Transcript
of a discussion on how social media and business networks
have taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and
companies.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to
BriefingsDirect.
Our next innovation thought leadership discussion
focuses on building a modern marketing organization. Marketing today is a
different game. Today’s buyers are more connected and informed than
ever, and that’s creating major upheaval in the way companies promote
their brands.
Social media and
business networks have
taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and
companies -- and savvy businesses are embracing these new channels and
technologies both to increase their brand awareness and to drive sales.
We’re
here with two experts to talk about these changes and how they
are shaping the future of marketing. To learn more, please join me in welcoming
Alicia Tillman, Chief Marketing Officer at SAP Ariba. Welcome, Alicia.
Alicia Tillman: Thank you so much, Dana, very happy to be here.
Gardner: We are also here with
Pete Krainik, Founder and CEO of
The CMO Club. Welcome, Pete.
Pete Krainik: Thanks, Dana and Alicia, good to reconnect again.
Tillman: Yes, of course, you, too.
Gardner:
Let’s begin our conversation at a fairly high level. What are the
trends, the competitive pressures, and the technology changes that are
prompting companies to have to seek new and better ways to market
themselves, Alicia?
Tillman: There are two
things, Dana. First, when we think about trends or even new ways to
market in particular, we're faced with the fact that
social media, and networks have taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and companies.
On one hand, there’s
no shortage of information, and
that’s a good thing. But on the other hand, it’s really causing
companies to get out ahead of that as quickly as possible, because the
reality is that today’s buyers aren't struggling to find information.
And so many buying decisions are made about companies and products
before any interaction with a member of the sales team.
Companies
are recognizing that all of the channels in the social media space that
companies are going after to find information is key. Making sure that
marketers are driving information in a consistent manner across these
channels will aid in feeling as though your company’s value proposition
and brand are being embraced and accepted in the ways that you want them
to.
My second point is in terms of the competitive
pressure. All companies are mostly trying to compete on a product, a
piece of technology, in a lot of ways, and oftentimes your competitors
are saying they already have or are about to innovate on the same thing.
So companies need to force themselves to innovate beyond products.
There are a lot of opportunities, in particular, thinking about how you
differentiate on things such as thought leadership or standing for a
particular cause.
How do you take a product and how do
you use it to benefit the world in terms of driving higher good in some
way? So between social media and networks, embracing those channels and
then separately thinking about how you differentiate beyond just the
basics of products are certainly the opportunities that companies are
faced with today.
Social media
Gardner:
Pete, with social media, we're more exposed than ever. People can point
at whatever they see about brands or companies. How is this trend
shaping the new marketing and competition?
Krainik:
I think Alicia is spot-on. I host dinners with
chief marketing officers (CMOs), and I'm
chatting behind doors on these issues around the new competitive
landscape. If you look at the pressures faced by CMOs, you still have
the same process or the same thought -- I need to sell more products, I
need to differentiate myself, I need to get leads, I need to close, I
need to build the brand. Those things and concepts haven’t changed, but
you have a whole new wave of extremely agile competitors now, like
Uber, like
Airbnb.
How is the
cloud
impacting that? You have the new players that you never had to deal
with before. You have new media channels, new influencers. In the past,
media mostly meant working on press releases. But the whole world has
changed. You talked about it, and Alicia again talked about social.
And
then, this whole issue of speed of change and how to keep up with it is
interesting. How do I, as an organization, keep up with all the
changes?
Marketing is completely different than it was five
or 10 years ago. There are just too many choices, too much noise, too
much
outbound. CMOs are getting hundreds of emails a day from someone
selling some product and they're not even looking at it. Those kinds of
pressures are building, as Alicia said, and taking the competition to
the next level. Those things are top of mind right now for CMOs.
Gardner:
Alicia, in this environment of disruption, of fast-paced change, of so
much noise and information, you recently completed a significant update
of the Ariba brand, and you’ve launched a
new name and logo. Why did you
do that at this time and how did you go about that differently than you
would have done 5 or 10 years ago?
Tillman:
Ariba was
founded some 18 years ago, and at the time, the company had set out
on a mission to build a single solution to help companies manage their
spend. If we reflect on the past 18 years, you see all the ways in which
our business has evolved, in which buyer needs and the economies have
evolved, and how our business has worked to evolve and be ahead of that.
