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Organizing Marketing for Success: CIO-CMO collaboration

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Forrester Research and Forbes made a study and article about CIO-CMO collaboration: “Why The Most Important C-Suite Relationship For Marketers Is Still The Trickiest” The article concentrate on the challenges and approaches to enable and enhance collaboration and how to create common ground and language between the two very different specialist areas. I did agree with everything that was said in the article, but I couldn’t help thinking whether CMO-CIO collaboration is actually enough. Customers today engage with companies in multiple touchpoints and environments, their expectations change along their customer relationship and -journey (check out article: definition for Customer Experience) and their motives and needs have great variation. In my opinion CMO should be in charge of customer experience, promises, concepts and methods that drive great brand experiences, brand loyalty and engagement. However, the reality is that currently many of those channels and touchpoints are managed by customer service and business units or online service development unit. Often the research and analytics are also outsourced or in a separate silo. In case the CMO really has the wide customer experience management role, I agree that CMO-CIO relationship can drive phenomenal success, in case that is not the case, there must be even wider collaboration across business units. Here’s Accenture Interactives documentation about the subject: “The CMO-CIO disconnect – Bridging the gap to seize the digital opportunity”

Tom Asacker captures why customers think of corporate experience  holistically. A brand, he says, is “one, interdependent system of behavior”. The problem is that in too many organizations the “system” has many masters and each wants independent control of their domain. CMOs, who might be expected to have responsibility for the overall experience as of right, do not. That’s because large chunks of the interface with customers, and the factors that influence that interface, remain for the most part outside of their control. They do not fit neatly into the “normal” org chart definition of what constitutes marketing. (Full article: Brands: One System Of Touch)

Some time ago I wrote an article in which I claimed, that the marketing organisation is like an engine from 60’s. “The Duke University’s CMO Survey 2013 results highlighted again the need for marketing and CMO’s to carry more responsibility and integrate better with the corporate management and operations. It seems to me that marketing is facing the same evolution that car engines have gone thru since 1960′s. In the 60′s car engines were large, heavy, powerful and impressive but their gas consumption was just terrible and their efficiency unacceptable in current evaluation. Currently engines are much smaller but deliver a lot of power with very low gas consumption. The big and impressive modern engines have amazing power with acceptable gas consumption. The engine game is all about efficiency, as it should be – and the same rule apply to marketing management”.

Inbound marketing technology provider Hubspot has created their view of agile, rapid, realtime, evidence based marketing function and organisation. They don’t actually define the business units that should be involved, that must be considered case by case. Hubspot’s process is based on SCRUM-software development process and methodology. I find this approach to marketing quite appealing and interesting. Inbound marketing is about creating content and turning that content and stronger online traffic in to demand and leads. The approach is all about relationship marketing in the digital era and omnichannel environment. Please comment if you have any experiences about implementing such process to your organisation? Check out the presentation:

I’m working with company’s customer interface development and customer experience design. What I see in my everyday business, is clear need to break thru silos and increase collaboration. The SCRUM-process and organisation outline in the presentation must be considered separately for each organisation. The SCRUM-team should be a group of people influencing customer experiences across the Funnel and customer relationship in order to really make most of the approach. Short term analytics and A/B-testing are naturally important tools in such approach to marketing, but also the long-term development must be carefully considered. The brand image changes rather slowly and is an outcome of everything the company does. The SCRUM process easily change perception to short-term development and generate blind spots in larger scale opportunities. Team like this must make sure that they have both insight and topsight views to what they are doing and developing.

Please, share your experiences about how to organise marketing function for success!!! What worked, what failed?

Author: Toni Keskinen, Marketing Architect & Customer Journey Designer

http://www.linkedin.com/in/tonikeskinen

Join FutureCMO Movement LinkedIn Group here


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