Produced by CMO Australia for ADMA

How marketing leaders and their teams master the art of marketing 3.0

BUILDING THE SKILLSETS REQUIRED FOR THE

MODERN MARKETING FUNCTION

MARKETING TOOLBOX

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“HOW HAVE WE ENDED UP HERE? YOU CAN THANK TECHNOLOGICAL

INNOVATION FOR THAT.”

THE DAWN OF A NEW MARKETING ERADepending on whose definition you prefer, we’ve entered the

age of the customer, the experience economy, a new era of engagement. Brands now soar or plummet based on their ability to not only know and meet consumer expectations,

but anticipate those needs and desires before consumers even realise they have them.

This trend has been coming for a while. In 1998, B Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore summed it up nicely in their Harvard Business Review article, ‘Welcome to the Experience Economy’:

“An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event. Commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.

“While prior economic offerings – commodities, goods, and services – are external to the buyer, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level. Thus, no two people can have the same experience, because each experience derives from the interaction between the staged event (like a theatrical play) and the individual’s state of mind.”

How have we ended up here? You can thank technological innovation for that. Connected devices, digital disruption, social media and advanced analytics have combined into a perfect storm of technological force, leading to a situation where consumers now control the conversation. It’s technology and algorithms that increasingly dictate the way we interact and understand each other, and put data and real-time relevance centre stage in the modern marketing approach.

Off the back of such significant technological advancement, digital upstarts such as Uber, Netflix, Airbnb and Amazon have rewritten what it means to offer frictionless, pre-emptive services to customers. These, in turn, have lifted expectations of experience in every industry to dizzying heights using a combination of data, customer insight, service-led culture and product excellence.

In response, marketing has become less about selling products or services, and more about providing ever-more impressive, seamless experiences. Mass, broadcast styles of marketing are being thrown out the window in favour of increasingly personalised, digitised and data-informed engagement.

It’s not just about getting a customer to make a purchase either. Marketers are compelled to take the entire lifecycle of a consumer into account, plotting out the highly complex, non-linear and often irrational customer journey across channels, devices, contexts and more. All while facing increased pressure to prove marketing’s worth.

As expectations around engagement have risen, so too have expectations about marketing’s remit. If the nature of marketing is being redefined in the experience economy, so too must the skillsets within the marketing function.

It’s no longer enough to have creative and communication aptitude. Marketing teams must incorporate digital and technology nous, data-driven and analytical decision making, and revolve around a more holistic view of the customer that adapts and changes. Iterative thinking is prized, strategic thinking is a must, and resilience is paramount.

In the words of American marketing author, Phil Kotler: Welcome to the new age of marketing 3.0.

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“ ALL MARKETERS TODAY NEED BASELINE SKILLS IN DATA & ANALYTICS.”

Y ou only need to look at the state of marketing leadership in Australia today to see the transformative change the experience economy

is having on the skillsets required in a chief marketing officer – and their growing responsibilities as executive leaders.

A number of CMOs have morphed into more holistic customer engagement roles as they take ownership for wider brand experiences across the organisation. AMP, Suncorp, Mercer, Foxtel, Aussie, Vocus and Bendigo Bank, for instance, have extended the sphere of marketing beyond the 4Ps and into end-to-end customer experience (CX) management.

There’s also the question of digital ownership. In CMO’s 2017 State of the CMO research, more than 60 per cent of marketing leaders were found to own their organisation’s wider digital strategy, and 78 per cent said digital commerce is one of the many functions reporting into the marketing division (followed incidentally, by customer experience).

Having wider CX and digital responsibility comes with an obligation to enact change, not just within the marketing

MODERN MARKETING SKILLS MIX

function, but across the organisation. This is seeing a host of softer skills come to the fore, including adaptability, resilience, innovative and strategic thinking, collaboration and an ability to partner with divisions across the business, as well as externally.

It’s not just leaders that must increasingly exhibit such attributes. Four major roles are gaining ground in the modern marketing to cope with digital transformation and the quest for personalised, customer-led brand engagement: Data analytics, digital marketing and technology, content and customer experience.

According to eConsultancy’s 2015 State of Digital Report, 96 per cent of A/NZ marketers recognise a good understanding of technology is crucial for future success. More than 40 per cent saw improving data and analytics as the top skills priority, and 53 per cent highlighted the right mix of technical and creative talent as vital.

Author of Analytical Marketer: How to transform your Marketing Organisation and marketing chief at SAS, Adele Sweetwood, puts the emphasis on digital marketing, content marketing, customer experience and marketing science in her book. She writes:

“All marketers today need baseline skills in data and analytics. Today’s marketer needs to go well beyond reporting and metrics, to be more proficient in a full range of analytical skills – including knowledge of data management principles and analytical strategies, and an understanding of the role of data quality, the importance of data governance, and the value of data in marketing disciplines. Marketers today also need a nuanced understanding of current and emerging digital channels.”

