Many chief executive officers of the past, such as Gurcharan Das, Bharat Puri, Sanjay Rishi, Rajeev Bakshi, and Anand Kripalu, all passed through or headed the marketing function of businesses during their ascent to the top job.
A chief marketing officer’s work included overseeing aspects of business, like customer insights, pricing, and unit-level profitability. With an operating role that exposed them to the company’s profit and loss statement, CMOs had an advantage versus other C-suite executives, making them natural heirs to the CEO role. This formula hasn’t changed over the years. However, the ever-changing technology landscape has added elements of complexity, and hence, difficulty, to the process.
Four decades ago, life was relatively simple. CMOs armed with ruled sheets and handheld calculators, juggled data collected via sample-based qualitative and quantitative customer research. This information was converted to insights and shared with creative agencies, which built 30-second solutions – advertisements – as answers to the problems articulated by the CMOs.
These ads were meant to address every customer and prospect they were displayed to. Some who were exposed to these ads succumbed, but most didn’t, and yet, given the state of the art, it was the best CMOs could do. A CMO in that era was essentially a right brained communications expert who also dabbled in pricing and unit-level profitability. My first job as a CMO was spent rolling out the brand Hutch and making the pug a popular dog.
Two decades ago, and a decade after calculators had given way to desktop computers, technology took what then felt like a huge leap and we saw the emergence of data warehouses, and analytics and campaign management software. This allowed marketing folks to divide their customers and prospects into segments, or subgroups of customers who behaved in a similar fashion. Customer value management (CVM) became the new buzzword and meetings focused on newfound verbs for customers – acquire, retain, and upsell.
CMOs were suddenly expected to behave like Ardhanarishwar, a union of the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati, and use both sides of their brain with ambidextrous alacrity. Some firms, after failing to find CMOs with such cognitive flexibility, divvied up the role into chief communications officer and chief commercial officer. In my second stint as CMO, I was blessed with an able communications team that created endearing campaigns like the ZooZoos while I focused on building an engine that helped build a substantial value realisation gap with our competitors. We achieved this by using state-of-theart technology that helped us discover customer segments that were more profitable, and we acquired even more customers from these while leaving the unprofitable segments for our competitors. The technology also helped us identify and retain customers who were valuable in the long term and upsell to the ones who wanted more and could afford to pay for their incremental needs. The ‘Ardhanarishwar’ CMOs of that era eventually became CEOs, while others continued with their communications and commercial roles.
Technology has leapt further in the 2010s and today’s CMOs have access to artificial intelligence, which is rapidly advancing. AI-savvy CMOs don’t have to depend on time-consuming surveys for insights, nor do they address all their customers with a single 30-second campaign. Instead, they create personas of their customers and make them answer queries without ever having met with them, to create messages that are unique to every customer and are delivered one on one. Spray and pray, the technique of firing blindly with the hope that a few will land, is giving way to NEO, or n equals one, enabling CMOs to stop thinking in averages and start using technology to solve for every individual.
Markets are made of individuals, but we didn’t have the power to address them individually earlier. AI has enabled us to probe each customer and their individual needs, motivations, and truths, and design for each real individual instead of an abstract average.
Does this make a CMO’s role left-brain centric? Not at all. On the contrary, the left and right brains will require greater balance as the brand becomes central to every personalised nudge.
CMOs who harness AI to solve for a single person, single scenario, and a single truth are more likely to become the CEOs of the future.
The author is chief executive officer of Tata Play. Views expressed are personal.
A chief marketing officer’s work included overseeing aspects of business, like customer insights, pricing, and unit-level profitability. With an operating role that exposed them to the company’s profit and loss statement, CMOs had an advantage versus other C-suite executives, making them natural heirs to the CEO role. This formula hasn’t changed over the years. However, the ever-changing technology landscape has added elements of complexity, and hence, difficulty, to the process.
Four decades ago, life was relatively simple. CMOs armed with ruled sheets and handheld calculators, juggled data collected via sample-based qualitative and quantitative customer research. This information was converted to insights and shared with creative agencies, which built 30-second solutions – advertisements – as answers to the problems articulated by the CMOs.
These ads were meant to address every customer and prospect they were displayed to. Some who were exposed to these ads succumbed, but most didn’t, and yet, given the state of the art, it was the best CMOs could do. A CMO in that era was essentially a right brained communications expert who also dabbled in pricing and unit-level profitability. My first job as a CMO was spent rolling out the brand Hutch and making the pug a popular dog.
Two decades ago, and a decade after calculators had given way to desktop computers, technology took what then felt like a huge leap and we saw the emergence of data warehouses, and analytics and campaign management software. This allowed marketing folks to divide their customers and prospects into segments, or subgroups of customers who behaved in a similar fashion. Customer value management (CVM) became the new buzzword and meetings focused on newfound verbs for customers – acquire, retain, and upsell.
CMOs were suddenly expected to behave like Ardhanarishwar, a union of the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati, and use both sides of their brain with ambidextrous alacrity. Some firms, after failing to find CMOs with such cognitive flexibility, divvied up the role into chief communications officer and chief commercial officer. In my second stint as CMO, I was blessed with an able communications team that created endearing campaigns like the ZooZoos while I focused on building an engine that helped build a substantial value realisation gap with our competitors. We achieved this by using state-of-theart technology that helped us discover customer segments that were more profitable, and we acquired even more customers from these while leaving the unprofitable segments for our competitors. The technology also helped us identify and retain customers who were valuable in the long term and upsell to the ones who wanted more and could afford to pay for their incremental needs. The ‘Ardhanarishwar’ CMOs of that era eventually became CEOs, while others continued with their communications and commercial roles.
Technology has leapt further in the 2010s and today’s CMOs have access to artificial intelligence, which is rapidly advancing. AI-savvy CMOs don’t have to depend on time-consuming surveys for insights, nor do they address all their customers with a single 30-second campaign. Instead, they create personas of their customers and make them answer queries without ever having met with them, to create messages that are unique to every customer and are delivered one on one. Spray and pray, the technique of firing blindly with the hope that a few will land, is giving way to NEO, or n equals one, enabling CMOs to stop thinking in averages and start using technology to solve for every individual.
Markets are made of individuals, but we didn’t have the power to address them individually earlier. AI has enabled us to probe each customer and their individual needs, motivations, and truths, and design for each real individual instead of an abstract average.
Does this make a CMO’s role left-brain centric? Not at all. On the contrary, the left and right brains will require greater balance as the brand becomes central to every personalised nudge.
CMOs who harness AI to solve for a single person, single scenario, and a single truth are more likely to become the CEOs of the future.
The author is chief executive officer of Tata Play. Views expressed are personal.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
