Hard Shift from We to You Before Brand Distancing Sets In

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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I have a confession to make: I have multiple email accounts...to collect spam. 

It is a dirty secret confession of a marketer. I’ve got Yahoo, Gmail, and there “may” even be an AOL account in the collection. I knowingly hand these out to brands. I have a system for email prioritization with the top spot in the collection going to brands I want to hear from. If you got an AOL email and the name doesn’t have any initials from my name…sorry.

In this time of shelter at home, I’ve had a chance to review the contents of all strata of spamcounts. It has NOT been pretty. The emails fall into some curious categories:

• Desperate remembrance – “Hey, we are still here waiting for you to buy from us!” to “Without YOUR support, we won’t be here for much longer.”
• Gross outs – “Out of an overabundance of caution, we have finally started cleaning things!” 
• Bottom feeders – “This is the perfect time to buy sweatpants in bulk…AND…with every purchase, we will send you toilet paper and a picture of a nurse holding a puppy!”

I think it is clear most consumers would like to permanently banish the phrases “Out of an overabundance of caution” from branded email. This overabundance of caution isn’t really that…now is it? It is an overabundance of Stan from Legal and Debbie from Risk telling you an email had to include the robotic linguistics known as an overabundance of nobody talks like that.

The longer the world shelters and economies grind to a crawl, the reaction of some is apparently to ramp UP emails in an attempt to continue relationships. Even worse are the brands who failed to check their workflows and content, keeping customers in automated drip campaigns that fail to take our global condition into context. I especially love the ones encouraging me to bring the email IN-STORE by a certain date.

What got really depressing was when I started to look for emails that used the word “you” more than the word “we.” Outside of the self-serving celebrations of “we are still up and running so that you can keep working/buying,” the “you” emails were few and far between.

In this age of customer-centric-lip-service and “embracing” the customer-first attitude, isn’t it time to make a hard shift from talking about “we” -- we are with you, we are in this together, we are still here ready to do business, we still want your money – and start talking about “you”?

Shifting conversations from WE to YOU can be hard…it demands that for every question we ask, we are ready to respond quickly with action that directly reflects the answers received. It also demands that we ask internally before we ask externally. Once again, asking our people what they need and what they know our customers need will also demand we be ready to respond. We can’t keep asking and not answering.

Perhaps the biggest thing to remember is that if we continue delivering messages of fake empathy and false community, the outcome will be brand distancing. Consumers are not likely to forget the opportunistic, the false or the downright creepy interactions during a time when nerves are frayed.

There is a difference between HAVING empathy and just sounding empathetic. It is not our customer’s job to have empathy for what our brand is facing. It is our job to remind them why our mission, values and vision align with their own, today and well into our mutual tomorrow. It is our job to ask how are YOU? What do YOU need or want? And if the answer is they just want to be left alone for a bit…to not be sold something…not be reminded a bill is heading their way…not be reminded they can’t go to the store with a coupon…we need to respect the answer and respond in kind and with kindness.

The social currency accumulated now will last well into the recovery. The brand distancing could last a lifetime.

Managing Beyond the Crisis: On the Minds of CXOs

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Employees, customers, and a path to “the new normal” top the list of C-suite executive concerns. Here are a few pointers from Constellation’s Post-Pandemic Playbook.

First, let’s acknowledge some realities here in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis in North America. Personal and family safety are obviously at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Some heroes, like our healthcare and public safety workers, selflessly put even these concerns aside in order to do their jobs. Also deserving of acknowledgment are those working in pharmacies, grocery stores, warehouses and other places where people interact and where there’s no option to work from home.

Second, let’s admit that it’s hard to generalize about what some now euphemistically call “the new normal” for business. The airline and hospitality industries and businesses deemed to be “non-essential” are in near or total shutdown mode. Those in health and public safety, the food supply chain and anything tech related to supporting remote workers are scrambling to keep up with demand.

