Note: This is a guest post I contributed to the Flite blog (http://blog.flite.com/home/2012/9/19/the-waning-days-of-the-vp-of-marketing-guest-post-by-lars-le.html) and
reposted here.
Technology and obsolescence have always done a ruthless dance with each other. That’s why the best technology watchers know that it is as important to forecast when trends will die as it is to predict how long they will flourish. If you happen to maintain an obsolescence calendar, then you should add a particular person to it: the VP of Marketing.
That’s right, start clearing out that corner office. The
traditional VP of Marketing belongs to a dying breed, and technology is driving
this.
With urgency, companies are changing the way they engage with
their customers. Engagement is more social, and increasingly happens in
real-time. A recent study from
Chadwick, Martin Bailey, involving 1,433 consumers, showed that 50% of them are
more likely to make a purchase after viewing tweets from a company. Meanwhile, comScore reports that
82% of global Internet users use some form of social network.
Deeper dives into bigger data are driving engagement strategies,
and titles are toppling. Vamoose goes the VP of Marketing, and in come the VP
of Social Media, the VP of Data and Analytics and a new kind of CMO.
The pace of interaction that companies have with their customers
has grown exponentially in the past several years. Meanwhile, the fluency
requirements for effective marketers bear little resemblance to the tapes that
play in the head of the traditional VP of Marketing. The companies that
we believe in used to look for people who played those tapes. Now they don’t.
Mail-based marketing is going through an electronic renaissance.
Not only has paper-based collateral diminished, but email collateral is driven
by ever more sophisticated platforms. Capable of producing very customized
email newsletters, spitting out precise analytics, and steering readers to
embedded video content, campaign management tools from companies such as eDialog and Yesmail require
experts to optimize their capabilities.
Meanwhile, video is driving a siege on the written word, with
epic repercussions for marketers. The new leaders will be fluent with today’s
affordable, approachable and sophisticated video platforms, applications and
tools. They will produce persuasive, customer-facing online video content
themselves, work with business partners on video-based narratives and use
platforms such as VideoGenie to tap into customers’
passions through user-generated videos.
The new leaders will be fluent with engagement marketing
platforms such as Marketo, and will run campaigns that
change with real-time events, as handled by tools such as Flite (Disclosure: Hummer Winblad is a
venture partner of Marketo and Flite.) These leaders will
empower their advocates through Influitive. They will be
buyers of big data analytics and make data-driven decisions in unprecedented
ways.
My prediction is that the average age of the head of marketing
in organizations will drop by a decade or two, very quickly. It’s not enough to
know that the new platforms exist; it’s about having experience with them in
your DNA. The new marketing leaders will have grown up on the new, social
platforms.
In large and small organizations, they’re already arriving.
