Chief marketing officers must embrace all aspects of digital technology, focusing on customer experiences and business outcomes like never before.

Your email box is always full with promotions that have little relevance. You download a new app for your smart phone or tablet every day. You spend way too much time online either on social sites connecting with friends you don’t have time to see, checking out the viral videos your kids are watching on YouTube, or catching up on the latest news. [source: Accenture]

You are today’s consumer, bombarded with information, technology at your fingertips, but with no time and certainly no patience.

Digital—the marketing game changer
In an information overloaded world, the traditional, brand-centric marketing approach— one size fits all—is losing the appeal it once had for attracting consumers and assuring a healthy rate of return from marketing investments. As consumers go digital and interact across multiple devices and channels (encouraged by their millennial children), they expect brands to fit their needs of the moment with relevant experiences. If the brand doesn’t measure up, consumers move on.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) who internalize this undeniable trend acknowledge that meeting the demands of increasingly tech-savvy consumers requires a transformation in the composition and culture of their marketing departments.

The focus needs to shift to driving relevance at scale, sometimes referred to as the ‘R Factor.’ The marketing organization will need to evolve from pushing mass market product and service value propositions to orchestrating consumercentric, contextually appropriate experiences across a wide range of possible avenues, such as company website, social network, search, tablet, smartphone, kiosk and store. This change has far reaching implications for the functional role of the CMO, their organization and how they deliver projects. The demands company executives are making of their marketing organization are already compelling CMOs to focus more on business-driven outcomes and less on their conventional function of marketing communications.

Marketing Transformation
Three important trends are transforming the role of marketing today.

  • Digital is becoming a key channel of choice for many aspects of the buying lifecycle and digitization is making traditional media increasingly more social, local and personal.
  • The availability of “big data” is helping marketers understand and track consumers as they move across interaction points.
  • Advances in experience management technology are enabling marketing organizations to engineer contextually relevant communications and interactions.