In an open virtual discussion with more than 40 CXOs last week, Constellation Research heard a broad range of short-term and long-term concerns and opinions. Chatham House rules applied to the meeting prevent us from sharing the identities or affiliations of the speakers, but here’s a sampling of what these CXO had to say.

Learn from Work-from-Home Successes

Several executives agreed that work-from-home (WFH) productivity is going surprisingly well, so much so that some speculated that many companies may reassess their WFH policies and real estate commitments once the crisis is over. Benefits mentioned included the ability to hire prized talent and workers from outside of Silicon Valley, New York and other competitive job markets.

One exec noted that his firm had previously learned the hard way that mixing remote and local workers on a team does not work well when most of the team members were in one physical location. The remote minority inevitably feel like outsiders and cannot participate as equals. His firm solved this problem by having all  team members join meetings virtually, even if half or more of those team members are in a single location. This levels the playing field and ensures equal access to information and ability to participate. This is a policy that businesses should consider as the crisis wanes and the mix of remote and office workers starts to get back to normal. Some employees will feel comfortable returning to offices sooner than others.

Note: Still struggling to support work-from-home requirements? Check out this Webinar by Dion Hinchcliffe on productivity, collaboration and remote work technologies and best practices.

Set Short-Term Plans & Keep Monitoring

Whether your business is struggling to keep up with new demands or struggling to survive, you can throw out the budgets and business plans originally developed for 2020. Historical data and existing models may have little predictive value for the time being. Agile analysis and planning based on the very latest data is the name of the game.

Even supermarkets and hardware stores, which have remained open nationwide throughout the crisis, are seeing dramatically different customer behavior and buying patterns. One CPG executive we spoke to shared that his company has narrowed its product assortment to best sellers, and it can’t make enough of some of these products.

Other businesses are not so fortunate and have been completely shut down. Experts expect an eight-week crisis cycle to roll across North America as population centers go from the first 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 to a tapering of new cases and an easing of the danger of local healthcare systems operating over capacity. The easing of shelter-in-place directives and business closures will depend on case numbers, availability of testing and other, yet-to-be-determined criteria.

To support an agile, data-driven approach, take these steps:

• Know your data sources, particularly those providing leading indicators of demand
• Ensure timely access to the latest information and monitor actual data-access and usage patterns rather than relying on old assumptions about the data that the business relies upon.
• Break down departmental silos. Information found to be useful to one group may have equal or greater value in another context. Recognize interconnected requirements and outcomes.
• Embrace continuous planning. Keep monitoring customer interactions and digital behaviors, sales, procurement, inventories, accounts receivables, cash flow. Patterns are likely to change from week to week.

Yes, historical patterns, such as seasonality, will continue to shape behavior, but the new normal has yet to emerge and customer behavior will take time to stabilize and become more predictable. 

Prepare for Longer-Term Opportunities

One CIO said he’s seeing “crash” teams established within companies focused on  three questions: How do we survive (addressed above), do we need a strategic reset, and how to we get back to growth once the crisis eases?

On the strategic reset question, Constellation expects that many companies will reassess secondary business models and commitments to non-core product lines and markets. Constellation expects to see a wave of asset sales, mergers, and acquisitions. Companies that are saddled with debt and those in bankruptcy will lead the asset sales and become takeover targets. Today’s Fortune 500 maybe thinned to a Fortune 350.

Companies that are flush with cash will be in a good position to pursue acquisitions, but if they don’t act quickly, they themselves will become acquisition targets. Fast financial analyses and accurate assessments of market prospects will be crucial. M&A is often a secretive endeavor, carried out by bankers, lawyers and top-level executives. Do not enter deal rooms with piecemeal data or half-baked assumptions about your own firm’s performance, its ability to effectively acquire or the prospects of an acquisition target.

