Brave marketers must lead with data to drive change

The bravest, most outward-looking chief marketing officers (CMOs) must be leaders of change, prioritizing how they work with CTOs and CIOs to build the ecosystems required to gather and respond to the data they need to deliver great experiences and frictionless commerce.

At an HFS Research marketing executive roundtable on March 7, supported by Capgemini, Google’s Amy Copeland, Director, Global Data and Tech EMEA, described how she saw success when CMOs understood the need to connect business silos. Building partnerships beyond the business with an experience-first focus is imperative for modern marketers.

Make experience a shared focus, from the boardroom to the shop floor

Beyond having the idea or ambition, CMOs should be effective leaders of change to ensure experience becomes a shared focus from the boardroom to the shop floor.

Cellphone network Three’s Fraser Gibson, Head of Channel Marketing, echoed the sentiment as he told the group about a campaign to raise awareness—and ultimately sales—among students.

“We are trying to work in a fully integrated way across marketing teams and focus on the customer to deliver a seamless marketing experience,” he explained. Key to that is the idea of “one customer, one budget,” focusing spending on the output for the customer rather than an individual department’s key performance indicators (KPIs).

Data can give CMOs the backing to make the big leaps

Several marketing leaders at the event raised concerns that too many CMOs had become risk averse despite recognizing the increasing amount of data available, potentially providing the evidence they would need to back themselves in taking the big leaps.

HFS notes that much of the conversation centered on using data to measure outputs and marketing’s impact on growth, KPIs, for example. But using customer data to drive decisions that impact those outputs appears less mature in the industry.

A top challenge and imperative for customer experience (CX) leaders is to increase their understanding of customers, an unattainable feat without proper data collection and quality (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: CMOs know they must get to know their customers better, and the key is using data better

Sample: N=300 CX Leaders, 2022, “The Future of Experience in a Hybrid Reality”
Source: HFS Research, 2023

Data interpretation gap limits progress in customer experience

The executives shared concerns about their incomplete understanding of the flow of data into their businesses and their lack of resources for turning that data into insight for enhancing decision making.

A gap remains between what data scientists generate and how marketers can use it. Fraser summarized, “We need people to explain the data to us in a story.”

Marketers have data, but they need support interpreting it. When that insight flows to the right decision points in the business, CMOs can become evidence-based drivers of real change—delivering the improvement in customer experience they aspire to.

Capgemini’s Abha Singh, Offer Leader – Connected Marketing Operations, explained, “Marketing is evolving rapidly. It must be more agile yet scaled and global in its approach to delivering personalized experiences. All marketing programs need to be data driven and must be measured with relevant metrics to support growth and customer centricity for the brand.”

The Bottom Line: Marketers need internal alliances and expert partners to make the best use of data.

The bravest marketers are leading the way in silo-busting alliances with their CTOs and CIOs that access the data they need to drive improvement in customer experience. To join them, marketers should turn to partners with digital and data expertise and the ability to run centralized processes globally at scale to close their interpretation gap and deliver real-time brand experiences. Connecting the dots outside of their businesses and streamlining the partner ecosystem will help CMOs add to HFS OneOffice™ experience-led outcomes with HFS OneEcosystem™ outputs to meet the needs of a customer’s end-to-end life cycle.