05-Innovation vectors for marketing operations

What three innovation vectors represent the largest change-barriers, defining the new criteria recruitment and selection of staff and partners?

DIGITAL GROUPS TO LEAD THE REVOLUTION

Several dozen interviews and discussions conducted by GISTICS about the future of marketing operations reveal that digital or interactive groups of marketing operations will likely take the lead in most of the major change initiatives for customer engagement.

A number of factors now support the claim that the digital executive will lead the transformation of marketing operations management.

First, most digital executives already possess the mindset—beliefs, expectations, behaviors, and self-identities—of technical innovators.

In contradistinction, many of their analog print and broadcast colleagues merely use technology as an enabler.

Traditionally minded marketers often emphasize other dimensions of marketing: grand strategy, positioning, trade relations, hiring, and administration. They tend to emphasize what they already know, have mastered, and have ample proof that they can do it again…and again…and again.

Digital executives expect change, often with rapid onset and little or no forewarning.

Digital executives use technology to enhance operational capabilities, building systems and processes and developing new skills and accountabilities within their team.

Digital executives understand the power of integrating core processes by which they execute strategies and apply numerous late-breaking insights to effect rapid midcourse corrections to their executions.

Digital executives know that a whole market or engagement context can change seemingly overnight, using disruptive change as an ally and game-changing resource.

SYSTEMATIZE, SYSTEMATIZE, SYSTEMATIZE

Digital executives use systems, processes, and accountabilities to have things done that meet pre-determined standards of excellence and productivity benchmarks.

The figure to the above depicts several key trends in the transformation of marketing operations.

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360-degree performance measurement move beyond the confines of specialized databases and tools used by a few “high priests and priestesses” of market insights or analytics groups.

Digital executives will drive their analytic teams to develop services and tools for use by marketers and engagement managers in the field: executives with local knowledge and direct relationships with customers and partners.

This means that in the near future, the multichannel analytics team of marketing operations will build and provision tools and services for localized customer engagement, integrating local market knowledge and engagement simulations with email messaging, social media, and Web content production and delivery teams.

Thus, local engagement managers (which may include area sales or marketing executives) will execute communication and engagement strategies from the bottom up, applying local-market knowledge to opportunities spanning the customer engagement lifecycle: awareness, consideration, trial, commitment, etc.

This represents one of a handful digital-service innovations: how firms will use digital processes to drive new value into the experience of customers and marketspace partners.

Local-market engagement managers will both produce and consume uniform data sets, becoming a trusted supplier of good data to other regional and headquarters analytic teams.

The subsequent use of good local-market data in the form of engaging conversations and services will stimulate new cycles of insights, strategies, creative content, and executions.

This iterative close-loop process will require that digital leaders employ process-orchestration technologies—the glue that binds the other engagement-cycle technologies.

Deeper long-term customer engagement entails a specialized business process management platform to systematize and integrate the typically isolated practices of planning and budgeting, project management, campaign development and tracking, procurement and vendor collaboration, and dynamic scheduling and workload balancing of internal staff and external suppliers.

In practical terms, process orchestration comprises a suite of marketing resource management tools and technologies of the marketing process management platform (Web service development, policies, business rules, routing, and customized browser-based dashboards).

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