As for that third question on how we get back to growth, “that's kind of the Golden piece of information that every business is looking for,” said the CIO. “A few of the CEOs that I’ve talked to are saying, ‘it’s not like we’re just going to turn the switch back on and , boom, everybody’s going to come back to work and customers are going to show up again.’ They’re saying it’s going to be more of a gradual, testing process."

Constellation founder R “Ray” Wang advised that “it’s very hard to put a timeline together without understanding when the crisis is going to end. We are looking at four factors: time, industry, geography, and the spread of the virus. We think it starts to get to recovery when you have seven days of no new cases [in a particular geography] and you know you’re on the other side of the exponential growth curves we’ve all been staring at.”

Related Reading:
Why Every Organization Must Build A Post Pandemic Playbook
Lead with Visibility and Agility During and Beyond the Pandemic
The CIO Must Lead Business Strategy Now

Musings - IBM's 10th CEO takes the rains - Krishna has his work cut out for him

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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Today it became official, Arvin Krishna succeeds Ginny Rometty as CEO at IBM. A technology company that has only had 10 CEOs since 1911, starting as Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) in Endicott, NY. 

Arvind Krishna in an interview with CNBC on April 6th 2020

Krishna has his work cut out

DOMOPALOOZA: How to Make Lemonade from REALLY Ugly Lemons

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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Domo was handed a rough hand. First, make the decision to cancel the live Domopalooza scheduled for the week of March 16. Second, figure out how to turn a massive live experience into a virtual event. Third, just before go-time, deal with a 5.7 magnitude earthquake rattling everyone’s nerves at 7 am followed by aftershocks throughout the day.

This wasn’t just an exercise in handing Domo some lemons and asking for a cool, sweet beverage, it was handing them rotting lemons and asking for a miracle.

The message repeated throughout the event was more of a rallying cry: Go big. Go fast. Go bold. Domo went big. They HAD to go fast. Domopalooza ended up being a bold move to showcase some even more bold and successful clients.

Rethinking Live

Domo did an exceptional job at bringing a completely different experience to their virtual event. Then again this should NOT be a surprise for an event where Josh James is CEO. I don’t think it is a coincidence that John Mellor was also there to help mold James' vision into a successful strategy.

These two KNOW how to do this and do it WELL. 11 years ago…almost to the day…I was in Salt Lake City listening to Maroon 5 thanks to these two. James and Mellor created something unique with the Omniture Summits…so I wasn’t really surprised this reimagined event went so well.

More than anything, Domo leaned in to the fact this was NOT what they originally had in mind, but they wanted to achieve a couple things: share their customer’s stories, wins and thinking, introduce some new products, features and functions, answer as many live questions as possible, allow as much interaction as possible...and remind us that James is one heck of a skier.

Mission accomplished on all fronts.

It is worth noting that Domo DID in fact go big, fast AND bold. It was 2 weeks between shift decision to start time and yet none of the experience felt rushed or that corners had been cut. It was as if this was the plan from the very beginning.

It should also be noted that it may be unfair to compare other events to Domo’s high benchmark of success as moments after the live (albeit virtual) experience multiple states issued bans of gatherings more than 10 – 50 people making assembling a larger scale production team an impossibility. Even with the deck stacked against them, today it might feel as if they still had multiple advantages in pulling this off.

I would argue, however, that the greatest single key to success was that Domo’s focus was NOT on how to deliver their news or their story but instead how to deliver their customer’s successes and their customer’s stories. THAT is where the production and the engagement really made a difference. Josh James wasn’t just talking about data with Brian Kaner, CEO of Pep Boys…the audience was eavesdropping on an earnest conversation and it was captivating.

