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Apr 15, 2016 | 2 minute read
written by Linda Bustos
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is on the frontline of digital marketing and delivering digital experiences. Over the past decade, CMOs have gone from being a cost center, siloed within their own organization, to being a full-blown digital player, charged with P&L and caring for the entire customer lifecycle. CMOs have gone full digital, hiring marketing technologists, data analysts, and “growth hackers” in addition to the usual creative types.
As customers increasingly turn to digital touchpoints to interact with brands, CMOs are focused on creating great digital experiences.
Recently, the editors at Adobe's CMO.com blog sat down with CMOs at some of Europe's leading brands to get insights into how these brands are responding to the challenges and opportunities of new digital economies.
One of the world's largest cable companies, Liberty Global has more than 27 million customers and operates in 14 countries. It owns U.K.-based telecom Virgin Media among other telecom brands. Liberty has 12 markets in Europe, each with a local CMO.
Liberty's Peter Dorr, Managing Director Strategic Marketing, Sales and Customer Service, says the CMO office at Liberty Global acts as thought leader and innovation leader, and tries to be ahead of the curve in two areas.
"First, we focus a lot on new technology and new developments because we define the long-term strategy, whereas the markets have a shorter-term focus," Dorr says.
"Secondly, we have agreed on a strategy to harmonise almost all of the digital platforms. They’re all managed and run and implemented from the central office. The team is implementing the platforms for all local markets, so we’re all operating from one platform with all the synergies and benefits that this brings."
Liberty's digital experience platform, running Elastic Path Commerce for Adobe Marketing Cloud, forms the basis for the organization-wide platform.
Dorr says having a standardized digital experience platform across the company allows the CMO office to lead by example. "It’s a key function for us to add value, not so much by telling the markets what to do, but by showing them what others have done and what their results were. And, as a result, to help them make better decisions."
Narry Singh, Managing Director of Digital Business Strategy at Accenture says marketers are far ahead of their peers in terms of what’s happening in digital.
"A big role for marketers is bringing external innovation into the organisation," Singh says. "Marketers by definition are outward-facing, market-facing, user-facing. And one of the biggest challenges that large companies face is not innovating fast enough, and having a Chief Innovation Officer doesn’t suddenly fix that. But a marketer has the right antennae and the systems to know what innovations are coming, and they can sense and respond really quite well."
To read the rest of what these and other leading CMOs have to say about digital experiences and innovation, download the complete ebook at http://www.slideshare.net/adobe/the-cmocom-interview-ebook-emea-edition?from_action=save