Looking at Digital media projected to contribute 27.3% to total advertising revenues by 2021, how has the role of the new age ‘Digital’ CMO evolved? The CMO’s role is evolving fast and no longer limited to the traditional marketing aspects of brand management, creative, advertising and market research. While digital media, performance marketing-measurement occupy larger parts of the CMO’s portfolio then before – the whole shift in consumer behaviour has brought in the both the need and opportunity for CMOs to embrace technology, data analytics, omni-channel in a big way and become custodians of customer experience. In doing this, CMOs find themselves playing a pivotal role in the larger organizational transformation and co-owning business responsibility with their peers.
What has been a key success story of Titan in the past few months and it would be interesting to know how was that made possible? Our journey in creating, building best in class digital customer experience for some of the most well-known brands in the country-Titan, Tanishq, Fastrack and others is an ongoing one. With over 25,000 products available online across categories of jewellery, watches, eyewear, bags and perfumes, Titan.co.in , our Company’s integrated eStore is among largest vertical/speciality e-commerce portals in the country. Titan.co.in offers shipping to over 10,000 pin-code destinations within India and even international destinations like US, UK, UAE, Singapore & Australia.To highlight some of the recent successes would be integration with Encircle, our in-house Loyalty Program that allows customers to seamlessly earn & redeem points on purchases across our stores and online, launch of an artificial intelligence powered chat-bot to assist customers on purchases & order queries.
What would be one of the biggest trends that you see today in Digital Marketing ecosystem? I think it is AI (Artificial Intelligence). As marketers’ dependency increases on tools, technology to reach the right consumer audiences, AI offers the ability to understand consumers at an intricate level which means not only analyse, segment customer data but also derive a meaning. Hence taking the guesswork out of marketing by delivering relevant ads to the right set of people. Today Google is already using AI to process consumer searches, besides which there is an increased prevalence of AI in development of websites and mobile apps. Digital marketing is beginning to see transformation as machine learning and AI enable better understanding of user intent to display accurate information, instant product discovery-making experience ultra-personal and easy.
What would be a top challenge that you see in the MarTech ecosystem at present from a Brand’s perspective? As technology becomes even more important to the success of marketing, building a MarTech stack that works best for your unique business needs is an ongoing challenge. The explosion in both solutions and vendors has made this landscape quite crowded and in fact there is a fair amount of duplication. Hence the difficulty in choosing what works best for your business, organization at the same time ensuring both new and old technology investments play together nicely. There is no point in investing into solutions that will sit in silos and/or be underutilized due to lack of ability to implement properly within the company.
What advice would you give marketers starting out today? Embrace MarTech! Given the convergence of technology systems and data with marketing, it is no longer about just brand management, campaigns and creatives. It is being tech-savvy about the tools, technology stack that would be the right fit for your industry and brand. This will definitely help them achieve their marketing objectives with better understanding of customers in this age of complex consumer journeys, multiple mediums and devices for consumption. With digital, e-commerce and customer experience falling more than often under the purview of marketing and larger spend allocations towards technology, it is essential to be a marketing technologist versus simply a brand marketer to deliver greater business impact.