The Announcements

Throughout the live event and sprinkled across several on-demand sessions, new features and functions were announced. Here are a couple of items that caught my eye:

• Integration studio reminds me of the moment in Dirty Dancing when Johnny announces that NOBODY puts baby in a corner. With Integration Studio, Domo makes sure that no system and no dataset is left in a corner allowing for seamless integration BETWEEN systems and not just from systems. The drag and drop nature of the connectors allows you to quickly and easily bring in data sets, apply ML or AL and configure connections across cloud, on-prem or proprietary solutions.
• Updates to Domo’s Analyzer remembered users are human. From instant undo and redo, drag and drop layout functions and a general sense that the user is in control and capable to “just see what would happen if…”
• Excited to see the updates and upgrades to Data Lineage and Impact Analysts. Lineage allowing users to click into a DataSet to see ancestry of the data to quantify freshness, data source and owner, and any availability of the data and run times. Impact Analysis lets users see what the ramifications of shifts or changes to a DataSet might be. As marketers are being asked to justify data utilization and leap with every new regulation, this functionality is now critical.
• Domo Stories has been a clear hit among users and something Domo deserves to celebrate. The new additions add flexibility and the opportunity to deliver even more context and relatability to the data being visualized. Layered on top of Domo Everywhere, you can take something that feels big and hulking and turn it into something easily accessible, understandable and relatable to everyone across the business. Case in point: Domo took multiple sources of COVID-19 data and created one of the more usable and explorable dashboards I have seen. Check it out here: https://www.domo.com/coronavirus-tracking
• Pardon me while I just let my data nerd flag fly when I say…O-M-G NEW CHART TYPES. For the “pie charts are my jam and I don’t need more than an exploding pie chart” set, you may as well move along…there is nothing here that will interest you. But if you love to see a good visualization come to life…Domo has the data-candy to feed your hungry soul. From the Sankey diagrams to the SPC Charts that can plot trends while highlighting outliers and anomalies but can also trigger alerts to spur immediate attention and action, I’m not going to lie…I got a little breathless during this part.

In the end, there was a playfulness to Domopalooza that was not a by-product of the shift from live to virtual event. It is an attitude that is clearly present across the product as much as it is watching Josh James wearing a panda t-shirt while standing in front of the Salt Palace. Domo wants you to have fun with data…explore with it…play with it…but most importantly, they want you to lose the fear of it, dig in and make decisions about business with it.

In a day and age when there is more than enough conversation and dialogue around the questionable impact and negative ramification around data, it was refreshing to be part of a discussion where data was more about painting like nobody is watching and being OK with the mess than it was about rigidly painting by the numbers and being told to be happy with insights that you only see in a rear view mirror.

Go big. Go fast. Go bold. Well played.

Note: Screenshots were taken from Doomapalooza 2020...if you want to check out the on-demand, visit https://www.domo.com/domopalooza/dp20

Social Networks: Another Dark Web

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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What’s going on when people spill their guts on social media sites?  Or on the other hand, when they loudly reject the public health advice of their own governments?  

It’s risky to generalise but I tend to agree that there are stereotypical differences across the world in how the public rations out their precious trust to governments versus businesses.

The cliché goes that Americans typically distrust government but have faith in the invisible hand of the markets, and so they “trust” businesses more (the shudder quotes are deliberate when we’re using such broad generalizations). Conversely continental Europeans tend to “trust” governments more than business. Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom fall somewhere between the poles.

Now, trust is a moveable feast, but this article isn’t the place to dissect how trust in social institutions is degrading. Rather I'd like to debunk "trust" in social media. Little or no conscious trust actually enters into the decision to share data with social media.  In fact, it’s not so much a decision as a reflex. 

Very few users comprehend what’s going on in social networking.  We should suspect a priori that the relationship between the giant digital properties and members is not exactly balanced.  Many of the brightest data scientists in the world are employed by Facebook, Google and Twitter, and for the most part they’re not there to find a cure to cancer but to figure out cleverer ways to target advertising.

