Doing marketing today is tough work. After all, modern marketers are expected to play a more direct role in sales, effectively reach and engage customers across multiple traditional and digital channels, and at the same time meet their sky-high expectations despite their fickle brand loyalty.
And this is merely the tip of the iceberg, as CMOs and marketing executives grapple to learn and adapt to an ever-evolving landscape awash with new tech-centric tools, metrics and marketing paradigms.
Digital competence
While training and a positive attitude to change can help, the real solution to getting ahead may entail changing one’s mindset, according to Otto Ruijs, the managing director of Hyper Island in Singapore in an earlier interview with CMO Innovation.
Because everything around digital is changing so rapidly, the idea is for professionals – and especially marketers, to develop a heightened level of comfort with digitization and experimentation, not just a limited skillset that may become obsolete a few months down the road.
“We firmly believe you need a new way of thinking, a new way of problem solving to survive if you want to be a digital marketer, or digital innovation person,” said Ruijs. “If you are able as a digital marketer to kind of change your activities, pivot quickly and in an agile way, that will serve you well, and have that mindset that ‘I will not have all the answers’.”
But while gaining enlightenment on digital is a great start, it turns out that even the savviest marketers do not automatically result in a digitally transformed organization.
Not my problem
This because the requisite capabilities to properly support marketers may not necessarily exist in organizations. For instance, a new customer-centric initiative could easily be stymied by unmotivated employees, gaps in processes or technical limitations.
A real-life example came recently in the form of an attempt to contact a music provider for songs that won’t download. The problem isn’t a problem with the music division, a friendly support staff explained over email, but is considered a “technical” glitch. And yes, I will need to fill in the same detailed web form a second time, and select the correct department – from a lengthy drop-down list – for assistance to be rendered; you have a good day, sir.
Or how about reaching out to the social media team of your favorite brand for help, and then having to repeat the problem on the phone with a customer service officer. And repeating the problem to yet another company representative at a local outlet. Does this sound familiar to you yet?
Do similar gaps exist within your organization? What are you doing about them?
The transformed organization
The unvarnished truth is that even the best marketers have their hands tied if their organization continues to function as it always had. If anything, it is actually crazy to expect a positive outcome without change, going by the popular quote in which Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.
Of course, it is easy to point to the CEO or others senior executives for not enabling the needed digital transformation within the organization. Given their unique vantage point and deeper understanding of what digital transformation really entails, however, it would also be irresponsible for marketers to not lead the charge to initiate change.
This first appeared in the Q1 2017 issue our CMO Innovation Guide titled “Initiating Digital Transformation”. You can read the rest of the guide here (free registration).