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICEAs a sign of just how important data, digital, CX and content have become, Tourism Australia CMO, Lisa Ronson, restructured her team along these key pillars, and now has a GM of digital, GM of content and campaigns, GM of research and insights and a lead for ‘signature experiences’.

Country manager at food delivery company Deliveroo, Levi Aron, is also looking for marketers who not only have extensive experience and great ideas, but analytical and execution skills that are even greater. “From Google Analytics, to understanding data sets across a wide range »

ADDRESSING THE

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THE DIGITAL

STRATEGISTWorking in finance seems like a strange route to becoming a chief digital officer. But it was while John Mackenney was CFO of Tourism Australia that he began running the promotional body’s analytics practice and measurements around digital performance.

“I was also part of the digital steering committee,” he says. “We decided to create a broader transformation role including all the sites, but also content, social, data then the overlay of how some of those data streams feed into media strategy. Having spent five years as a CFO, I saw digital as a strategic role to drive business and industry.”

SKILLS MIXMackenney says digital strategists have to be fast learners.

“Because the landscape is changing so quickly, the ability to pick up new concepts and work out how they apply to your business is a critical skillset,” he says. “Then it’s about working out if we’re making the right decisions and being constantly six months ahead of where we need to go. That’s more relevant to this role than others in the organisation.”

The second key skillset is embracing change and getting others to as well. “What’s consistent in a lot of big change roles is that ability to bring people along with you, articulate that message to people who are not digital in nature,” Mackenney says.

“Tourism as a sector is quite traditional in how it operates. Trying to get people on that journey is a big part of my role. There’s constant selling and proving what we should be doing.”

The third thing about being a digital strategist is avoiding “bright shiny object syndrome”, Mackenney says. “We’ve done great things with VR [virtual reality], for example, and it’d be very simple for us to just let AR and VR drive strategy,” he says. “The critical part is to understand the business challenge, then be open-minded about taking on these new innovations to solve those problems.”

Mackenney describes this as authenticating the ‘why’. “Look at TA’s data sharing relationships – the reason we do these is so we buy media more efficiently, there’s less wastage and we have more money to talk to the right people,” he says. “Those are the things that need to be in focus, not the fact we can segment audiences and buy programmatically.”

ALLIESMackenney is joined at the hip with Tourism Australia’s head of media, largely because two-thirds of the group’s media budget is in digital media, and mostly driving audiences back to the Australia.com website.

His other main ally is the CIO. Tourism Australia’s digital team creates the roadmap, then IT works to a set of deliverables, much like an internal agency. Both have adopted Agile work practices to ensure teams work iteratively and deliver value regularly to both consumers and the business.

CURRENT PRIORITIESA big part of Mackenney’s focus is spearheading the shift from mass marketing and a site that’s the same for everyone, to a one-to-one personalised approach.

“Once we know certain things, there are next best offers that make sense,” Mackenney explains. “If we know you’re coming to Sydney, then we can look at if you’re going to go up the Blue Mountains, or visiting the Hunter Valley, if you want to do the Bridge Climb or visit Taronga?

“How you get the right data layer to understand where a consumer is in the journey, their preferences, and then put the right piece of content in front of them at the right moment, is vital.”

MILESTONES Mackenney’s biggest achievement so far is around content curation. Initially, Tourism Australia brought on technology from Livefyre to pull social media posts from its Australia accounts to automatically feed the Australia.com site. Today, it’s now taking streams from social media accounts across the travel industry to populate Australia.com.

“We’re using content that already exists and is performing, and curating that, and that’s really allowed us to drive the site forward,” Mackenney says.

JOHN MACKENNEYGM Digital Transformation,

Tourism Australia

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of social, app and ecommerce platforms, today’s marketer needs to be able to digest huge amounts of info and make calculated decisions as a daily routine,” he claims.

Mercer Pacific chief customer officer, Cambell Holt, is another with data, digital and technology on his priority list. Content is then the component flowing across and uniting digital and data capability.

The ambition in bringing these skills into the marketing function is to own customer experience, end-to-end. “My view is marketing is CX and CX is marketing,” he says. “It’s really hard, and will continue to be for some time to come, particularly data, digital and technology, which are fundamental to customer experience.”

Three years ago, Mercer started pooling customer experience functions into marketing in recognition that it needed a dedicated customer champion. Holt now has a CX leader as one of his eight direct reports, with a remit that just keeps getting broader, from customer technology and platforms to call centres, and working side by side with the digital leader.

The journey to better customer experiences has evolved incrementally, Holt says, and the implications are profound.

“Every time you bring another part of CX into the responsibility of the marketing function, you find other areas fundamental to CX that need to come with it, and each is a point of bottle neck,” he says. “If anyone sets out to build the perfect CX function or perfect approach to designing great customer experiences, they will struggle.

