Connected Marketing: An Ecosystem Approach

Digitization makes consumer behavior difficult to manage

In recent years, marketing executives have shifted their budgets from creation and media to data and marketing technology. Digitization has not only created more communication channels, it has also changed media behavior:

• Customers like to exchange about their favorite brand, but also with the brand itself. They want to experience the brand with all their senses, as the number of visitors to brand parks, flagship stores, and events impressively shows. The interaction with the brand can also take place digitally, as the fitness trackers Nike Plus and Adidas Runtastic demonstrate. In both cases, the offers go beyond simply conveying brand values. Their success depends on their relevance. These are convenience, time, or cost advantages.
• However, even good arguments fade away if marketers miss the right time, because people are only receptive to them when it is the right moment during the day.
• If we were able to involve the consumer in a dialogue, you have to be quick – customers expect a response to a tweet within an hour and to an email on the same day.
• The interaction desires of consumers are diverse. You could assign them to sales, marketing, customer service or PR.

Accordingly, marketing communication today has to be personalized, relevant, contextual, and fast. Their diversity requires interdisciplinary teams. All in all, it’s a very complex task. It can be solved by the CMO entering into alliances with customer service, sales, and PR as well as partners from MarTech and data brokerage. However, the volatility of consumer behavior, which has intensified with the pandemic, has a destabilizing effect. Alliances have to be flexible and scalable. The third driver of complexity is the pressure to be efficient; the effect on sales can be attributed particularly well to data-driven marketing. In contrast, investments in brand management are difficult to justify with sales figures.

Get the upper hand by organizing marketing as an ecosystem!

We are observing a convergence in the way marketing is organized. Marketeers today need to have insights into all phases of the customer lifecycle because brands and customers interact more intensely than before. Online and offline communication merge. In both cases, it is critical to merge the data that customers leave behind at all touchpoints, including those with business partners or third-party data. And because the sales contribution can be easily measured, marketing and sales converge. This also applies to the marketing teams and their agencies, because CMOs are looking for a direct exchange with creative people due to time constraints. And the CMO works closely with the CIO to consolidate and optimize the inflationary MarTech offers.

If you channel these forces skillfully, you can create an organization that meets the changing consumer behavior. Their strength lies in their lower complexity. We are talking about a marketing ecosystem that has the elements of brand management, marketing organization, MarTech, customer activation, and content marketing.

The connecting element between all five parts of the marketing ecosystem is data. The marketing ecosystem is our answer to the disruption in the corporate environment.

New tasks arise for the CMO from the marketing ecosystem

Our understanding of marketing as an ecosystem gives rise to important questions for CMOs that we would like to answer in a blog series:

• At the beginning there is the question of how to gain customer trust so that they leave their data with the company. My colleague Marian Meyer-Tischler shows this in his contribution.
• Stéphane Sun shows how to build a complete customer profile by enriching this data from other sources.
• According to Jerome Honerkamp, ​​it is particularly interesting to find out what customers are looking for when interacting with the brand so that companies can address them in a targeted manner.
• Christian Bohm writes how such interactive offers are then presented to the customer via omnichannel marketing.
• To do this, it is necessary to produce a variety of advertising materials in different formats, which, according to Markus Cramer, requires fast and interdisciplinary work processes. If you use the minimal viable organization (MVO) method, these can be established quickly. The agencies should not be left out, because they are the extended workbench of the CMO, as Laura Dahlhaus explains. Marc Gruber sees a change in self-image as a prerequisite.
• David Geffroy elaborates on how a marketing team defines this range of activities for itself.
• According to Markus Degen, IT tools should make marketing work easier. Marketing automation, for example, allows the right moment to be timed for customer dialogue, as Malin Hendrickson describes.
• What is relevant content (advertising texts, images and films)? Marie-Cécile Puissochet writes about it.
• Aljoscha Klopothek closes this blog series with the answer to the question of how to measure the ROI of these marketing activities.

These questions show how much the range of tasks in marketing has changed. Jochen Sengpiehl, the CMO of Volkswagen, sums it up: “Marketing has to reinvent itself.”

Connected Marketing can help. By connected marketing, we mean:

– addressing customers

– about personalized and relevant brand messages

– that are placed at the right moment,

– namely by a fast and interdisciplinary marketing team

– that is able to communicate efficiently on a large scale with the help of appropriate marketing technology.

Why should you act now?

According to Forrester, most CEOs will make marketing efficiency a top priority for the company in 2021. Accordingly, more and more CMOs are also measured against sales goals. At the same time, the data represents a great opportunity for CMOs, because information about consumer and media behavior allows conclusions to be drawn about consumer preferences, from which new products and services can be derived. Marketing could thus become the company’s source of innovation.

Why are CMOs ahead here? You have interaction and transaction data. In addition, CMOs are usually assigned the exact role of shaping the customer relationship, which is why corresponding projects are assigned a priori to marketing.

What can you do today?

Why is Capgemini so well placed to support you as a CMO?

We believe the CMO should be the manager of the marketing ecosystem. With our Connected Marketing offer, we enable you to orchestrate all five components.

• With 265,000 management and IT consultants, we cover everything from marketing strategy to MarTech implementation and supply you with everything from a single source – without losses through handovers.
• We can provide data platforms on a large scale and allow ourselves to be measured by success, for example as a data hub in lead management.
• With our 1,800 creatives in five agencies and 20 studios, we love creating great customer experiences.
• Because, on the one hand, we are a premium partner of the most important MarTech vendors, but on the other hand, we are independent of the licensing business, we will find the best IT solution for you.
• We have extensive industry knowledge and strong organizational know-how because, unlike agencies, we work with you on site. This delivery model has made us experts in 22 industries.

We create impact in marketing by taking the complexity out of disruption. To do this, we tear down the silo boundaries in terms of data and thinking. Data plus creativity are our ideology.