series:
- At the beginning there is the question of how to gain the trust of the target group so that they leave their data to the company. My colleague Marian Meyer-Tischler shows this in his contribution.
- Stéphane Sun shows how to build up a complete profile by enriching this data from other sources.
- According to Jerome Honerkamp, it is particularly interesting to find out what people are looking for when interacting with the brand so that companies can address them in a targeted manner.
- Christian Bohm writes how such interactive offers are then presented to customers via omnichannel.
- As well as other blog posts.
These questions show how much the range of tasks in marketing has changed. Jochen Sengpiehl, the CMO of Volkswagen, sums that up: “Marketing has to reinvent itself.”
Connected Marketing helps with this. By connected marketing, we mean that
- Addressing the target group over
- personalized and relevance Brand messages,
- the in right moment be placed, namely
- through a fast and interdisciplinary working marketing team,
- that is able to use appropriate Marketing-Technology To communicate efficiently on a large scale.
Why should you act now?
According to Forrester, most CEOs will make marketing efficiency a top priority for the company in 2021. Accordingly, more and more CMOs are also measured against sales goals.
At the same time, the data represent a great opportunity for CMOs, because information about consumer and media behavior allows conclusions to be drawn about the preferences of consumers, from which new products and services can be derived. Marketing could thus become the company’s source of innovation.
Why are CMOs ahead here? You have interaction and transaction data. In addition, CMOs are usually assigned the exact role of shaping the customer relationship, which is why corresponding projects are assigned a priori to marketing. What can you do today?
Why is Capgemini so well placed to support you as a CMO?
We believe the CMO should be the manager of the marketing ecosystem. With our offer in Connected Marketing we enable you to orchestrate all five components.
- With 265,000 management and IT consultants, we cover everything, from marketing strategy to MarTech implementation, and deliver everything to you from a single source – without any losses through hand-over.
- We can provide data platforms on a large scale and allow ourselves to be measured by success, for example as a data hub in lead management.
- With our 1,800 creatives in five agencies and 20 studios, we love creating great customer experiences.
- Because, on the one hand, we are a premium partner of the most important MarTech providers, but on the other hand, we are independent of the licensing business, we will find the best IT solution for you.
- We have extensive industry knowledge and strong organizational know-how because, unlike agencies, we work with you on site. With this delivery model, we have expertise in 22 industries.
We create impact in marketing by taking the complexity out of disruption. To do this, we tear down the silo boundaries in data and thinking. Data plus creativity are our credo.
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