CMOs Adopt a Collaborative Futuristic Customer-Centric Vision

    Customer Centric

    CMOs across industries have widened their vision and broadened perspectives with more innovative marketing strategies to improve customer experiences instead of just focusing on sales.

    CMOs have the onus of driving business of  their brands. Recently, a survey conducted on a group of CEOs and CMOs across industries suggested that 17% of the CMOs identify themselves as growth drivers. This survey also brought to fore  a universal acknowledgment from the CMOs and CEOs that the traditional techniques cannot help  CMO’s efforts to  focus on customer brand experiences. An in-depth analysis of this study indicates that businesses employing collaborative, customer-focused CMOs outperform a portfolio of traditionally led companies by an average of 11% per year.

    Brands agree that decisions at every level of business impact the experiences the brand provides to customers. The collaboration between departments, teams, and members of the C-suite cannot be neglected, if they were to pursue flexible strategies and realign the organization to enhance the customer experiences. CMOs are universally accepted as the right leaders to orchestrate this pan-organizational collaboration. The CMO’s vision and insights into market acceptability and expectation, uniquely qualify the CMO to oversee a culture of customer obsession.

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    CMOs need to open entrenched silos across sales, customer service, marketing, and other business functions to new and more collaborative processes. The corporate culture focused on enriching customer experience, must start from the top of the pyramid; the CMO’s leadership plays the most crucial role here. Building a customer-centric organization will automatically push the employee satisfaction meter up, as employees will take pride in the positive customer experiences they deliver with effective inter-department communication.

    Unfortunately for companies across verticals, only 34% of organizations surveyed have established a culture of customer excellence. CMOs need to identify and utilize KPIs shared across teams and functions while aligning each internal process with the delivery of positive consumer experiences to overcome the challenge of deconstructing silos.

    The survey also recommended early adoption of a customer-focused culture for all firms for the competitive benefits. CMOs are quick to replace legacy processes to embrace new martech strategies that provide agility to meet evolving customer needs. Personalization of marketing strategies creates hyper-relevant customer experiences promising customer retention. This includes utilizing powerful analytics tools with data-backed insights to more confidently design policies that promote new customer experiences to pursue unconventional growth strategies. There is a massive scope of improvement  in this aspect, as only 31% of CMOs reported investments in new marketing technology like AI.

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    CMOs foster collaboration across industries, as the C-suite officers unite to deliver stellar customer experiences. The relationship between CMOs and the CIO is essential, as collaboration here can encourage shared ownership and responsibility for marketing technologies. Not only the inter-organizational relationships but also the partnership and external relationships of CMOs play a critical role. These partnerships draw in new capabilities and opportunities to support the delivery of innovative, ideal customer experiences, for adapting to the customer obsession culture.

    The most successful CMOs are fierce customer advocates who are not afraid of technological innovation and external collaboration that shape the organizational culture. Industry experts and visionaries suggest that all CMOs should adopt a similar mindset and techniques to transcend the traditional practices and join the elite 17% who sit at the top of their profession leading their companies to innovation and success.

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