Today, Ariba is the world’s largest marketplace for all
business-to-business (B2B) transactions.
We
have two million companies and
$1 trillion in commerce that run through
the
Ariba Network. When we think about some of the significant change
that has happened notably in the past four years, number one, we were
acquired by SAP. SAP is a global leader in enterprise application
software. It has an incredible brand, and is an incredibly sound and
operationally and financially stable company known throughout the world.
It’s really important to us to take that brand reputation into our
identities.
First, we've added the SAP name to our
brands, now calling ourselves SAP Ariba. And secondly, the logo, the
mark, or the bug as some people like to call it, that fits alongside the
company name is equally important. The visual representation of our
brand needs to well support the business we're in and the value
proposition we offer.
Pete said it really well. When we
think about the marketplace that we're in today, there are new
competitors, new influencers, and so many choices that we have an
obligation as marketers to help buyers clear through the clutter,
understand where the differentiation exists within companies, and
associate themselves with a company that is most relevant to their
needs.
Showcasing customers
So,
we evolved our logo and made it into a mark that really showcases our
customers, which are both buyers and sellers. Within our logo there's a
connection there that’s reflected to support how Ariba brings those two
buying populations together.
In addition to that, we've
worked to adapt a new tone in our messaging. Messaging got simple and
clear to piece point about all the choices that exist. You’ve got to
focus on a simple and clear message, and one that is very understood and
very relevant for your customers.
Gardner: Pete
touched on this issue of so much information available, and research
confirms that consumers are looking at multiple channels when they make a
purchase. They have much more of an ability to do research and to get
social commentary. I myself find, in my own buying, that I'm ready to
push the button to buy something, but then I'll glance at the comments
or some of the recommendations, and actually back away. So this is
really a big deal.
So how do we, as marketers, think
about different ways to accommodate these new behaviors by buyers, and
how do we then provide information to them as sellers to help them along
the way?
Krainik: One thing some of the top
CMOs or top brands are doing is moving away from a campaign-focus to
360-degree coverage. I was a CMO before I started The CMO Club, and the
profession has moved beyond kind of the "blah, blah, blah" to true
focus. There’s the ability to make sure that the content is relevant,
that the stories are there, that you’ve identified the advocates, and
people underestimate the value of that.
Everybody is driven by mobile now. It's truly a mobile workforce. We're always doing everything on mobile.
You
talked a minute ago about how you check on social media or with people
you know or respect, and they say, "This product is good, this product
isn’t, or I had a great experience here." How do you spend the time
making sure you know who those advocates are, who the influencers are,
how to engage employees, and really focusing on getting to that. It’s
such an important thing that I think people don’t think about as much.
Another piece that there’s not enough focus on: Everybody is driven by
mobile
now. It's truly a mobile workforce. We're always doing everything on
mobile. So making sure when we talk about
multichannel and we talk about
going where the customers are, we need to be sure it’s in the format
they want as well. We want them saying that we have this great website,
this great digital space. If you’re not going to mobile, then you’re
missing the boat.
Gardner: Alicia, anything to offer on ways marketers need to do things differently to accommodate these new buyer behaviors?
Tillman:
I think a lot about the power of consistency and how marketers need to
have their finger on the pulse of the channels that their customers are
getting information from. Pete’s organization, The CMO Club, hosted a
fantastic
CMO roundtable a couple of weeks ago where the topic was how
to stay ahead of the digital transformation, and how marketers are
embracing digital transformation.
One of the questions
was how much of our budget is dedicated to a digital platform to support
our marketing? Certainly, the percentages were quite high, but we also
found that there is still budget being invested in your more traditional
channels, including things like print and events. Events in particular,
because of the face-to-face communication that occurs and how business
is still done over a handshake, and we can’t underestimate that.
Strong balance
Striking
a strong balance between your
digital marketing channels as well as
your traditional marketing channels is key. Keeping the message
consistent in how we market between those channels is also quite key,
and then understanding the various buyer personas that you speak with.
If you’re creating a digital campaign for the CIO audience, the messages
are going to be different from how you would market to a chief financial officer (CFO) audience.
