Innovative Digital Marketing Drives Brand Advantage
Guest Post by
Peter Sieyes , Associate Vice President and Head for Marketing and Innovation Services, Retail, CPG & Logistics in Europe, Infosys
Infosys hosted a 'Digital Dinner at Hôtel de Crillon in Paris on September 6th 2012. The networking dinner was designed to bring together senior level clients and prospects from the CMO and CIO organization in the CPG and Pharmaceutical industry across the French market. Given the focused nature of the event, the theme was sharpened to "Driving brand advantage through innovative digital marketing".
As the moderator and thought leader at this extremely exciting forum of senior leaders, I was delighted to partake in an engaging discussion around key challenges and success factors for great Digital Marketing transformation. Four big themes arose where there was consensus amongst the leaders.
The first was the critical need for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to break down some of the traditional cultural barriers between their two functions and recognize interdependencies. It became evident that this is, and will continue to be, a core enabler and accelerator of future success for Marketing in a digital age.
The second area of consensus was the need for organisations to improve skills in digital technologies across areas such as multi-channel communication and commerce, digital asset management, analytics, etc. All agreed that most organisations still lacked this skillset internally but that there were different models to overcome the challenge. One model was based on in-housing the skillset by hiring into IS/IT organisations the relevant new skills, as these are difficult skills to learn in an existing traditional IS organisation. This new dedicated group would ideally sit between IS/IT and Marketing
The alternative model was based on outsourcing the skillset to specialist managed partners.
The third area where strong views emerged focused on the importance of considering digital as a new operating model for marketing rather than treating it as a stand-alone channel. The discussions clearly highlighted that digital is a powerful accelerator for marketing to deliver growth, profitability and customer retention in the new consumer world, rather than an alternative to traditional broadcast media channels.
The final area of consensus was the critical need to engage and gain buy-in at Board level in order to unblock some of the major investment decisions essential to any major digital transformation programme (eg infrastructure/platforms, resourcing).
We, at Infosys, have addressed many of these challenges for Diageo, the global drinks company, through a pioneering Digital Marketing platform. You can read more about the case study here . I welcome your thoughts or personal experience with any of these themes.