“It’s like pulling a thread from a woolly jumper: You pull it a bit and you achieve some success, but it keeps coming. And you find yourselves navigating the deepest, darkest regions of an organisation you wouldn’t even have considered played such fundamental roles in the ultimate customer experience.”

ADOPT SYSTEMS THINKINGTo build these skills, Holt is looking through the lens of the customer. To help him, he’s hiring exclusively outside the financial services industry and category to FMCG, retailers and service organisations.

“You often listen to marketing leaders wanting to change the results they are getting, but the first question in the interview is ‘tell me how much experience you’ve had in this industry’,” he points out. “The last thing I want is more of the same. Literally, they are the people who have been responsible for existing CX in my category.”

But the biggest distinguishing feature Holt outlines between old and modern marketers is they’re “systems thinkers” .

“New marketers are systems thinkers, rather than by channel, or monoline thinkers by product, market or segment,” he says. “Systems thinkers have a lot more business knowledge, they’re more aware of where they sit in the broader ecosystem, and they’re much more effective as a result.”

In recognition of this, plus the need for better collaboration across the marketing function overall, Mercer has introduced what it’s calling ‘conscious interdependence’. The notion is if the digital team is winning at the expense of the content or customer platforms team, then no one wins, Holt says.

“We’re fostering that because it’s the right thing to do,” he explains. “I have eight leaders, and each knows if any other leader fails this year, the whole team fails. What that does to relationships in an enterprise is phenomenal. My success being dependent on someone else’s success is a completely different mindset.”

It’s taken some work to force interdependence, and sowing annual performance objectives to elements required for everyone else to succeed was key. Holt says it’s produced amazing conversations and tension as a result.

“Forcing conscious interdependence is recognition we’re operating as a system,” he says. “It comes to the fore when you see

people doing great customer experience thinking; you start pulling this thread and you end up following it all the way through the organisation and wind up back at the start. It’s all interconnected.”

RESPECT YOUR PEERSChampioning respect for peers in the marketing function is taking root in a number of Australian organisations, sometimes because of skills and budget constraint, other times for reasons of agility and efficiency.

For instance, a similar idea of inter-function collaboration led Sportsbet’s CMO, Barni Evans, to switch his 2ICs for brand and creative, and media and data-driven marketing, for 12 months. This was both an investment in people to have a more rounded set of skills, and more empathy in each other’s roles, working in tandem. He says it’s an experiment that succeeded.

What’s also vital is fostering deep skills, knowledge, experience and diversity of thinking. Even as staff align behind a common vision, Ronson says Tourism Australia boasts a diversity through industry, education and multicultural backgrounds, and gender.

“We have varied skills and experience across the marketing team, which has obviously made it easier to touch on all those areas [data, technology, content and customer experience],” she says. “We’re not at our ideal state but I don’t think we ever will be.

“The world is changing so quickly, we have to make sure we have the right people and also just as importantly, work with the right partners that can help us navigate through the way the world is changing, what problems we’re trying to solve for the customer and how we best go about doing that.”

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“NEW MARKETERS ARE SYSTEMS THINKERS, RATHER THAN BY CHANNEL, OR MONOLINE THINKERS BY PRODUCT, MARKET OR SEGMENT.”

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After studying a three-year degree at Victoria University in Wellington in marketing and ecommerce, Rachel Wilson kicked off her career in sales support, before becoming contact analyst at New Zealand telecoms operator, Telecom (now Spark).

“Spark was very advanced at the time, had a very powerful database with some great analytical tools and was just starting to think about marketing automation and using data to create new customer journeys,” she says.

While at Spark, Wilson was exposed to SAS coding and using data to send email campaigns. She had a stint with Loyalty NZ and then NZ Post as a customer data analyst before joining Xero as a data marketing analyst. This saw her setting up new systems and processes to run marketing automation, working as part of a global team sending emails, building journeys and doing pre- and post-campaign analysis. In 2015, she joined NZ classifieds giant, Trade Me.

“Coming out of university, it was difficult to know that these jobs even existed in workplaces,” she says.

THE REMIT Wilson’s role was created to come up with innovative ways to use Trade Me’s data to send targeted email communications, as well as post-campaign analysis. Her tasks include cleaning and analysing data, ensuring data is available for campaigns, helping build customer journeys, and challenging campaign thinking.

“Generally, it’s about questioning everything and being insightful,” she says. “A sense of urgency is needed for this role and the ability to juggle multiple campaigns and deadlines. Huge attention to detail is needed too. It can be why we struggle to fill these roles, because people just don’t have that unique blend of skills.”

Wilson works alongside a head of marketing automation and operations, five campaign managers, a designer and two campaign analysts.

RACHEL WILSONSenior Campaign Analyst,

Trade Me (New Zealand)

SKILLS MIXAlongside detail, Wilson’s skills list includes an ability to present numbers “in a way that means something to someone who isn’t technical”, and an understanding of business problems and how to solve them by making use of data for targeted campaigns. Like most roles in marketing, being a data strategist also requires a knack for collaboration, excellent time management, and taking responsibility for data checking and best practice.

