“Real-time data will be a critical enabler for CMOs to deliver their broadened remit”

Adgully is back with a new edition of its annual feature – TRENDING NOW – where we present the strategies and views of a cross-section of industry leaders as they go about reclaiming lost time and market opportunities and build for a stronger future, armed with the lessons of the pandemic period.

Over the next few weeks, Trending Now will bring insights from industry leaders on how their organisations are gearing up to seize the opportunities in 2022, break through the Covid disruptions and find growth and remain resilient.

In conversation with Adgully, Sarika Naik, Chief Marketing Officer & Chairperson, Diversity – India, Capgemini, speaks about the key marketing trends expected in 2022, as well as the challenges and opportunities in the year ahead.

What are the trends that you expect to dominate in your sector?

The marketing landscape has gone through a transformation with the core principles of marketing remaining unchanged. Some trends that we will witness in marketing in the coming years are:

Data driven marketing

In order to truly understand how customers interact with brands and companies and know when and where to engage with them, real-time data will be a critical enabler for CMOs to deliver their broadened remit. Data driven marketing will enable effective decision-making, better business outcomes, and the ability to perform real-time marketing that consumers increasingly expect.

Client obsession

Marketers will focus their energies towards building a client centric approach when it comes to building marketing strategies. This goes beyond just selling a product and a service, the goal is to provide quality customer/ client experience. Gaining deeper understanding of consumers and trends and targeting consumers with personalized and relevant offers and services will be key in the coming years for a successful marketing campaign.

Sales and marketing: two sides of the same coin

To improve business performance, it is crucial for sales and marketing to not only align but be integrated. The coming years we will see more synergies between sales strategy and marketing strategies which will improve ROI.

It’s all about AI

Marketers will increasingly leverage AI to offer personalized customer experiences at scale and to curate customer engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. AI will particularly be a game changer for digital marketing with chatbots, virtual assistants to content generation and user experience enhancement.

Purpose driven marketing

As the marketing landscape gets more cluttered, brands will have to strive more to align their brand with wider mission and purpose – it will be authenticity at the forefront of the brand purpose that will be the key lever for the brand to communicate holistically and endear itself to end consumer.

What are the challenges and new opportunities that you see emerging in the year ahead?

Over the past few years, organisations have upped the ante on use of automation in marketing. However, there is a skill gap for technical talent in marketing. This challenge will be an opportunity to upskill and reskill. Going forward we will see a more integrated marketer where every marketer will need to be a technology marketer. There is a need for marketers to catch up on many important technical and digital-marketing skills. In the coming years we will witness a new breed of marketers who will possess a unique combination of technical, analytical and creative expertise. The marketers of the future will go beyond the traditional remit of brand-building to become more holistic by being responsible for a wide range of activities including data and technology, business strategy, business growth, and customer experience.

In the coming years we will see organisations invest in customer experience tools to strengthen digital footprint and increase their ROI. Marketers will need to reimagine client engagement by using online as well as offline methods for a creative and immersive experience.

Data-driven marketing is the future. Data mastery, extracting meaningful insights from deep data analysis to shape marketing decisions and customer activation will be key for business growth. AI and ML will become a game changer for marketers in the coming years, by making customer interaction more personalized and engaging. MarTech, enabled by AI and ML, will be a key element in the future of business.

How is this year's turnout to be in this sector as compared to the last two years? How strong the recovery will be, what are the changes that have happened in this sector in the last two years? How strong will this sector’s growth be compared to the last two years as well as the pre-Covid period?

CEOs across the world and business sectors are closely aligning marketing to business priorities and CMOs are now been given targets set and measured directly to business goals. Today marketing has evolved and become more personalized, relevant, contextual, and fast. This diversity in marketing now requires CMOs to increasingly lead interdisciplinary teams consisting of customer service, sales, and PR as well as partners from MarTech and data. This has been further compounded by the fact that consumer behaviour both across B2B as well as B2C has become and further intensified due to pandemic and there is more thrust on data driven marketing. Going forward, we will see brands take a unified view of the client journey that ties in with customer experience.

More than ever before today marketing is more about putting customer first by deeply understanding customers’ interaction with brand including when and how they interact with brand as well as when and where to start the conversation with a targeted outcome of creating a brand differentiator at the outset. As the marketing outcomes – for example sales results become more measurable, CMOs will be keen to have direct conversation with the creative teams to drive more measurable outcomes. Another trend that will be more relevant in future is that marketing will become more connected to business as a whole and include overall organisation, brand and MarTech that will form the bedrock of the marketing in an organization and will be unified by data to enable business growth.