Page 78 - GLOBAL STRATEGIC MARKETING

The changes to marketing are not only strategic, but deep in detail. Shifting one's
perspective from pushing out campaigns to helping customers throughout their
decision journeys immediately raises the issue of cross-functional coordination
across marketing, sales, and service -- as well as how it all integrates into the brand's
core offering itself. Digital interactions require significant analytic support to develop
the algorithms that push the right content to the right interaction point. Social media
requires real-time decision-making based on unstructured data, often executed
through people on the front lines of interaction. Mobile requires coordinating an
astoundingly wide array of parties — telecom carriers, media providers, operating
system owners — as well as personal, contextual, and location-based data to drive
any kind of scaled engagement program. Generating the growing mountain of
content to power all of these interactions requires supply-chain type discipline.

Putting the right capabilities in place will not only help brands develop the right
interaction strategies; it will give them a broader range of options that they can
execute. The pressure for operational leadership now shifts to marketing and sales.
Creativity is no longer delivered in simple advertisements; it requires multifaceted
execution skill. Great brand stories come to life only when they can be delivered
through everything the consumer experiences. The cost of all of this complexity can
rise rapidly once it gets out of control. Perhaps the big ideas of 2013 are old ones:
efficiency, scale, and execution.