“There’s an element of conflict resolution – talking to marketing managers and coming up a middle ground, and often falling to numbers to determine how to solve problems,” she continues. “Then there’s adaptability. Priorities often change and there are urgent requests. Working across different business verticals and changing the type of analysis you’re doing and for who means you must be flexible.”

Working collaboratively with marketing peers and other parts of the business requires strong communications and process design. “And we are customer led – each marketing manager in their vertical knows the priorities and ensures their jobs are ranked in order of importance,” Wilson says. “We have dedicated people working directly with them.”

CURRENT PRIORITIES As senior analyst, a major part of Wilson’s time is spent mentoring and training the analyst team. Other daily tasks include code peer checking and building automation flows, campaign and code documentation, reporting and analysing how historic campaign and cross-overs impact automations and tactical activities.

“It’s about how to make something more targeted and dynamic, and I’m always thinking about how to improve things,” she adds.

MILESTONESWilson’s biggest achievement has been in process improvement. “Since we started our automation journey, we have developed a design guideline document, which has been integral in enabling us to scale,” she says. “Having everything modularised means we can be quick and nimble in getting something to market.

“Data combined with design done the right way is very powerful. We recently updated our welcome email after 15 years, and we can now test and iterate on this to find that sweet spot with members.”

THE DATA STRATEGIST

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BUILD FROM WITHINSuch skills are not necessarily there for the picking. The quarterly marketing jobs report from recruitment firm, Hays, shows continued shortage of skilled candidates locally, particularly in digital marketing and big data, with marketing and customer insights analysts among those most in demand.

Commonwealth Bank group executive, marketing and strategy, Vittoria Shortt, has been working to build capability across her 220-strong marketing function through an internal marketing academy. The training program produced in partnership with the Australian Graduate School of Management and Blackdot, and is aimed at improving staff literacy in 10 fundamental modern marketing skills.

For CBA, these encompass data-driven marketing, influencing strategy, and functional

capabilities including project and change management. Training is both formal and on-the-job.

That can’t be at the expense of cross-team collaboration, however, and Shortt agrees it’s important a shared language, culture and way of working exists.

“If teams get too specialised, people start talking different languages and it’s difficult to come together,” she says. “We’re asking people to step up more generally, but it also comes back to having a philosophy of always learning. Things keep shifting and changing, and you have to commit some of your time to continually learning. It’s not good enough to say I don’t know.”

The academy is one of four pillars in CBA’s Customer Marketing Transformation. Also on the agenda is democratisation of customer data across the business, introducing

technology capabilities that raise marketing’s ability to interact through more personalised experiences, and a host of things Shortt describes as “new ways of working”.

In a similar vein, Jurlique chief brand officer, Andrew Martens, is working to foster data-driven, customer-led thinking by opening up learning, collaboration and data insight access to teams. She’s appointed a head of consumer insights to ensure staff have up-to-date intelligence on their global customer base to better inform marketing activities and are driven by data.

Martens is also compiling a development program incorporating internal and external training and insights, and partnered with external experts to run week-long programs for marketing and market leads that immerse staff in brand health data.

Over at ANZ, a Strategic Workforce plan

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GENERALIST VERSUS SPECIALIST? IN ALL OF THIS CHANGE, HAVE MARKETERS CHANGED THEIR MINDS ON THE GENERALIST VERSUS SPECIALIST DEBATE?

I’d take a generalist over a specialist

any day of the week. They generally

come with these qualities of resilience

and an ability to take risks and be agile.

Specialists tend to be quite narrow in

their field of view and consequently

their world view. You need that flexibility

across generalist and specialist.

Sometimes that changes, and with

respect to the way we mix internal

resources with vendors and partners.

“You need both, but I prefer generalists

and I need them at the core of the

business, when we are trying to develop

a vision then navigate towards that

vision. A group of specialists won’t get

you there. But augment a core of clever

generalists with specialists and that’s

where the magic starts to happen.

MERCER’S CAMBELL HOLT:

TOURISM AUSTRALIA’S LISA RONSON:

Now more than ever, there has to be a mix. It’s because of the

way the consumer is changing, and way they’re interacting with

technology, it’s changing constantly. You need the balance of

specialist and the generalist, so one can go deep, and one can go

broad and consider A through Z instead of just X,Y,Z.

THE MARKETING ACADEMY’S SHERILYN SHACKELL:

I’m sick of this debate. There is, and will always be a need for both experts and

generalists. If someone has an oaverriding passion for a specific niche, then

let them develop this. If someone wants a broader remit supervising others,

then let them flex that muscle. Bottom line, we need diversity in thinking,

experiences, skills, desires and abilities.

