Solving all marketing problems: The Chief Marketing Technologist

Sound-bite:
Do we need such a being; surely it is every marketer’s raison d’être?

have long been an advocate that marketers need to have a distinct competence in understanding consumer behavior.

Rather than having a CMT rather ensure marketers acquire the knowledge required to harness the rich bounty of information becoming available

The Harvard Business Review of July/August 2014 contains an illuminating article on the advent of the Chief Marketing Technologist.

The article suggests that marketing is now becoming one of the most technology reliant of all business functions and there is a fundamental trend toward institutionalizing that trend with the appointment of chief technology officers; who the reader is told, sets the marketing technology strategy and advocates more ‘Agile’ management of the function to create and deliver strategic competitive advantage.

The article’s text is in-undated with adjectives and superlatives leaving the reader in no doubt that this structural innovation, if managed properly, will create value from never-ending technological disruption.

I must say after reading the article, I was left with a sense of foreboding; another failed marketing initiative, another in the long line of innovations marketers bring to the corporate table.

As explained in a previous article, I suspect Marketers in the quest to prove their relevance, go further and further away from what they should be doing; definitively understanding consumer decision making processes. An understanding which, I believe has been drastically removed from marketing and corporate conversation.

It seems to me that technology can create space, gaps, products and services, none of which however, are guaranteed any form of successful execution unless they fundamentally are embedded in addressing consumer needs whether they are know or unknown.

I would have thought that the ‘chief consumer behaviorist’ has far more value in any corporation; alas, I suspect, most senior executives think that either all marketers are experts in consumer decision-making or that they themselves are.

Of course they are incorrect on both scores.

I would suggest that many, if not most marketers have little knowledge of consumer decision-making; relying instead on what they leant at university and supplemented with what they now read; such empirically well founded articles in the latest AD-Mag, industry reviews and research studies that they briefed-in and made observations on.

I was most fortunate, that at the time /I read the HBR article I also read ‘Designing for Behavior Change’ by Stephen Wendell (Head Researcher at Hello Wallet). What struck me was the contrast between the two (admittedly the one was a book) where Hello Wallet, a technologically founded service, was derived from not by having a Chief Marketing Technologist but a ‘_Principal Scientist_’ who focuses on consumer behavior showing perhaps the importance the technology company places on its functions, but importantly what drives the disruption.

There was something (perhaps fallacious?) that linked these two pieces – the process referred to as being Agile. But of course this is as far as it goes.

Interestingly, Stephen Wendel, outlines a process in which the practitioner is mandated to define, in great detail, the customer’s decision making process and behaviors. As one can imagine this is a difficult undertaking, requiring an in-depth understanding not only of the category, but circumstances and the social condition.

The process on paper seems simple enough and I thought I would map such a process in a product/market which I am somewhat familiar (Tourism). However, simple it was, simplistic it was not; by rigorously re-reading the text and working through many examples, the path became somewhat clearer but still probably not in a form that was practical; this took additional time.

Others have also been thinking the same; as evidenced in the McKinsey & Company article ‘ Digitizing the consumer decision journey, published in June 2014. The telling section of this paper speaks to the requirement to obtain a ‘360-degree view of the customer and their environment and decision-making influences’.

This surely is step 1; everything then emanates from that; no technology officer can achieve anything unless his or her organization and his or her marketers understand consumer decision making.