The CMTO is here

In the past decade, India has been racing towards technological revolution. Over the last three years, there has been a surge in smartphone adoption. With the availability of affordable smartphones and ubiquitous data, the tables have turned in favour of the Indian customer. It is the age of the digital consumer.

Today, the consumer is empowered not only with extensive information at his fingertips but also with access to innumerable platforms to voice his opinions and expectations. The modern consumer prefers to have a two-way communication with a brand via digital mediums rather than being just a silent onlooker to brands’ one-way announcements.

As is explained in Extreme Trust to marketers today, “In the absence of communication among your customers, advertising rules. Once your customers communicate with each other, it’s the customer.” And rightly, so! Marketing is no longer about the generic mass communication through traditional broadcast media such as television, print and radio. It is about personalised communication and creating great customer experiences. The modern marketer needs to first understand the changes in consumer technology and their impact on buying behaviour. It is not just about digital marketing, but how technology is fundamentally reshaping the marketing discipline. To ensure that marketing can be effortlessly integrated into technological solutions, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) needs to create a strategy for his company to leverage the opportunities in the digital world. Additional funds have to be allocated to implement this strategy.

A growing portion of marketing’s budget is now allocated to technology itself. A recent Gartner study revealed that 67 per cent of marketing departments plan to increase their spending on technology-related activities over the next two years. In addition, 61 per cent are increasing capital expenditure on technology, and 65 per cent are increasing budgets for service providers that have technology-related offerings.

Changing business models The growth of digital channels and marketing technology necessitates that the CMO reinvents himself as the Chief Marketing Technology Officer (CMTO). The CMTO needs to adopt new capabilities such as content marketing, inbound marketing, push marketing, data-driven marketing, analytics and marketing technology (MarTech) to tap the digital opportunities.

MarTech is increasingly becoming embedded in overall corporate strategy. The fact is that marketers have started to use technology at each step of the marketing value chain, from product planning and media buying to customer engagement, to sales and after-sales. This integration of marketing and technology is leading to considerable changes in the organisational structure.

According to a recent Nasscom report, the increase in digitisation of marketing activities has caused marketers to rework the business model of their companies. New designations in the C-level suites, such as Chief Customer Experience Officers, Chief Creative Officers and Chief Digital Officers are being adopted.

Technology is also bringing about a major change in the relationship between a brand and its customers. While a brand can directly reach out to its customers through digital channels, the CMTO needs to work on making this direct relationship significant using marketing technology. He can use marketing technology to personalise the messaging at a mass scale. He can achieve that by analysing the consumer’s digital footprints. Analysis of such data would include building a unified view of the customer, gaining information about the customer using profile information and tracking the customer’s activity on digital media.

The CMTO can also utilise marketing technology to ensure that real-time action is undertaken to respond to the opportunities, which increases the efficiency of the overall marketing activity. The CMTO’s strategies will have a direct impact on the revenue of the company which, in turn, will leave an impression on the core business. The CMTO needs to lead this transition or else face the risk of obsolescence, personally and for the company.

The transformation of the CMO to a CMTO will need support and buy-in from the top management, most importantly the CEO. The time to start the journey of providing personalised and wonderful customer experiences is now. As Ram Charan, author of The Attacker’s Advantage rightly says, “With companies… being able to collect and control information on the entire experience of a customer, the math house now can focus on each customer as an individual. In a manner of speaking, we are evolving back to the artisan model, where a market ‘segment’ comprises one individual.”

Rajesh Jain is Founder and Managing Director, netCORE

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