Today’s marketing is not just about awareness, promotion, and lead generation – it’s about the complete customer experience and creating consistent and impactful impressions at every single 
touch point. This means that the role of marketing within a company is transforming and there are new rules, considerations, and collaborations necessary for ongoing success.
Marketing professionals and CMOs must take some time to understand how to navigate these new waters that fuse together marketing, customer service, and IT, and be able to work within a team that has accepted the shift of focus and wants to support the entire experience from end-to-end.
To better understand these changes, the SAP Center for Business Insight gathered a panel of experts who discussed the future of marketing and spoke more about the five key responsibilities marketing must embrace.
The first responsibility is that marketers must represent the voice of the market. Thomas Stewart, chief marketing and knowledge officer at Booz. & Co. said that, “The voice of the market has become much more cacophonous than it used to be. But many employees don’t see and hear the market at all or see only pieces of it…more and more we are asking every employee to take on more decision-making authority…they must know how to connect the voice of the market to the strategy.”
And that leads into the second responsibility, which is to synchronize the customer experience across all channels. David Edelman, partner, Marketing & Sales Practice at McKinsey & Co., points out that the digital landscape has increased the number of touch points in an experience and they must be consistent in presenting the brand. Stewart agrees and added that “…somebody has to be able to connect them [channels] all in such a way so that I, the customer, recognize that I am dealing with the same bank, bookstore, or clothing store wherever I approach it from.”
There are also the concepts of being the brand steward and capitalizing on insights. Rebecca Carr, CMO of Foxwoods Resort Casino had a very accurate observation that most companies using data aren’t “looking at a full, 360-degree view and doing it in real time.” She continued that, “…the CMO’s relationship with the CIO is so important. It’s about really being able to tap into the data that’s being [captured] across the myriad of mediums.”
The last key responsibility is that marketers must be an integrator and force multiplier across the company. This means that marketing must ensure that the brand promise is translated across every interaction. Every employee must understand, adopt, and carry out the brand in a way that makes sense.
Tom Stephenson, director at McKinsey & Co. weighed in stating that, “Marketing can be a force multiplier by creating transparency around information, data, and the market. And that last one’s the new one, because historically, that hasn’t been marketing.”
To read more about marketing and the customer experience and hear from marketing experts about the future of marketing, check out Marketing’s Customer Experience Mandate.