As
an example, and it’s really important, back to an earlier point I made
around relevancy, you’ve got to stay consistent, but you also have to
make sure you’re being relevant, and then taking into account a strong
balance between the new digital channels that exists, but also not
underestimating the power that still remains with some of our more
traditional channels.
Krainik: Alicia, I think
you're spot-on. I loved the comment about staying true and consistency,
and you’ve demonstrated that with what you’ve done. I know you talked
about what we actually see in the market. It’s the importance of
creating the brand story and being consistent to that story.
It’s
more important now than ever, because then you can get your employees,
your advocates, and all your stakeholders supporting that brand story,
regardless of the channel. Brand consistency is more important now than
the actual advertising campaigns. You’ve done a great job and I think
you're spot-on with that. It makes the multichannel execution easier, if
you’ve got that nailed, as opposed to chasing it campaign to campaign.
Brand consistency is more important now than the actual advertising campaigns.
Tillman: Yeah, absolutely.
Gardner:
Well, Alicia, at this point, where we have these challenges, we're also
facing some great new tools in the marketplace, ways to get more
information, get customization, use big data, and leverage cloud models
to extend our reach, but also to gather more information in better ways.
Tell me what you think some of the strong tools are, and I am going to
imagine that the
SAP Hybris marketing suite is among them.
Tillman:
I'd start by ensuring that you have a strong
marketing automation platform. It's becoming commonplace in most marketing organizations,
large or small, for the past five years or so and it’s certainly growing
in size in terms of marketing organizations that are raising the
technology.
Essentially, this technology allows you to
automate the lead generation process to help you manage campaigns in an
automated way, help you nurture the leads that are coming through your
demand waterfall in an automated way. The leads that you’re handing off
to sales are more qualified than they ever had been before.
You
have such an extreme ability to nurture these leads using digital
campaigns in these automated ways. That’s my first recommendation: you
need to pursue marketing automation technology.
The
other thing that exists within these technologies is not just an ability
to help you manage your campaigns and manage the nurture strategies
within them, but it’s also the data that these technologies provide.
As you integrate them with your company's sales
customer-relationship-management (CRM)
system, it gives you really unprecedented abilities to show where the
demand is being created, and how you can most effectively demonstrate
the support of marketing to the ultimate growth of the pipeline, and
then of course, to the growth of the business.
Focus on measurement
So
it is a must-have that you focus on that in particular. That’s the
leading place that I would start. Then, there's all of that getting into
the analytics. Every marketer should always be focused on measurement.
Measurement is the sole thing that has enabled me to grow my team,
whether that be headcount or investment.
When you're
not sitting across the table from your CEO or my president talking in
terms of numbers and data that are showing the true impact as
marketing’s existence on the companies thought of mind, you’re
essentially not having a conversation, and you will not have an ability
to grow your team. So I highly advise that you look at strong marketing
automation and data and analytical structure to enable you to help
support your programs.
Gardner: What’s super
powerful these days about the data is that we're not only gaining a
360-degree view of customers, but we're able to react in near real time,
and then target them with precise customization. How are those tools
being used, from your vantage point, that sort of feedback loop and an
instant ability to know what a customer is doing, learn inference,
compare that to other datasets and then offer something back to them,
which really should engage them?
Data is what needs to be at the backbone of your operations within the
marketing organization, because it really informs everything.
Tillman:
Obviously, being part of SAP, I could spend all day talking about the
advanced analytical tools that exist, and having the sort of
in-memory computing technologies like
S/4HANA,
which is the backbone of SAP. These tools have the power to look at
large datasets quickly. There are many cloud sales applications that
work to provide customer information that marketers need in a central
location, it’s available at a glance, and it’s delivered in context
that’s truly most important for marketers.
There’s so
much flexibility in the cloud. Companies can pull together information
in real time or live, as we like to say here at SAP, pulling from so
many sources. Data is what needs to be at the backbone of your
operations within the marketing organization, because it really informs
everything from where you can innovate and where campaigns are having
the most success, to what that next big thing is going to be to help
propel the company forward. And that’s a big part of what’s the core of a
marketing organization.
Gardner: Pete, any additional thoughts about what you’re hearing from your CMO audience about use of these data tools?
