As marketers worldwide attempt to reach a digitally empowered and connected consumer,technology body Nasscom has said the Indian IT sector can potentially tap into a market which can rival the spends in traditional IT outsourcing areas like systems and applications support, which it dominates as an outsourced service provider.
Releasing a new research report on the opportunities in the marketing space for IT service providers, Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar said, “Digital technologies are creating disruption in areas beyond those under the purview of the CIO. New opportunities are opening up, opportunities that demand closer coordination with new stakeholders in businesses and modify their services to address new kinds of needs.”
The report, brought out jointly with digital advertising major Sapient and researched by Bangalore-based IT consultancy Offshore Insights, estimated that the addressable market for Indian IT companies can be as much as $ 37 billion by 2020.
To actualise this though, “Technology players must review and streamline their services and offer customized solutions for modern business to make the most of the new opportunity,” Chandrashekhar said.
The report, titled ‘Marketing, Disrupted: Opportunities for the Indian technology industry’, said the spend on digital marketing is expected to grow from current 8 per cent to at least 35 per cent of the totalmarketing spends of the world’s top 2000 companies by 2020.
“The role of the CMO today extends beyond the traditional remit of the function. Marketers are embracing new technologies like big data analytics, social media and mobility for customer engagement and brand communication. The result is that today the CMO is looking to spend far more on technology than ever before,” said Sudhin Apte of Offshore Insights.
The report said the industry, in order to seize this opportunity, has to deliver value to a new stakeholder – the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Marketers are actively participating in decision making related to technology and 34 per cent of the marketers surveyed cited new tools/technology investmentas one of the key concern areas, the report added.
Outlining some of the key challenges in achieving this, Rajdeep Endow, managing director, Sapient, India, said Indian IT firms need to re-engineer the way they look at the market, and develop design capability.
“The brand is the customer experience,” Endow said, adding that in order to deliver value to CMOs, who are themselves grappling with a rapidly changing marketplace and consumer, a “culture of speed” was essential.