Marketing1

Marketing faces the challenge of managing the increasing complexity in communications and bearing the rising cost pressures, which is the reason why we decided to organize an event next month that intends to shed light on the impact of the ‘digital’ phenomena.

On June 10, 2014, Asian eMarketing will provide top-notch technology solution providers and brands an opportunity for in-depth peer-to-peer discussions on digital marketing that in general is forced to tie together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet - including design, development, advertising, and sales.

It’s quite obvious that marketers have access to more marketing channels than ever, making it more difficult to find the perfect unified marketing strategy. To succeed in the increasingly challenging environment, we therefore rely more and more on both the art and science of marketing:

  • The art of marketing helps you coordinate marketing channels and designing the appropriate messages you put into those channels.
  • The science of marketing taps into the rich data associated with all of these channels, so that you can make informed investment decisions based on desired business outcomes rather than past investment levels and rule of thumb.

Topic-oriented round table discussions, moderated by 8 renowned experts in a comfortable atmosphere, will provide 64 (8byEight) chosen marketing leaders with trend predictions, strategy insights and support in finding the best solution for their upcoming project.

8byEightModerators

One of the many conclusions that come out of the discussions will for sure be that handling all processes and data resources involved to stay successful, simply won’t be possible in the future without IT support. Already these days, around 10% of the companies spent more than half of the marketing budget on IT, due to the close integration of marketing and information technology. Fact is:

  • Today’s customers have to be invited to an individual dialogue with the right content - at the right time and the right place;
  • A customer-oriented focus of the company requires a rethinking in all areas - not just marketing;
  • The step from Big Data to Legal Big Data demands a stringent data usage management;
  • In the future, content must be dynamically adapted to a variety of context of users - even beyond mobile;
  • Interdependencies of all used measures have to be understood in order to allocate and use scarce budgets in an even more targeted manner.

To develop the needed knowledge - and to derive acts or measures from it for optimization - is a typical task of marketing. But to gain this knowledge, marketing requires first the appropriate information that must be generated from the data which has been collected.

I am convinced that the roundtable discussions will help to discover how to combine the Art and the Science to successfully optimize resources across the entire marketing mix and I am looking forward to fruitful discussions.

Complex demands require more exchange
The four fields relevant to marketing success - communication, data, operational processes as well as measurement and analysis – have to be taken into consideration and applied to optimize the Plan-Do-Check-Act method accordingly. Certainly, the data obtained is then stored and managed with the support of IT, but unfortunately there usually is still a gap between data and knowledge.

Marketing often lacks knowledge of the analytical potential of the data, the required technical infrastructure, and the construction of the interaction processes involved. On the other hand, IT is often short of understanding the applicability of the data, the tasks of marketing and in the reverse conclusion the targeted collection, processing and analysis of such data.

The systematic integration of IT and marketing into infrastructure and business processes – the so-called marketing engineering – will therefore start to take center stage in businesses in the future.

Professional cross-functional requirements, both for the marketing and the IT, have to be anticipated and executed over time. If marketing is no longer possible without IT, this is also true for marketers without IT skills. Or the other way around: For IT it’s essential to have knowledge of marketing processes, customer and service orientation - at least at the interfaces with marketing – and the still predominant silo mentality in both areas has to come to an end.

Gartner’s prediction is therefore not surprising, stating that the investment in marketing technologies will continuously rise and that CMOs will invest more in IT than CTOs in the years to come.

By Daniela La Marca