The Chief Marketing Officer's job is becoming gargantuan. How will future CMOs grow the most important asset the company has -- its brands? Manage the nexus of corporate strategy and integrate the company's strategic initiatives? Ensure that everyone in the corporation is keeping the brand's promise to its customers?
There are two schools of thought in marketing -- and we wish to propose a third.
The first school is the Old Guard. We'll call them OG. This school believes that marketing can meet the challenge of the new agenda with more of the same. The task of crafting the brand promise, of making it relevant, ownable and repeatable, in the new age is the same as it was in the previous age. Better survey research to understand customer needs, better market segmentation, and, above all, better communications, will be the tools for the winning brand marketer in the future.
This is the school that sees the Internet as just another advertising medium, and that keeps network television advertising prices so ridiculously inflated during its rapid decline into irrelevance.
The second school is that of the digital zealots. We'll call them DZ. They are the revolutionaries whose agenda is the total destruction of marketing and brand thinking as we know it. Their worldview is that software does marketing, and people (at least, human beings involved in marketing as a profession) are not needed. Computers, networks and software will manage a world of "total access" in which consumers will be entirely self-directed and will not need -- and will, indeed, reject -- any intervention by marketers.
They will automatically communicate their needs to software and the software will react appropriately. They will design their own new products and services. They will manage their own relationships with brands and companies aided by CRM software that tracks and records their every transaction and interaction. There are no marketers in the DZ's world -- only customers, networks and databases.
The CMO must be a never-before-seen hybrid of marketers and technologists -- Marketer Technologists -- the MT.
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Both the OG and the DZ are half wrong and half right. The OG clings to a communications-led view of the world that doesn't withstand scrutiny. We live in a services world. Even Pampers has a website of information services about mothering and taking care of baby -- Pampers is a mothering services brand. Tide is a stain removal services brand. Ford is a transportation services brand.
In services, the product marketing construct is stood on its head. Broadcast advertising is a weak substitute for word-of-mouth. Purchase pricing and promotion is a weak substitute for the reliability of future services as an influence on the consumer's choice. Profitability stems predominantly from loyalty which is a function of service experience rather than product performance.
The DZ, however, are equally wrong. They assume that the service experience can be mechanized and computerized and that consumer satisfaction is merely the sigma function of a string of successful transactions. They miss the critical component of brand building, the one that leads to market share and profits, to global acceptance and business sustainability.
That component is emotion. Machines cannot know the feeling of fulfillment a mother gets when she sends her kids off to school with the benefit of a good, nutritious breakfast inside them. Software can not recognize the deep, atavistic veins of feeling a son taps into as he makes decisions about long-term care for his father. Networks do not even understand the ego reward of the day trader when their brand of trading system makes them feel like they are moving the market from their Windows desktop.
Marketers understand these things, and turn them into sustainable profit streams and brand asset value.
The CMO must be a never-before-seen hybrid of marketers and technologists -- Marketer Technologists -- the MT. CMOs must identify, understand, catalogue and codify the most effective marketing best practices for brand building. They must do so for every customer type in every country and every channel, whether digital or traditional. From these components the MT must craft a company and brand-specific marketing process that can translate into the impeccable delivery of the brand experience at every touchpoint, all the way to the very edges of the corporation.
The CMO and CIO -- like the farmer and the cowboy of bygone days -- must be friends.
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At the same time, the MT must identify the best technologies to make the brand-building process and its associated tools understandable and available to every practitioner in the enterprise, with a view to making their jobs both more productive and more fulfilling. The CMO, as MT, must cope with technology's timeline, and know when to be on the leading edge and when to be a smart follower.
The CMO and CIO -- like the farmer and the cowboy of bygone days -- must be friends. They must collaborate on finding ways to apply marketing's best practices in the most effective and efficient manner.
We call it the intersection of marketing IP and marketing IT -- the intellectual property that companies employ to build distinctive, sustainable brands, and the information technology they employ to put those tools at the productive disposal of everyone in the corporation. The result is faster and more profitable brand growth, both in cash flows and asset values.
It's the new location the CMO must drive towards.
Hunter Hastings is managing partner of EMM Consulting Group, which advises companies on how to implement Enterprise Marketing Management, a multi-faceted system for global brand management combining marketing knowledge, best practice processes and training with collaborative software, marketing tools and infrastructure. He can be reached at HunterHastings@EMMConsulting.net
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