FOUR As OF THE MODERN MARKETING ORGANISATION

ACUMEN: These are the new core skillsets required to cope with the rise of digital, data and technology-fuelled marketing. Ten capabilities were identified by marketers: Customer insights, digital marketing, social media, integrated engagement planning, content

development, evaluative analytics, predictive analytics, customer data management, marketing technology planning and implementation, and innovation planning.

The CMO Club founder and CEO, Peter Krainik, notes many of these skillsets wouldn’t have been on marketing’s radar five years ago. But they’ve become vital as CMOs strive to understand and influence the wider customer decision journey. In particular, there’s a rise in analytics skills that help with “quick response, learning and monitoring” of tactical activities, as well as understanding and informing growth strategies and decisions with the customer in mind.

ALIGNMENT: It’s particularly critical marketing teams can partner from top to bottom and across every business function in order to effectively engage customers across all touchpoints. Key functions marketing must collaborate with include sales, IT, dedicated digital functions and customer service.

Kimberly-Clark CMO, Clive Sirkin, who was quoted in the report, says alignment has to happen on multiple levels – from business model and brand plan, to foundational tools and strategy across divisions globally.

“The last level of alignment is how our teams are going to work together as one team to execute on that plan,” Sirkin states. “You can image if you are off at any one of these levels, the further you are into the organisation, the greater the gap is. So we try to talk as an organisation about the impact of what we are doing, even as to how that impacts at each level of the organisation.”

1AGILITY: The days of setting up a marketing campaign or strategy and seeing it through are gone. Test-and-learn, iteration and optimisation and pivoting quickly are vital. That requires not only team agility, but again, cross-functional collaboration.

The report highlights four key ways of bringing agility into teams: Establishing funds for experimentation; forming empowered cross-functional teams, developing test-and-learn programs, and modelling decisive behaviour.

ACCOUNTABILITY: This is a reflection of the increased pressure CMOs are under to demonstrate the return on investment in marketing and their effectiveness. The report advises marketing leaders to instil a culture of personal accountability, ensuring

the right measures and goals are in place. Key is establishing the right measures and reporting on them,

as well as keeping everyone aligned to top-level goals through strong brand values and business objectives.

If one thing’s clear from the way marketing leaders are experimenting with in-house skills, role responsibilities and cross-functional collaboration, it’s that there’s no one organisational model every CMO can adopt to successfully adjust to the new world of customer-led marketing. But according a report from The CMO Club, there are four emerging pillars underpinning

successful modern marketing functions. The CMO Solution Guide for Building a Modern Marketing Organisation report, produced by the member-based organisation in partnership with Oracle Marketing Cloud and marketing agency nFusion, set out to investigate the organisational structure and skillsets needed to transform marketing functions for next-gen marketing. The research was based on interviews with more than 20 leading CMOs in the US.

FOUR KEY THEMES WERE IDENTIFIED AS INCREASINGLY INFORMING ORGANISATIONAL DECISIONS: ACUMEN, ALIGNMENT, AGILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY.

SOURCE: THE CMO SOLUTION GUIDE FOR BUILDING A MODERN MARKETING ORGANISATION, THE CMO CLUB, DECEMBER 2015

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“ EVERY SINGLE PERSON IS BORN WITH THE ABILITY TO BE FLEXIBLE, THINK THROUGH THEIR OWN SOLUTIONS, BE ACCOUNTABLE, TAKE RISKS, AND MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS. THE REASON WHY THEY DON’T IS THEY’VE BEEN TAUGHT NOT TO.”

has been established in order to attract and nurture the right talent and a high-performance culture, its head of marketing for A/NZ, Carolyn Bendall says. Five pillars underpin it: Marketing culture model; strategies workforce capability plan; external positioning of marketing at ANZ to attract talent; succession planning; and a focus on diversity and inclusion.

BALANCE IN-SOURCING WITH OUTSOURCINGIt’s not all number crunching and technology. Content development and aggregation has become an area of significant investment and resource thanks to the growing requirement for personalised communication and the plethora of channels being used to communicate with customers.

To cope with the rising volumes of content required, as well as gain agility and responsiveness, many marketing leaders are building content teams in-house – Xero, Sportsbet, Qantas, CPA and ANZ, to name a few.

However, rapidly scaling the marketing function isn’t going to be cost effective or possible for everyone, and throwing resource at ever-more content production isn’t necessarily the right answer either, The CMO Club founder, Peter Krainik, says. He claims the best and brightest CMOs are approaching content by getting customers, partners and key influencers involved.

Tourism Australia’s decision to bring content and social media management in-house was because both are strategically important, Ronson says.

“I think insourcing capability depends on the organisation and extent to which they have access to data,” she says.

“With programmatic buying, a lot of large organisations have been bringing that trading in-house for a few years now. It’s also about the extent to which they can draw and keep that talent within the organisation.

