By Avik Chattopadhyay
I attended a very interesting conference of CMOs yesterday. The one subject that took my fancy was that of “marketing in the era of technological disruption”. The panellists were CMOs from different industries, ranging from BFSI to consumer electronics, food and home improvement…from the totally digital to the totally physical consumer spaces. [I hate using the term ‘phygital’ as it sounds derogatory to both the spheres or spaces.] These people were in the thick of things, hemmed in between increasing personalisation and the rising head of AI and ChatGPT. I had some key takeaways from the session which I share here, as I believe these CMOs represent the larger community of marketers who chart the course that corporate India takes in building and nurturing brands and businesses.
The role of the marketer fundamentally remains the same as before. The larger objectives remain the same while the ‘tools’ of the trade have certainly changed and proliferated. Given the rapid digital proliferation, the marketer now has to focus on reducing inefficiencies than ever before.
While data is the ‘new oil’ and the ‘king’, it is easy to be burdened with tons of data without knowing what exactly to do with it. After all, the tasks of how to mine the data are also created by us humans, so anomalies may creep in till the time when AI totally takes over this job and we become mere implementors of orders from the ether. It is crucial for the marketer to draw the line between big data and usable data.
Conversion continues to the biggest challenge for the marketer. While the funnel gets richer by the day, it narrows too soon leading to a rapid fall in % shares from prospect to customer. The marketer has to shift the focus of both the organisation as well as the investors from mere visitors / footfalls / followers to converts / advocates / consumers…basically from the passive base to the active base.
The second biggest challenge is retention. As there is an overwhelming investment in getting customers, the required focus on retaining the existing base gets diluted on occasions. This is why the marketer has to look after the service aspect too, in terms of communication and engagement. We all know how expensive it is to get a new customer vis-à-vis retain one who gets more by word-of-mouth.
The third biggest challenge is measurement. With the proliferation of channels and media, there is also an explosion of measurement systems, with each claiming to be the “right one”. The marketer looks forward to a single measure for all media and channels, and also a simplification of the process. Aspects like sustainability also need to feature in the measure, as it is a corporate regulation now. Both new media like OTT and traditional ones like OOH suffer from credibility issues when it comes to measurement.
The use of jargon seems to bother today’s marketer. He / she wants the language to be simplified. Terms like “omnichannel” and “cohort” have been recklessly used to justify both esoteric strategy as well as on-ground non-performance. While the old guard would grapple with such terminology, the new-age CMOs do not fall for such smokescreens.
The marketers agreed that every organisation has developed into a ‘software firm’ along with the business it conducts. Thankfully, learning tools have become more accessible and intuitive to allow people in marketing and sales to remain updated ‘over the air’. While AI and its tribe will take over the routine tasks of capturing data, processing it and churning out reports, the marketer will need much higher analytical and cognitive skills to use the reports for culling out insights. Will that mean that marketing teams will be down-sized? Remains to be seen. Will that mean that tools like ChatGPT will make the marketer dumb, as Harari fears? Not at all.
As long as the human being continues to consume physical products, the focus on creating immersive sensory physical experiences will keep growing. The marketer has to create the smooth bridge “from the screen to the showroom”. After all, all e-commerce and q-commerce entities survive on delivering physical products from their physical warehouses. The bridge has to be intuitive, seamless and bespoke for each customer over a period of time. That is the final frontier in the career of a marketer.
A new role added is to also keep a tab on competition or vested interests using technology to create deep fakes to damage your image and market. The same technology that holds us in awe, with its ability to insert a person into a video and put words in the mouths that never said them, can become a double-edged sword. We already have cases of deep fakes in advertising created to damage brand reputations.
Finally, technology is not a disruptor but an enabler. It is the means and not the end. The marketer has to have complete control over it rather than become a victim of its whims. New technologies will always be fascinating but shall always remain the ‘tool’ of the marketer. How one uses it decides what one becomes of it.
To draw inspiration from the childhood nursery rhyme,
“Tinker, tailor, marketer, sailor
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief!”