Time For Greater Collaboration

In an exclusive interview with BW Businesssworld’s Ruhail Amin, Oracle Marketing Cloud’s marketing transformation & strategy director Wendy Hogan spoke about the need to build complementary relationships between customer data and the potential challenges facing future marketers and more.

According to Wendy Hogan, technology is playing an increasingly influential role as far as new marketing trends are concerned. She feels the need of the hour is to leverage the collective approach to data marketing using technology tools rather than working in silos.

Data Sharing
Hogan believes the way forward for businesses will be building complementary relationships. “We often talk about first party, second part and third party data. Plus, a lot of companies have data in different silos. The need is to bring all that into some kind of data warehouse and use them to activate your marketing, your service and your sales strategies,” she says.

“A lot of people are now concentrating on: what I know about my customer, do I know my customer, how do I connect, what am I doing for acquisition and what I am doing for loyalty building, using third party data. For example, programmatic is powered by third party data, driving segmentation and data driven advertising. In the middle you have second party data. We are seeing in other markets a lot of recognition, say from finance vertical about leveraging partnership from the travel vertical or from broadcast about leveraging the FMCG vertical,” adds Hogan.

Challenges For CMOs
Among the obstacles that future CMOs will face, Hogan believes paucity of talent will be one; onboarding the younger generation and getting them to learn and retaining them will continue to be a challenge. The other thing to which she wants to drive the attention of CMOs is, having the right data strategy. “If you consider the amount of data, from artificial intelligence (AI), IoT and all of those, the future CMOs will be dealing with a lot of data compared to now. So, if you haven’t got the data strategy right, it’s only going to get harder and harder to figure that out,” she says.

Technology Trends
The need for marketing intelligence is changing the marketing game in a big way for all brands. “We are witnessing a lot of activity in the AI space across the world, which will help to arrive at adaptive marketing intelligence solutions. In terms of marketing strategies, you will see CMOs take control and own their relationship with customers by putting infrastructure in place, and all the insights that they get from media buying will flow into their own customer real-estate. So you will see a lot of changes in the collaboration between technology vendor, agency, marketers and brands,” Hogan says.

Speaking about the need to adopt the learnings from marketing into other aspects of the business, Hogan says, “You will also see marketing become more central to the success of business, as marketing teaches a lot to other parts of the business.”