“With social, some other organisations might outsource that, whereas we have brought it in-house because we’re getting 3500 pieces of content a day via social and we have a lot to work with. It depends on brand, size of organisation, capability and what capability you want to build in the future. Plus whether there’s a cost or overall efficiency to service your customer in the optimal way. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”

Founder of the Marketing Academy, Sherilyn Shackell, believes marketing capability development should be strategically led in-house, with select outside companies providing subject matter expertise and content as required.

“The most progressive companies will ‘buddy up’ with companies in other sectors who have also built in-house programs and

collaborate in cross company mentoring, execs running masterclasses, sharing best practice, job swap work experience and so on,” she says.

ENCOURAGE RESILIENCE AND ADAPTABILITYArguably more important than tangible skills in data, digital and content, however, are the softer skills required to keep up with and adapt to both changing customers, and rapidly advancing technology.

Agility, adaptability, resilience and a willingness to take risks are all musts if brands are to stay relevant. This in turn, requires a culture that empowers team members to try new things, embrace change and work collaboratively. It effectively has to reward failure as part of a continuous learning loop.

“We talk about disruption every day because it’s true,” says Ronson. “The ability to adapt to change has always been really important but now more than ever, it’s vital.”

Since joining Tourism Australia in 2015, Ronson has worked to build a clear vision for the organisation that’s aspirational, and that everyone knows, believes in and buys into. “That’s very powerful in shaping how people behave and perform on a day-to-day basis,” she says.

Resilience is number one for Holt at Mercer, and he’s invested heavily into formal training around mindfulness and resilience to build a team of people capable of navigating the pressures of the modern market.

“To face into structural, cultural and political headwinds in order to create change requires enormous resilience,” he says. “Marketers come to work each day and invariably are doing new stuff. The ability to maintain focus, energy and passion through that is paramount to success.”

A key way for brands to build adaptability, resilience, a fail-fast mentality and accountability is through leadership, culture and environment.

“Every single person is born with the ability to be flexible, think through their own solutions, be accountable, take risks, and make their own decisions,” Shackell says. “The reason why they don’t is they’ve been taught not to. You can’t expect your people to have fail-fast mentality if people get reprimanded, or worse fired, for sticking their necks out.

“If company leadership plays the ‘blame game’ and looks for scapegoats when things go wrong, they’ll soon find people stepping back instead of up.”

Shackell advocates for an internal way of working where risk taking and failure is actively encouraged, where freedom of thought and taking responsibility for owning solutions is celebrated every day, and where

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Over the course of her career, Sarah Roberts has strived to create brands that consumers and businesses truly want to engage with. To do this, she says it’s vital to create trust with customers and develop long-lasting relationships.

After completing a degree in psychology and beginning her first role in marketing, Roberts quickly realised the power of harnessing these skills to truly understand the customer. Since then, she’s worked with B2B and B2C businesses, including Optus and New Zealand Post, leading major rebrands, product launches and integrated marketing campaigns.

Through all of it, success hinged on the quality of the content and story being told.

“With content becoming even more front and centre in our daily lives, and people consuming it 24/7 on multiple screens, brands must embrace the power it wields in a brand’s experience with a customer,” Roberts says.

THE REMITRoberts’ role was created to raise global awareness and consideration for the SAI business. Reporting into the CMO, she’s responsible for global brand and content strategy and global channels including PR and social development.

“My team is focused on how we can support the business, especially sales teams, with lead nurture and acquisition through targeted and measured content amplification,” she says.

The role didn’t start out directly as a content one. But in building out where the compliance and risk organisation needed to go and the global reach required, it was obvious fostering relationships with customers and prospects at all stages of the buyer journey required strategic content, Robert says.

SKILLS MIX“You need to love learning in order to resonate,” Roberts says. “Whether it is deep diving into who is the customer, or what’s happening in the industry, you have to have an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Even with subject matter experts in the business, you need to know and understand a multitude of topics.”

You also need to be a storyteller. “Customers engage by being taken on a journey, one that helps them understand your brand and taps into an insight that resonates,” Roberts says.

Measurement and tracking is another core job requirement. “Content is only as good as the medium you promote it on,” she says. “It’s critical to understand the measures for success for each channel your content will be amplified through in order to track the impact on brand awareness and credibility.”

CURRENT PRIORITIESRoberts’ main priority is ensuring all teams deliver an authentic brand experience that builds customer trust. Daily tasks include supporting regional marketing teams with campaigns and content, working with her team on new content, communications or development of channels, nurturing a subject matter expert, and working with partners to create content to scale.

“Over the coming year, my key priority is building brand credibility by strengthening our always-on content model with scalable solutions that deliver quality content and ROI, aligned with our marketing automation tool,” she says. “I’ll be focused on increasing the personalisation of content and how it is served at the right time to support sales.”

ALLIESTo do her job, Roberts says communication in and around her function is vital. “Being involved in the upfront business planning process is incredibly important,” she says.

“It’s about working with multiple teams from marketing to product and sales to track key performance measures and setting up feedback loops with all stakeholders to ensure the content is optimised at every opportunity.”

