Seth Matlins on the CMO’s Role in a Fragmented Marketing World

Welcome to the first episode of “Tame the Mobile Beast.” Today, host Tom Butta is joined by Seth Matlins, Managing Director of the Forbes CMO Network, to discuss the challenges faced by today’s Chief Marketing Officers, including declining budgets, organizational silos and the ever-moving needs of customer expectations.

Short on time? Here are five key takeaways from the conversation:

Organizational Silos Hamper Effective Customer Experience Design & Execution

For most brands today, no singular executive or team is accountable for customer experience design and execution. The work that goes into capturing, retaining and nurturing customer relationships comes from many teams — product, customer service, marketing, data, technology and even investor relations. The result? Silos across teams, channels and data that hamper a 360 view of customer relationships and, more importantly, holistic accountability for them. 

CMOs Must Be Responsible for the Omnichannel Customer Journey

When you consider the breadth of factors that impact the omnichannel customer journey, marketing sits at the center of it all. The person responsible for customer experience design must also have the authority to ensure that the team is executing against a unified vision. That’s why Seth believes the CMO is most fitting for this responsibility. However, they too need to be careful about avoiding the same pitfall of overspecialization. As Seth puts it, marketing is “a microcosm of the macrocosm within any enterprise.”

C-Suite Support is Critical for Successfully Executing a Cross-Channel Customer Experience

Ninety percent of CEOs at the world’s largest brands don’t have marketing experience, which can translate to not enough resources to deliver a truly unified, cross-channel customer experience. Often marketing is seen as an expense rather than an investment. Imperfect measurement or the false belief that everything can be attributed only compounds the problem. To navigate this challenge, CMOs need to build trust with the C-suite by outlining exactly what to expect and when, while educating about the strategic importance of cross-channel customer experience.

Emotional Context Can’t Be Ignored in Your Customer Experience Strategy 

A good customer experience strategy requires an understanding of the emotional context of the customers you want to engage. Seth underscores the importance of considering everything that precedes customer experience design and execution — macro and micro events — to gauge how it will influence the reception of it.  While data is critical, it is not infallible especially if it fails to account for qualitative factors that could change your customers’ mindset.

Knowing What Not to Do is Just As Important as Knowing What to Do

Seth believes that the biggest challenge CMOs face today is declining budgets paired with rising customer expectations. With every dollar spent under scrutiny, marketing teams need to embrace a “do more with less” mindset to shape their customer experience strategy and get the most value out of limited resources. While strategy has always been the art of sacrifice, this concept has never been more important today because the things marketers don’t do give room for those that they will do.