The Wonderful World of Marketing, Episode 35: The 21st Century CMO

For decades, science has teased us with the prospect of the flying car. As I sit in barely-crawling Seattle traffic (in a DeLorean, no less), I’ve often wished that science had delivered on this promise. Seriously, what could be better than zipping across airborne highways in a Mr. Fusion-powered DMC-12? (C’mon, science!)

Our marketing departments have also struggled to make good on the promise of technology that has become commonplace in other areas of our organizations. In many ways, many of us are still mired in the marketing norms from 40 or 50 years ago.

The good news is that while our cars are asphalt-bound for the foreseeable future, our marketing departments are in the nascent stages of a technological shift that will transform the way we work. We’re in the early stages of this shift and, no doubt about it, marketing technology is an immature discipline. But we’re making progress.

We’re well into the “a lot of discrete point solutions” era of our evolution, and are beginning to pave the way for the kinds of technological innovation that will result in the customer-centric marketing platform we so desperately need. We’re probably a decade away from becoming true revenue marketers, but the Mr. Fusion-powered marketing department is within reach.

Where we need to evolve is from the “tech of the day” to “how do I manage my customers end-to-end.” We have to eliminate the siloed approach to marketing where we talk to customers in customer service and reach out to customers in marketing like those are two separate functions. If it touches the customer it’s *one function* — and that function is called Customer Experience Management. As CXM emerges as a category we’ll see marketers do a better job of thinking about the entirety of customer experience with the brand, and deliver delight at every stage of the journey. It’s the essence of what it means to be a luxury brand — and incredible experience from start to finish — and to date there hasn’t been a luxury brand in software because of our siloed and somewhat mechanistic approach to marketing.

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, and I love that we’re at this important stage in our evolution! Also … kittehs.

Let me know what you think at @gradconn.

(Note: No clock towers were harmed in the making of this video)

#MarTech #CXM #NoSilos #Marketing