Three seminal forces are driving the adoption of MarTech across organisations: The exponential growth of technology, the use of social platforms and mobile devices by consumers, and increased competition brought about by the arrival of start-ups that are trying to usurp established players across industries.

While technology adoption is limited by the ambition of the organisation and the size of its IT budget, the greatest challenge in becoming a fully tech-enabled organisation lies in finding ways to break down organisational silos and in getting people to understand the value of technology adoption.

At Hansa Cequity, we have seen that when companies adopt new MarTech platforms, specially social media platforms, it speeds up the collapse of inter-departmental silos and when employees are given the freedom to be real people, the adoption rates pick up.

A retailer’s case When a retailer sets up a Twitter account, for instance, it is knowingly or unknowingly setting itself up for a deep organisational change. The Twitter account soon becomes not just a way for the company to broadcast marketing messages, but a way for millions of customers to reach out and connect directly with it. It started off as a tool for being used by the marketing department to receive customer service, HR, merchandising and other requests from customers. And if the retailer needs to meaningfully respond to these requests from customers, then the marketing department will need to stop acting in a silo and share its services within the different departments of the organisation.

The new organisation understands that customers today are more informed than they ever were. They have access to vast knowledge networks powered by the internet and are able to easily connect with billions of other customers, start conversations and share their know-how.

To operate in this environment, companies need to reinvent the way they do business. Forward-thinking companies have moved away from talking about market shares and profits to a purpose-driven way of operating. Facebook, for instance, is built on the purpose of giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. AirBnB, on the other hand, has a mission statement that wants to help create a world where you can belong anywhere. GE recently re-framed its mission statement that moved away from a self-aggrandising ‘we bring good things to life’ to a more inclusive purpose, to build, move, power and cure the world. The new, purpose-driven way of operating a business means not only looking at the world at large or the market opportunity specifically, but also about looking inwards. It’s about building belief systems among employees and empowering them to change their mindset and behaviour.

Think like a start-up Traditional IT projects asked people to wait until the full implementation is completed. New-age digital and MarTech solutions mandate that the tool is tested and many proofs of concept (PoCs) are done, even while the full implementation is still in progress. For marketing and IT departments, this goes against the way they have operated. Historically, marketing has never rolled out campaigns that were not fully baked or thought through, while IT teams had their own processes and systems to follow before a tool moves from staging to launch. Thinking like a start-up means not having the time to build a system fully and then roll it out. Instead, it’s starting with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then testing, trying, running and improving being one way of looking at this.

Digital is the new mass media True digitisation means that an organisation moves from being product- and market-share focused to becoming one that is customer-obsessed. The number of technology-enabled customers now rival those who do not have access to mobile, social or the internet.

Engaging with and being available for millions and sometimes billions of people means that organisations have to re-organise themselves in ways they have never done before. From bringing in new tools and platforms for training and realigning its employees, to creating new structures that are agile enough to understand customer needs and create for it on-the-fly is how winners of the future will be found. Is your organisation ready for it?

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