Today we are living in the world of engagement. CMOs need to throw away their MBA text books and concepts and adopt new marketing techniques to suit the “new age customer”. The other up CMOs sleeve is - they required to establish a brand that’s resilient to the changing times and create customer experience that gets better with every interaction in today’s digital economy.
This new customer has greater expectations, requires higher control and engages more actively with brands. These customers have new social channels to express their opinions and can easily do so through their smart phones. Peer, review/validation and communication is high on the agenda and they expect more ways to communicate and shop anytime, anywhere.
So what does this mean to the marketing mix? Over 60% of the marketing spend is going to be spent on the non-traditional digital content like social networks, blogs, mobile, etc. This signals the demise of the traditional CMO. What this means, it requires CMOs to educate themselves on the latest emerging tools and techniques of measuring the customer’s voice, satisfaction and also to understand in detail the disruptive influence of online platforms and channels on a customer’s purchase behaviour. That is by no means the be-all and end-all of the CMO's role. This requires a radical shift in mindset. The CMO’s responsibility is to initiate and implement that change.
With this rise in customer-centric organizations, CMO and their teams are now the key enabler for organizations to work cohesively and to have an accurate read of customer behaviour. Customer support becomes an integral element in customer engagement and creating great customer satisfaction.
So successful enterprises who have crossed this chasm and become truly customer-oriented, have aligned customer experience and support to the CMOs. These are organizations of the future catering to the new age of the customer.
