02-CMO’s operational mandates

What operational mandates do IT-savvy CMOs pursue, clarifying new investments in engagement infrastructure and technology partnerships?

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MARSHALING AVAILABLE RESOURCES

Strategy constitutes a mechanism for directing available resources to achieve maximum competitive advantage.

Most chief marketing officers (CMOs) know that this mechanism comprises systems, processes, and accountabilities for directing the resources of a complex marketing operation.

The figure below depicts key dimensions of an operational strategy, emphasizing how CMOs formulate and execute strategy using an integrated system—where each element interacts and affects all other elements of the system. In a word, this figure calls attention to dominant principle guiding successful CMOs today: orchestration.

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OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES

Brand integrity defines an operational capability of a marketing operation: how marketing staff and partners create and execute marketing communications with clear brand values, consistent expressions, and credible messages. Brand integrity succeeds when customers and other stakeholders develop deep, resonant emotional connections with the brand and the brand’s community of users and advocates. With success, brand integrity becomes brand engagement, creating a deep, rich vein of behavioral and attitudinal data as well as self-declared preferences and criteria.

Strategic differentiation entails the translation of customer insights and buying criteria to marketing communications (paid media)  and word-of-mouth conversations (earned media), eliciting desire for the offered product or service. Strategic differentiation succeeds by achieving a leadership positioning in its market—exclusive association (or ownership) with a desired and expected satisfaction of customers.

Market coverage describes the delivery of promotions and marketing communications and  word-of-mouth conversations at all the key touchpoints or social contexts with customers and trade partners, integrating digital online channels, traditional print and broadcast channels with point of purchase promotions and packaging. Market coverage succeeds with the convergence of marketing communications and word-of-mouth conversations at key points of purchase, creating an “echo effect” in the market. Often, this echo effect takes on a life of its own, becoming a viral cascade or an artifact of popular culture (“Where’s the beef?” or “Whassup?”)

Marcom supply-chain orchestration describes the increasing levels of process integration among industry partners, emphasizing more agile sourcing and procurement of creative service, marketing content, and related production. Marcom supply-chain orchestration succeeds by producing productivity dividends: new money within existing budgets for redeployment as new strategic spendings. However, orchestration of various business processes and vendor workflows requires specialized IT capabilities: business process management platform and an IT services infrastructure, usually not available within existing enterprises. Thus, CMO’s rely on SaaS or hosted services for marcom supply-chain orchestration.

Digital brand interaction describes the newest operational capability of marketing management, provisioning contextualized content and interactive services to customers, brand fans, and trade partners. Successfully executed, this produces self-service satisfaction. Digital brand interaction includes social networking (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), immersive worlds (virtual worlds such as SecondLife), promotional games, self-navigated 3D models, rich Internet applications using Adobe AIR or Microsoft Silverlight), conversational voice-of-customer microsites, Webcast theaters with self-directed Webinars, screencast video explanations and demonstrations, and YouTube or Vimeo video channels).

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SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES

Innovation and marketing create value. Operational capabilities enable a firm to innovate new products or offerings, drive new or existing offerings to market, facilitate the buying process, support customers using a product or service, and maintain infrastructure and systems that enable primary and secondary operational capabilities of the firm.

Operational capabilities of marketing include the creation of the following:

• New markets and revenue streams

• New customers of existing and new offerings

• Larger and more frequent orders from existing customers

• Greater loyalty and acceptance of system lock-ins

• Higher barriers to market entry

Each business will emphasize one or more of these competitive advantages over others, reflecting economic conditions, corporate life cycles, etc.

One fact, however, remains constant: the demand to change with little or no forewarning.

This calls attention to two more critical capabilities: business agility and institutional change management.

Business agility describes the ability to reconfigure processes and workflows within day or less. This capability requires an on-demand IT service management infrastructure and the technical capability to rapidly integrate new services to the all important brand theaters of the firm. For many marketing operations, this means securing needed application software “as a service.”

Institutional change management describes the systems, processes, and accountabilities for facilitating the rapid deployment of new systems, the collaborative development of new processes, and self-declaration among affected stakeholders of new accountabilities.

In many respects, institutional change management and not technology will determine long-term success in volatile markets punctuated by all manner of disruptive innovations and economic discontinuities.

Thus, the effective CMO driving the transformation of marketing into engaging profitable customers for life will make institutional change management his or her number one priority.

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