Tapping into pockets of knowledge is key. “Every business is filled with lots of people all with different knowledge, customer and industry insights,” Roberts adds.

“A large part of my role is connecting my content marketing team with our subject matter experts to build credible, unique and thought provoking content.”

SARAH ROBERTS Global Head

Brand & Content, SAI Global

THE CONTENT STRATEGIST

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“ MARKETING 3.0 IS ULTIMATELY ABOUT COPING WITH CONSTANT CHANGE.”

leadership demonstrates a belief in teams by empowering them to try new things. “This is a scenario where great work is actively and openly appreciated and failure is seen as the best opportunity for learning,” she says.

According to Holt, large organisations have too often beaten down their marketing organisations to submission.

“My team gets told the day they join, and every day thereafter, that they are the business drivers, no one else will drive the change through the enterprise,” he says. “The expectation is they think and conduct themselves as business drivers every day. That requires a willingness to take risk, and that creates an obligation for me to create a safe environment for them to take those risks.

“There’s never a straight path through CX or the organisation for this. Agility and lateral thinking are things I really value.”

Ronson offers a wider checklist for empowerment:

• Start with basic human interactions• Listen and make sure people can have

a voice• Empower them to make decisions and

recommendations• Have a clear set of corporate values that

are aspirational• Build your values from the bottom up

and collaboratively so teams feel a sense of ownership

• Make sure leaders are demonstrating and rewarding these values

• Remove hierarchy and avoid ‘command-and-control’ structures.

ENCOURAGE COLLABORATIONBuilding skills within the marketing function isn’t the only answer to filling the skills gap. Often, someone who’s not a marketer can give you fresh perspective or a different way to look at a problem, Ronson says.

“When I’ve looked at areas where I think we could have done something better, it’s where we haven’t collaborated as extensively or the team hasn’t collaborated as extensively across the organisation,” she says.

Holt, however, increasingly believes CX needs to come under someone with terminal accountability for the customer, even as he recognises collaboration is more important than ever.

“The jury is out for me on whether cross-functional will ever be truly effective to produce great CX, particularly in complex environments and business models,” he says. “It’s getting harder to achieve the outcomes.

“Even our CIO recognised the fact he was an impediment to CX and handed over 30 people my CX leader and we have a customer platforms team flourishing now.”

PRACTICE AGILEAt a more practical level, one operational methodology helping organisations pivot more quickly to customer needs has been Agile. Born in the software development world, Agile is about solution solving in short sprints and via self-organising, cross-functional teams.

It’s proving to be a vital practice in helping marketing functions gain the agility and adaptability they need to pivot in the face of changing customer needs and technology innovation.

“Any successful marketing team works very collaboratively with the broader organisation,” Ronson says. “With the evolution of agile working teams, there are a lot of opportunities for people to work on different projects and campaigns.”

At ANZ, the need to be always-on has seen test-and-learn move away from being a line item to a continuous thread in market optimisation approach and culture, Bendall says. In addition, ‘disruption live’ has been embedded into the daily team rhythm, encouraging staff as well as agency partners to bring forward insights that can be acted on immediately.

Agile has also proven to be a great way of keeping staff motivated, Tourism Australia’s head of digital, John Mackenney, says.

“As part of our Agile development approach, we make sure we have an ‘announceable’ in every sprint, such as a new piece of functionality for the consumer, or efficiency for people internally,” he explains. “What we’re trying to is create momentum and progress, and get people excited. Many work in an agile way, but it’s as much about how you create momentum in that environment. That helps build momentum and changes the culture to be more iterative.”

CONCLUSION: A CULTURE OF CHANGE However you feel about the capabilities marketing leaders are now striving to harness across their teams, what is clear is that most are tasked with leading a culture that’s adaptable. Marketing 3.0 is ultimately about coping with constant change.

“How to create the infrastructure and environment for innovation and change marks a huge difference in the role of marketing leader from five or 10 years ago,” The CMO Club’s Krainik says. “For many, it’s about creating that ecosystem, which is big piece of their success.

“You need people that think that way [agile], and who are rewarded and incentivised that way. So if those things change in social, in future for instance, it’s not just about what you know today, you’re positioned to bring in those new resources and approaches.”

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Shawn Goodin built his career in technology, but it wasn’t what he set out to do. He started with a Bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology.

“I studied cognitive science in search for understanding the human condition, then realised I needed a job,” he says. “One of the first jobs I got out of college was at UCLA, where I started building Web pages for different departments. I then went back to school to learn graphic design, which led me to a Master’s degree in information technology.”

Goodin worked as a Web developer at startups, then SC Johnson (A Family Company). From there, he spent five years on corporate IT systems for HR and product, roles that allowed him to bring his anthropology and tech passions together. He wound up supporting marketing systems before landing a position as head of digital marketing at Northwestern Mutual.

It was when he got a call from direct competitor, Clorox, asking him to become its head of marketing technology that he got to lead marketing transformation. A year ago, he become marketing CTO leading JPMorgan Chase’s customer experience transformation.

