IT Marketing Leader: Sarika Naik, Chief Marketing Officer, Capgemini Technology Services

The expectations for an organization’s chief marketer have increased exponentially in the past few years. In this day and age of recent global economic challenges, there is greater demand to be more strategic.

Key things that a CEO expects are:

• Drive ROI: The CMO is expected to bring in true value and show real results on every initiative to propel business and growth. The focus is to monetize the brand to get maximum returns
• Being a team player: Build dynamic and collaborative teams with a blend of new age and traditional skills relevant to the organization and customers
• Be a custodian of the brand: This is beyond creating logos and driving brand awareness. Reputation management today is a critical pillar of brand management and the CEO not only expects the CMO to build the brand but also deploy all possible resources to manage the brand reputation with both internal and external stakeholders
• Focus on innovation: The marketer today should be able to create solutions that are out-of-the-box and is able to leverage technology to reinvent marketing on an ongoing basis
• Be a strategist and a collaborator: CMOs today are expected go beyond vanilla marketing and collaborate with other departments they interact with and make marketing a strategic enabler of organizational goals. He or she should also enable the organization with strong insights that will help strengthen the go-to-market strategies and make them impactful.

The following three things are what we believe to be important:

• Go digital: The digital world today can completely transform the way we do marketing and be a differentiator in the way we enable sales and drive brand loyalty
• Drive customer centricity: Marketers need to understand that creating a good brand experience for customers helps boost better brand image and have an impact on the business growth. We live in a highly connected world today and customers like being associated with a brand that connects with them and responds to them. Therefore, brands need to get responsive and stay connected with the end customer and continuously raise the value proposition of the brand
• Have an integrated brand strategy: Finally, although digital is the future, marketers need to understand that every consumer has a different perspective and different need. In order to fulfill these varying needs, marketers need to keep an open mind for the various channels of traditional, social and digital.

There are various tools available in the market being sold by different vendors proving to be best in class in improving profitability. What we look at in a marketing tool is a better return on the investment done. Leveraging some of the best industry frameworks and products could actually help in getting the best ROI. But, we believe listening to a customer feedback on various media platforms and working towards a solution to provide best experiences that can actually help improve profitability.

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