Krainik:
I’ve seen a shift among CMOs in the last year to two years on how they
approach data tools. They used to approach it by looking at the tools
currently available and choosing one that catches their eye. Now, there
are a number of really bright CMOs out there who are actually taking the
approach of assuming that they have total visibility, total velocity,
and can get total value at their fingertips from a design perspective,
whether it’s for demand and lead generation or a campaign. So they start
with that assumption, then they design what that ideal tool would be.
And then they evaluate the tools’ capabilities and processes.
By
the way, what’s equally is important, I found out talking to CMOs is
that you can have the great tools, but if you don’t have the right team
and expertise to run it, post implementation, it can cause a problem.
That’s an interesting approach. If you could have any piece of
information what would like to begin with, what would you like to have
to know about your customers? It just opens up some interesting ideas to
really stretch the envelope versus force fitting, and I am sure,
Alicia, you are seeing that too with some of your customers.
Tillman: Absolutely.
Gardner:
Alicia, looking to the future, what do you see as some of the greatest
challenges that marketers are facing? I'm thinking the perhaps the user
experience is going to become more important over time, but how do you
see that?
New opportunities
Tillman:
There are a couple of things. The war to differentiate and to bring new
opportunities, new leads, into the business is always going to be a
reality for marketers. They're always going to need to have a very clear
brand, a very simple message, and one that’s differentiated and
relevant.
So focusing on your brand story and ensuring
that that brand story is consistent across all of the buying and
marketing channels, and is relevant and is compelling is always going to
be a reality for marketers, because your brand drives the growth of
your business’s bottom line. It’s what fuels your pipeline; it’s what
fuels the sale of your product; it's what enables you to tell your story
around differentiation. So, there always needs to be a clear focus
there.
The other thing too, and I had mentioned this in
one of my opening comments, is around this notion of differentiation
and thinking beyond products in ways in which you can differentiate
yourself. As an example, I work in a B2B space, but think about some of
the best consumer brands in the world, and those that we support in our
personal lives.
Often, I like to reflect on the brands
that I support in my personal life, and when I think about what the
similarities are between those brands and why I am so loyal to them, not
only are their products best in class, but they’ve actually put their
products to use beyond what the day-to-day objective is.
If
you think of a brand like Tom’s or Starbucks, they have filled brand
promises around where they source their materials, where they donate
portions of their revenue. And when we think about the millennial
population as one, but any buyer, there is a much greater desire for
them to partner with organizations that stand for something versus ones
that don’t. B2B organizations, in particular, have a tremendous
opportunity to think beyond the level in which they’re competing with
day after day, and think about what is that higher good.
It’s really how we're taking our value proposition and using it to
create higher good in the world around things that people care about and
really mater at the end of the day. That’s the real opportunity for
marketers.
When we talk about visions, vision
statements should be operational, and it’s really how we're taking our
value proposition and using it to create higher good in the world around
things that people care about and really mater at the end of the day.
That’s the real opportunity for marketers.
Gardner:
Pete, what advice would you offer the CMOs as they think to overcome
these challenges in order to reach this vision of a brand-driven and
customer-centric world?
Krainik: The two most
important things are, first, that I would put my energies around making
sure that I have a marketing organization that has the new marketing
skills and new technical skills needed for success. Number one, get the
best and the brightest.
The other thing, in addition to
the differentiation that was discussed, is this whole issue of
ecosystem of innovation: creating an ecosystem, understanding how I am
going to look to the outside to bring in new ideas, new startup
capabilities, new energy. Those are the two essentials for success. If
you don’t do those, I think people are going to be in trouble long term.
Gardner:
I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a
BriefingsDirect podcast discussion focused on how to build a modern
marketing organization. We’ve heard how social media and business
networks have taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands,
products, and companies. And we have learned how savvy companies are
embracing these new channels and technologies to increase their brand
awareness and drive sales.
So, please join me now in
thanking our guests, Alicia Tillman, Chief Marketing Officer at SAP
Ariba, and Pete Krainik, Founder and CEO of The CMO Club.
And
a big thank you too to our audience as well for joining this SAP
Ariba-sponsored business innovation and thought leadership discussion.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba
Transcript
of a discussion on how social media and business networks
have taken the lead in shaping perceptions about brands, products, and
companies. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights
reserved.
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