The discipline of marketing is getting a position at the high table as a lot of companies are now embracing the chief marketing officer, says Suresh Ramanathan, Dean and Principal of Great Lakes Institute of Management and Distinguished Professor of Marketing. Many companies are eager to look at how the marketing function can perform a more vital role.
“When you have more data that comes in and when you have a CMO who understands data, and all the analytics that are performed on it, that is a language that CEOs and CFOs understand well as they are concerned about return on investments. So, treating marketing as an investment than an expenditure is something they can all have a common conversation on once the data is available,” he says in an interview to BL on Campus .
Marketing as a discipline needs to balance two different aspects, both the art and science. Because of the availability of a lot of data, complex analytics and deep dives can be performed on it and one can get insights on consumer behaviour. “But, there is complexity and nuance that goes beyond simply the numbers and that’s where the art comes in. I often like to think about marketing as a fine wine; a wine from France has got such interesting notes, primary and tertiary notes. Likewise, a customer is complex, with lots of deep motivations that is driving behaviour, and that’s what we need to understand. With insights from data, which gives us interesting analytical insights, but equally to make sense of the data using the psychological aspects of human behaviour, and marrying the two together, that’s how marketing can blossom,” elaborates Prof Ramanathan. However, in future, he hopes marketing doesn’t become too analytical or too psychological but achieves a happy mix.
Today, brands are focusing more on customer experiences, he says. There was a time that only thing that mattered was adding more features. But, today customers have feature fatigue and are tired of more and more features and, when that happens, what takes priority is experience. It doesn’t have to do with the product, but overall interaction with a company at every single touch point. “Every single point has to move towards the same goal. It’s the totality of every single thing experienced through a 360 degree view,” he adds.
On the impact of digitisation, Prof Ramanathan says it has fundamentally changed the way we do things, and organisations that are leaders in digital transformation are changing the way they function and the more they embrace it the more they will benefit.
“The only note of caution I have is that in the rush to embrace digitisation you could go wrong. If you don’t have a buy-in from everybody or if you don’t communicate your vision to all stakeholders, it will be a half-baked effort; so we need to articulate a clear vision of why it needs to be done and the C-Suite and everyone down the organisation needs to embrace it,” he explains.
The advantage of the digital experience is that it can be experimented with in modular fashion in a small part of an organisation and then, if successful, it can be implemented in other parts of a firm as well.