Facebook is notoriously clever at tricking users into divulging personal data. It’s pretty widely accepted now (isn't it?) that Facebook takes deliberate steps to get users addicted. See Shoshana Zuboff’s epic The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. My own favorite example of Facebook’s trickery is how they gamified the training of their face recognition algorithms, by getting users first to tag each other, and later to confirm the algorithm’s tag suggestions.  Until then, facial recognition routines were calibrated laboriously using relatively small image galleries. But Facebook changed the game, and not only by capitalizing on the billions of pictures innocently entrusted to it by its members, but by crowd-sourcing the matching of names to faces.  It was genius.

So that’s one of the best examples of Facebook’s direct (albeit covert) collection of personal data. But they’re also supremely adept at mining and refining data from the matrix they have cultivated. The closely guarded People You May Know (PYMK) algorithm is the state of the art in indirect data collection. Some of the best digital experts in the world ? like investigative journalist Kashmir Hill ? have been stumped by how Facebook manages to make its connections and generate friend suggestions

What’s to be done about all this? I am not a lawyer but I have two regulatory suggestions.  I’d welcome feedback from legal and regulatory experts. 

First, most places in the world (and increasingly also some U.S. states) have technology neutral data privacy laws which put limits on the collection of personal data. These laws are largely blind to the manner of collection.  If Social Media companies extract insights about identifiable users, then that’s personal data and it’s being collected. Therefore privacy laws apply, especially when individuals are unaware of the collection.  

So in my view, legal action could be taken by Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) in any number of jurisdictions against the unbridled use of algorithms in social networks (including Friend Suggestions, Tag Suggestions and People You May Know) to surreptitiously collect personal data.  Anna Johnston and I have written at length about Facebook’s particular clash with the Collection Limitation principle; see our chapter in the Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining. 

Social media’s algorithmic collection of personal data is but one example.  An increasingly prevalent feature of digital businesses is the use of machine learning and analytics to extract insights, such as financial scores and insurance risks, from our digital exhaust.  The synthesis of personal data ? or what the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner calls Collection by Creation ? falls within the scope of most data privacy law. If a business uses algorithms instead of questionnaires in order to get to know you, then privacy principles still apply.

My second regulatory suggestion is good old fashioned consumer law.  Social media magnates like to claim that today’s users are sophisticated enough to “know” that there’s no free lunch on the Internet.  Users are supposed to “know” that their data is being traded with businesses as part of a deal for services. But what if typical users don’t actually know how their data is used?  Very few people have figured this out, considering the opacity of PYMK.

Moreover, what if the social media bosses know that users don't know?  Being aware of ? nay, exploiting ? the information asymmetry while claiming that users are aware of what they're getting into would be deceptive conduct wouldn’t it? The purported services-for-data deal is a one-sided sham if users don't enter into it freely and knowingly.

Some of the richest people in history have arguably made their fortunes on the back of users’ ignorance about how data flows in the Digital Economy. The most lucrative undercover digital economy isn’t the Dark Web, it’s social media, with its tricky personal data practices and synthetic collection algorithms hiding in plain sight.

We Got This: CMOs Stake Their Authentic Claim

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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For the Chief Marketing Officer, the brand response to COVID-19 has been a case study in authenticity, focused on remaining true to the personality, spirit, character of their brand while keeping an eye on the real-world needs, fears, questions and concerns of their customers. Brands that have maintained open, bidirectional lines of communication and connection with customers are being repaid in loyalty and the promise of future profits, albeit delayed by the realities of a pandemic.

We have seen the best of us rise to the occasion: Chiobani deploying food and resources to address food insecurity in a time of total insecurity, LVMH shifting from luxury parfum purveyors to churning out much needed hand sanitizer, and B2B brands like Zoho, Microsoft and SAP opening up resources to help aggregate data, empower the newly remote workforce and ensure that the voice of the customer (both internal and external) is still flowing into the heart of every organization.

Sadly, we have also seen the worst: price gauging on cleansers, opportunistic advertising pushing fear, conspiracy and false hope cures, phishing scams preying on fear and hope, lazy automation inviting savings for in-store visits.

