Oh great – yet another digital transformation!

But wait – isn’t Marketing all digital already? We’re done, right? We are communicating through all the important and ever-growing channels. We’ve learned to use and love LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, (insert latest App teens are using here). We’ve even tried a chatbot or two for our websites. Not to mention our excursion piloting AR and VR applications while learning about Artificial Intelligence!

All said, as the digital frontrunners in our organizations, we didn’t achieve the ‘holy grail’ of business innovation, otherwise known as DISRUPTION. What does that mean anyways?

Disruptive Innovations are NOT breakthrough technologies that make good products better; rather they are innovations that make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a larger population. (Prof. Clayton Christensen)

Ok – so we don’t need to invent the next “One More Thing”. Rather, we need to rethink about how to better align our products and services with our customer base. This means, we are all supposed to be agile now – our job in Marketing is not done until it is done-done.

Enough of the buzz-wording (ok, almost). Let’s all consider if we’ve transformed our Marketing as much as possible to remain competitive?

• Nearly every channel is either purely digital OR content for the channel is provided digitally. Yet, the fundamental marketing processes have remained largely unchanged, merely adapted where necessary.
• It is hard and cumbersome work to retrieve product information and 3D construction data required to create digital experience content. Time-to-prep for Marketing material can easily be more than 6 months and the amount of repetitive work required can be more than 60% of initial product launch per year.
• A wild mix of cloud-based services and microservices called Marketing Technology (often referred to as MarTech or TechStacks) – on average more than 90 tools – can be involved in operating the marketing channels. Almost none of them are considered mature enough to reach enterprise-grade.
• Assembling and maintaining these tool chains are a nightmare for a Marketeer and therefore, are nearly always outsourced to the corporate IT or external agencies. This can raise serious legal issues regarding data ownership and global-data protection rules.
  

While it is apparent that the Marketing processes and tools are far from being perfect, everybody has surely been on the receiving end of general advertisements for products that you may have recently bought,  and don’t plan on purchasing again.  Statistics clearly state that personalized and well-delivered experiences improve sales revenue and are definitely here to stay.

But ‘more of the same’ does not necessarily create better results and has led the self-sufficient MarTech ecosystem to detach itself from the product sphere for which it was created – to bring products to market.

Without meaning to sound too heretical – The world of MarTech does not care about the product. This is exactly why Marketing Transformation is imperative. The transformation is not about making everything digital, but to give digility a purpose.

We cannot successfully create new disruptive business models unless the customer and the product sphere are tightly interwoven with Marketing being the Corporate Babel Fish.

Whoa, you might think – these are big statements! But bear with me.

In what scalable and reliable way is Marketing – and Sales for that matter - currently helping or even guiding the evolution of products and services? How do they provide data-driven insights into the design, engineering or manufacturing departments?

To do so, they need an enterprise operating system that provides digital continuity to all the product data throughout all the domains of business. A platform that enables each department to work collaboratively while bringing data transparency (based on clear rule-sets) across the entire organization.

Having such an enterprise platform in place let’s users address the availability of product information and data, reduce the time and complexity involved with creating Marketing content. It also supplies a return channel for all relevant information - from known and unknown customers. This scenario extends far beyond the current capabilities of MarTech. Through this enterprise operating system, it becomes possible to improve product offerings, product inventories and ultimately drive product innovation based on insights gained from all buyers and non-buyers.

Have we found the kind of disruption your organization needs to prepare it for the future?