We have grown so used to being interconnected, to having the means of communicating with other people or finding out information at the touch of a screen that it is hard to believe that when the current generation of senior managers were in the early stages of their careers Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter did not exist. The thought occurs because Don Tapscott has just published the 20th anniversary edition of The Digital Economy (McGraw Hill), the book that gave many the first glimpses of what today’s business landscape might look like. Tapscott had already made his name by co-authoring Paradigm Shift, a book that – as well as helping to bring a hitherto reasonably obscure scientific term into the mainstream – went some way to explaining that the technological developments emerging in the early 1990s were going to amount to a revolution in how we did business. But The Digital Economy went rather further and – viewed today – was remarkably prescient.
Nevertheless, the new essays that accompany the original text in the anniversary edition demonstrate that we may just be at the beginning of what the digital economy can deliver. Almost amounting to a book in themselves, they offer a commentary on how businesses – many of them so niche that they may only be known to tiny communities – are exploiting the potential of an increasingly connected world where limitless amounts of data can be utilized to devastating effect. But – as we have seen with Facebook and Twitter – yesterday’s niche operator is today’s behemoth. Although, as the concern over Twitter’s recent figures suggests, it is just as easy to become tomorrow’s has-been.
It is widely acknowledged that few industries have been immune to the disruption wrought by the internet. And even those that look like they are are probably not. But the world of marketing does seem to have been especially deeply affected. Perhaps one of the reasons why the television series Mad Men was so popular was not just because it was set in a time seen as especially cool but because it reminded people of a certain age of a period when business was a lot more certain and leisurely – in spite of all the social change – than is the case now. Moreover, it perpetuated the idea that the creative outsider – in league with the business suits – had almost total power over the general public, telling consumers what they could buy and how. Compare that with now. As Tapscott writes:
Advertising, promotion, public relations and most other aspects of corporate communications are archaic concepts. They exploited unidirectional, one-to-many, and one-size-fits-all media to communicate 'messages' to faceless, powerless customers. The Net Generation’s ‘N-Fluence’ networks are powerful new forces that marketers must engage.
One striking effect of this is a fundamental change in the role of the executive in charge of marketing. As long ago as 2007, the McKinsey Quarterly published an article, under the heading “The Evolving Role of the CMO” that began:
Few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer. Many CEOs and boards may think that their senior marketers’ hands are already full managing the rise of new media, the growing number of sales and service touch points and the fragmentation of customer segments. But as the forces of marketing proliferation gather strength, what’s actually required is a broadening of the CMO’s role. This expansion will encompass both a redefinition of the way the marketing function performs its critical tasks and the CMO’s assumption of a larger role as the ‘voice of the customer’ across the company as it responds to significant changes in the marketplace.
The theme was continued by another consultancy, Vivaldi Partners, in a research report – called “The Changing Role of the CMO” – published last year. “While all CMOs reiterated that there were still constants in their roles, the changing digital landscape and the rise of the Always-On Consumer have definitely impacted today’s marketing,” it said. It added that the change fell into five key areas – strategy, customers, operations, organization and technology. The last of these is particularly important because it is increasingly widely assumed that CMOs are increasingly moving into the territory that was previously the preserve of the Chief Information Officer. Indeed, the prediction by Gartner at the beginning of this decade that technology spending by CMOs would outstrip that by CIOs by 2017 looks like being spot-on.
Adam Howatson, CMO of the enterprise information management company OpenText, is in no doubt that a fundamental change is occurring. “We’re in a transitioning period,” he says before adding: “In five years all CMOs will be digitally engaged. The ‘Luddite’ CMO will go by the wayside.”
As he acknowledges, this is partly a demographic change. The people who will be taking on these roles will have – in Tapscott’s phrase – “grown up digital”. But it is also an acceptance that marketing is increasingly bound up with things like analytics, near-field communications, facial recognition, which all enable businesses to connect more effectively with customers. Only CMOs who are committed technologists will be able to make the most of the opportunities. This is not to say that all will be straightforward. An article in a special report on “The Connected Business” in the Financial Times this week pointed to some of the challenges, with various executives stressing the problems for marketers if they promise more than the IT can deliver.
But the possibilities indicated by the excitement that surrounds the revealing of supermarkets’ Christmas advertisements or the ongoing interest in campaigns by the U.K. price comparison website CompareTheMarket.com and others suggest that the modern marketer is playing in a sweet shop that is much larger than any in the dreams of Don Draper and his colleagues.
