club catalyst. Partners in trade

Personalisation is the most influential factor in determining value for money today. Consumers desire personalised products and services and marketers state that personalisation is critical to current and future success.

For today’s customers, a personalised, unique experience is essential, rendering the task of logistics, the stock keeping unit (SKU) and stock management increasingly complex. For example, Tropicana has increased its selection from six in 2004 to more than 20 today, with plans to increase to 30 by the end of the decade. The average US supermarket carries 40,000 product SKUs, a five-fold increase since 1975. BMW and Audi have increased their number of models by 83 per cent and 113 per cent over the last decade; today BMW already customises around 80 per cent of its cars in Europe and 30 per cent in the US.

Starbucks has a special secret menu which is a rage amongst youngsters. The knowledge of this secret menu, passed on by word of mouth, has led to immense social media discussion and posts and contributes to the individualistic tastes of young customers. All these developments are a response to the demand for variety and products which are unique to their purchasers, creating complexity at all stages of the production process — from design to fulfilment.

Closer home, IndusInd Bank offers ‘My Account My Number’ — a first-of-its-kind banking feature in India that gives users the freedom, flexibility and convenience to select the account number of their choice. Asian Paints emerged as an early brand to offer personalised colour consultancy service for an individualised painting experience.

Technology now owns customer experience as much as marketing.

None of these offerings would have been possible without a new type of relationship between the companies’ CMO and CIO functions. Traditionally the latter was regarded as an internal supplier to the former — marketing created the demand, the technology team endeavoured to fulfil it. Mass personalisation and the opportunities created by the availability of big data have transformed this relationship into a genuine partnership, and one which is starting to drive the bottom line.

According to Accenture’s latest annual survey, 69 per cent of CMOs say that they need to align and interact better with their technology counterparts on their strategic priorities (compared with just 56 per cent in 2012). Of CIOs surveyed, 83 per cent revealed a need to align and interact better with marketing (77 per cent for 2012). Once again, the driver for this is not merely internal integration, it is the bottom line. Close collaboration between marketing and technology teams makes business sense.

Successful customer engagement and fulfilment thus includes finding ways to allow consumers to customise products to conform to their needs and personal preferences. Both technology and marketing functions are now ‘customer-facing,’ both can directly impact customer experience, loyalty and — in competitive sectors where customers can switch suppliers with impunity, at zero cost — revenues. Whether or not digital (social) marketing ultimately will outstrip analogue (traditional) marketing spend as a result is open to question. Gartner estimates that this point will be reached by 2017, but a deeper collaboration between the roles and objectives is now irreversible.

Big data — and the ability to identify and respond to customer insights — is the real catalyst for drawing these two departments together. It is particularly compelling for challengers operating in highly competitive markets and Tata Docomo is no exception.

We draw insights and preferences from all aspects of our customers’ behaviour against hundreds of different criteria —ranging from handset type and data usage to recharge preferences and roaming activation. We then translate this into a personalised experience, not merely covering the subscription package itself but all aspects of engagement — from tailored offers to individualised customer support. Considering our scale covering millions of subscribers, a solid relationship between the CMO and the CIO is right at the heart of it.

Millennial consumers are driving the trend towards personalised products and experiences, but for tomorrow’s ‘post millennial’ customers this will just be a starting point for consideration. Unless it’s unique, they will immediately look elsewhere.

This environment requires technologists to become more aware of consumer trends and tastes and how they can be fulfilled. It also demands that marketers consider the technical and infrastructure implications of their campaigns. Today, both departments are well and truly customer-facing and driving customer experience; for this reason, the best CMO-CIO relationships are no longer customer/supplier-based but genuine partnerships.