This content relates to : DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Kate Erickson
Managing Director, Deloitte Digital
Hello, my name is Kate Erickson. I am a managing director at Deloitte Digital, specialized in the area of marketing technology, marketing strategy and marketing operations. Today I’m going to speak with you about putting agility at the core for marketing organizations and the necessity for it to drive business outcomes.
Marketing today is a very different discipline than it was a generation ago, or even for a few seasons ago for that matter. What was the domain of a department has now become the nerve center that connects the whole business together. Rather than simply creating campaigns for audiences, brands are looking to seek and make friends with their end-consumers. And rather than just pushing out emails, brands are now trying to orchestrate experiences and gone are the days when either annual or seasonal, or 6-month planning, or monthly or quarterly reporting could sustain the growth that is expected by the business and experiences that the customers expect from the brands.
Customer centricity depends on faster insights, accelerated speed to market, and personalized dynamic engagements across everything a brand does. The shift in how customers connect and relate to the business has implications across tactics, technologies, operating model, governance, and much more. That’s why forward-thinking CMOs are putting agile stream-like capabilities at the core of everything they do. And those core activities are dependent upon 3 key concepts.
The first concept for putting agility at the core is the move at the speed of insights. Decisions, messaging and even budgets are now needing to be rooted in real-time data and analytics. That’s why most companies are now pushing for in house ownership and control and management of their first party customer data. Insight-led brands are adapting hiring strategies and organizational structures to infuse data scientists and analytics professionals talent into the organization to continuously fuel actionable insights to drive growth strategy. And smart brands are completing these efforts with a more transparent approach to their privacy policies, where customers have fine grain control and informed consent regarding the collection, data, storage, sharing and reselling of their information to others. Together these approaches are expanding the knowledge and insights that help elevate the customer experiences for brands.
The second concept of putting agility at the core requires modernizing the operating model. Coherent personalized experiences for customers depend on a collaborative organization and partner ecosystem. Yet today, many organizations struggle with the question of who owns what and who’s doing what, which can hinder operational ability. In response, many marketing leaders are weighing their approach in terms of doing centralization to help drive more efficiency and effectiveness where it can also add more additional complexity. CMOs are addressing this in 2 different ways. First, some are decentralizing it in ways that they can insure their brand teams have agile processes and talented employees, giving them ultimate accountability at end-to-end capabilities from campaign ownership through execution.
The third concept of putting agility at the core is reimagining governance. This reorganization of teams, technologies and processes requires a new look at marketing governance. Most governance standards are outdated and not able to keep up with digital marketing practices today. And customer-centric brands are moving to a newsroom-like model around fast-moving content and personalized engagement content made possible through dynamic content assembly best practices. Brands need to establish structures and harmonize processes that evolve in step with new insights and opportunities to drive engagement. These efforts should be complemented with a risk based methodology and enabled by technology, artificial intelligence and automation to ultimately accelerate responsiveness and drive adaptation.
In summary, agility represents a significant change at how marketing organizations need to operate and the shift to infuse sustainable agility is critical to driving business growth and meeting those demanding customer expectations today. In summary, agility represents a significant change in how marketing organizations operate today. The shift to infuse sustainable agility is critical to drive business growth and ultimately meet the demanding customer expectations of today.
Author:
Kate Erickson
Managing Director, Deloitte Digital