Despite all the ups and downs, CMOs remain focused on mastering the 3R’s of modern marketing, namely driving revenue, relationships and reputation. While the old Ps (product, place, promotion and price) will always remain near and dear to our Marketing101 hearts, CMOs have graduated – moved on from the fundamentals and into an age of unapologetically driving the business forward. This has never been truer than the leaders facing down the chaos and uncertainty of a global pandemic to lay the groundwork for the explosive growth that will kickstart recovery.

A few key trends will be the hallmark of how successful CMOs pave this profitable path…they also happen to be the trends that got us to a point of Authentic Marketing to begin with.

Expect CMOs to…

Refocus on Humanizing Relationships

In our quest for optimized automation, human relationship building became the lost art of marketing. CMOs will go back to conversations and connections that speak to an audience of one. These efforts will demand a deep understanding and knowledge of the customer and a willingness to realize that segment and persona are not the same. The engagement cycle will shift from hear/react to listen/recall/act/remember, empowered by the power of AI to tackle the data crunching while marketers take care of the hyper-creativity that can create moments of delight.

In the near term, expect to see a renewed focus on data cleanliness, relevance and purpose. Dirty and dark data get dragged into the light while permissions and consent, take on new importance in a post-GDPR/CCPA privacy world. Long term, CMOs will refine marketing’s what (content), where (channel) and why (human relationships) in a more intentional manner.

Get More Involved in the Security Discussion

The trust dynamic is especially critical in the exchange of customer data for value. Modern, connected customers are now hyperaware that their data is the cost of engagement, setting the expectation for personalization, relevance and security. Customers turn over their data with the absolute expectation that the company they entrust will secure that data and honor their privacy. Break that promise and the relationship is not just shaken, it is broken, perhaps forever.

CMOs will start asking more questions about traditionally IT-centered security questions. IT won’t like it one bit. IT will in turn expect that the new systems being onboarded through the marketing stack are vetted for security standards. This is going to strain and test the CMO-CIO bond as marketing questions security posture and readiness and IT questions marketing’s sanity and strategy. The first such test will likely come in the form of marketing’s desire to put more control over data directly into the hands of the consumer. This will be part need (meeting regulatory hurdles for privacy and data transparency) and part value-add (leveraging customer identity and access as a value and promise with each individual customer).

Up-Skill Their Own Leadership Capabilities to Drive Change

To drive the growth agenda, CMOs can’t limit their leadership to the functional boundaries of marketing. In fact, the CMO of 2030 must be a cultural change agent to get the organization’s voice to reflect the customer’s voice regardless of function or department. The CMO will lead by example, intentionally inspire, reward and recognize. While the CEO will establish the vision, the CMO will establish the purpose and path. This will require a keen understanding of back- and front-office dynamics, systems and responsibilities, especially what part each function plays in the delivery of customer experiences.

Expect to see more partnership with purpose between CMOs and their counterparts in HR, compliance and risk to create a measured cadence for change. This will ruffle feathers for organizations not focused on the customer as leaders in these roles will question why the CMO is stepping into their lane. Interestingly, CMOs are often thought to already have the “soft skills” of management—continuous learning, advanced communication, negotiation and empathy, to name a few. Those will remain critical heading into the new decade, but CMOs are adding to their bag of tricks to include business analytics, cognitive agility, rapid decision-making and a firm grasp on finance.

Start Training AI to Grow Up Into a Super-Talented Intern

Organizations not leveraging AI will admit their folly and will start to leverage machine learning and cognitive tools to improve operational efficiencies and optimize rapid-fire decision-making. But there will also be a realization that AI is still an intern that needs guidance, coaching and leadership. As discussions around ethics, bias and the unintended outcomes of artificial intelligence continue, marketing will refocus talent and teams to apply AI in more intentional and meaningful ways.