THE REMITMarketing has become heavily dependent on technology and data processing, Goodin says. “Through the growing pains of stretching marketers into technologists, there comes a time to create a chief marketing technology role to give both the CMO and CIO confidence their needs are being met,” he says.

Goodin’s role sits in IT with a dotted line reporting structure to the CMO. He describes his remit as including ownership of the overall marketing stack architecture and alignment of this stack across sales and servicing, marketing roadmap planning and execution.

“There’s also marketing stack application development resource and budget planning,” he explains.

SKILLS MIXWhile he professes to some bias, Goodin thinks starting as a front-end software developer and user experience lead have proven invaluable skills as a CMTO.

“This has always helped me to put the user or in this case the customer at the centre,” he says. “Understanding how to create great customer experiences that drive lifetime value to the organisation is priceless.

“Having been in both marketing and IT also gives me perspective and the ability to influence and build trust across the functions that touch the customer, such as sales, marketing and servicing.”

Negotiation skills and a high level of emotional intelligence are also key attributes in this role, Goodin says. And to keep up with the fast-paced nature of marketing technology, he leads tech teams that use Agile development methodologies like scrum, to achieve iteration and continuous improvement.

FUELLING COLLABORATIONGoodin’s key allies include heads of channel marketing, primarily digital channels and marketing operations. He also recommends marketing technologists need connections in the cyber and controls teams, while finance is always key.

CURRENT PRIORITIES While unable to detail too much about the day-to-day priorities, Goodin says JPMorgan’s strategic focus is around centralising customer level data, building omnichannel campaign management systems and focusing on applications of artificial intelligence, which he sees as a game-changing to the way decisions are made around customer data and engagement.

“This is all about creating best-in-class customer experiences,”

THE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIST

SHAWN GOODINMarketing Chief Technology Officer,

JPMorgan Chase (US)

As if all this change wasn’t enough, marketers are about to experience a lot more disruption with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced machine learning. Many are predicting further jobs shake-up within the

marketing function, with more tasks automated and humans replaced by machines.

In May 2017, Google-owned algorithm, AlphaGo, defeated the world’s top player in the ancient Chinese game Go, sweeping a three-game series and showcasing a new level of intelligent machines. In fact, a new study by Oxford University’s Future of Human Institute, Yale University and AI Impacts, found 50 per cent of 352 machine learning experts expect AI to become superior in all human tasks in less than 50 years.

Tourism Australia’s John Mackenney takes a positive view of AI’s growing presence in marketing. The short-term opportunity is around image recognition and improving digital asset management. “We lose a lot of time tagging up assets,” he says. “There are huge efficiencies to be gained from using AI to tag images, as well as what images perform better.

“This will change jobs, and we will need to change the roles of the people who do that. But I’d argue those people largely doing that stuff would see this as the part of the role they hate. They’d prefer to be creating great digital executions rather than have to upload metadata.”

Secondly, AI provides a massive opportunity to solve a business problem around trip planning and automating itineraries for travellers, Mackenney says. “Australia is a big, complex place, particularly for the long-haul traveller who doesn’t understand much more than we have a harbour, bridge, rock and a reef,” he says.

THE FUTURE: AI IN MARKETING

“What if we know I’m coming to Australia for 10 days, with family, that I like beaches and I want a relaxing holiday. The ability for AI to generate an itinerary using that information helps us solve that problem of how to do Australia well. That’s a game-changer for our industry.”

JPMorgan Chase marketing chief technology officer, Shawn Goodin, believes AI is going to change everything, but we’ve still a long way to go.

“We will see decision engines that optimise customer experience across channels and products. The customer journey will move from manual to automated [business rules] to predictive but will always be some blend of all three,” he predicts. “This will free marketers up to dig deeper into the customer journey and deepen relationships, rather than replace jobs.”

IDC principal analyst, Gerry Murray, is convinced AI will change the marketing skills mix. He outlines a new ‘cognitive marketing’ team, incorporating data scientist (for data representation, featurisation and model building); data-driven marketer (business objectives, data cultivation, governance); business analyst (project management, business assumptions, communications); and marketing technologist (infrastructure management, system integration and IT liaison).

In five years’ time, CX leaders could well be sitting there as team of one, clicking and dragging experiences on their desktop, Mercer’s Cambell Holt says. But that then becomes table stakes.

“I don’t see a point where we reach the pinnacle of what technology will deliver. Everyone is going to continue to be searching for competitive differentiation,” he says. “That means there is always going to be someone seeking out ways to deliver technology-based solutions that will give people the edge. I can’t picture a future where you have AI able to make decisions in that context.”

Holt also doesn’t think AI will profoundly change customer needs. “It’ll probably just create new consumer needs,” he says. “I think higher order marketing skills, knowledge of the business, strategic thinking and proximity to customer will always trump automation.”

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