The marketing function will never be a fully autonomous car—it will always require a driver fully in control of the wheel. AI in marketing becomes the smartest GPS ever developed, extrapolating an unheard-of influx of data to deliver new shortcuts, alerts for opportunity and reminders for engagement. For the CMO, AI will empower teams, not replace, talent. Expect to see CMOs question the “AI-ization of everything,” selectively applying AI-powered tools where optimization and efficiencies around data are most needed and trying to avoid the familiar traps of half-baked cool-tech implementations on top of old, ineffective processes.

All in all, the greatest trend that will make authentic marketing a priority and not just an aspiration is the newly affirmed confidence of the CMO who now sees a path to the office of CEO. Growth through engagement has paved this new road. It will have bumps, but it has been successfully navigated. Regardless of new monikers or brands, the role of the chief marketing officer will endure, sitting squarely at the intersection of business, brand and buyer.

News Analysis: Tech Vendors Takes On #Coronavirus

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Over the past two-weeks, the tech community has sought different ways to assist with the battle against Covid-19. Efforts range from free usage of product, cash assistance, donations, and product innovations. Here's a short run down of some highlighted announcements:

IBM, The White House, and Department Of Energy create a COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium

Photo credit: IBM

A unique public-private consortium led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and IBM was created to enable researchers access to supercomputing resources. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium pulls 16 systems, including the world's fastest supercomputer - IBM Summit, to deliver 330 petaflops of supercomputing power to process epidemiology, bioinformatics, molecular modeling, and healthcare system response. Researchers can apply on this website and must describe what type of support from staff at the national labs or other facilities will be essential, helpful, or unnecessary for their project along with data privacy restrictions.

ServiceNow releases four emergency response apps for COVID-19 response.

ServiceNow provides free access to four emergency response apps designed to help companies, employees, and government agencies respond to the coronavirus crisis. The four apps include emergency response operations, emergency outreach, emergency self-report, and emergency exposure management. One of these apps was donated by The State of Washington’s Department of Health. They built the Emergency Response Operations application on the Now Platform in just three weeks.

Facebook donating N95 masks, offering $100M for small business, and media grants.

Facebook contributed its emergency stockpile of 720,000 N95 masks to US healthcare institutions. The social media giant also set aside $100 million for small business owners in cash grants and ad credits. In partnership with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Local Media Association (LMA), Facebook will offer $1 million in grants to US and Canadian local news organizations covering the coronavirus crisis. The fund provides grants of up to $5,000 to local news rooms to cover unexpected costs related to coronavirus reporting. Organizations can apply for the grants at this link.

Zoom gives away software to K-12 schools

Photo credit: Zoom

CEO Eric Yuan has stepped up to help address the crisis facing the shutdown of 40M schools in the US. As one of the emerging tools for online classrooms, Zoom has become a de facto standard. Yuan has removed the limits for any K-12 schools affected in the United States, Japan, and Italy. On March 18th, an estimated 350,000 people downloaded the Zoom app. Using a school email address, students, teachers, and administrators can fill out a form to register for the program.

Photo credit: Apple

Apple has updated the venerable Siri to answer questions and help screen folks on those who may have COVID-19. Users can ask Siri questions such as "Do I have the coronavirus?" or "How do I know if I have the coronavirus?" or "Am I sick with the coronavirus?" Using answers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Public Health Service, the voice assistant will ask you for related symptoms from dry cough, shortness of breath, fever, and other related symptoms as they are updated. The app also includes links to telemedicine apps and services. At this moment, the service is geared towards the U.S.

 

The Bottom Line. BigTech can help and this time its better not be a marketing ploy

Most big tech companies are in a sound financial position with massive free cash flow and cash on hand. These companies have the resources in talent, technology, and know how to assist. As more companies step up to help in the coronavirus battle, expect these efforts to come from authenticity not a public relations opportunity. Anything less would be detrimental to the technology vendor's brand and their standing in the public.