Budget Shifts Prevail – It’s Time for Marketing Performance Management
The chief marketing officer (CMO) will be a key player in the boardroom of the future. As more and more business decisions revolve around the consumer, the role of marketing is expanding – and its influence is growing. This is also reflected in the growing landscape of marketing technology solutions and budget shift. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2017, the average CMO will spend more on information technology than the CIO.
The reason is simple. In today’s hyperconnected and socially networked world, we have more data than ever before about an individual consumer’s buying behavior, preferences, and opinions. Every movement and social media interaction they make can be tracked, analyzed, responded to – and even predicted. This mass of available information is a potential goldmine for modern marketers as they strive to engage with their consumers at every stage of this new, nonlinear buying cycle. At the same time, synchronized data from the entire supply chain can be gathered and harvested in real time.
So – in theory, at least – today’s CMO has all the micro- and macro-insights they need at their fingertips to guide the boardroom and drive business performance. However, the prerequisite to all this, is having the appropriate and powerful technology, which is the foundation to capture and manage a rapidly increasing amount of divers mass-data which marketing is expected to convert into insight, meaningful reports, tactic and strategy.
Data is the new gold – capitalize on it!
For marketing professionals, time consuming and error prone “number crunching” activities are still part of their daily routines, as internal data, retailer point-of-sales data as well as syndicated data coming in from market research institutes needs to be cleansed, harmonized and appropriately mapped in order to provide meaningful insights. Apart from the difficulty of manipulating mass data from various different sources, additional hurdles to generate timely and meaningful reports do exist. The existence of hundreds of isolated data islands with poor data quality and hence, the lack of (system-) integration, resulting in a deficiency of consistency, regularly cause further challenges to derive fact-based business decisions. As a consequence, opportunities could be under-analyzed, wrongly interpreted, or even missed completely.
Marketing performance management – a new approach
Powered by in-memory computing and leveraging the flexibility of cloud and mobile technologies, next-generation solutions can now deliver the real-time insights that companies need to compete in the digital economy. All the associated tasks of collecting, cleansing, harmonizing and even hosting mass data from various internal and external sources, as critical precondition to generate one consistent source of truth, can now be accommodated by powerful marketing technology solutions. From a business perspective, a defined common language for marketing reporting is represented in the Whitebook, providing the global business blueprint and assuring a consistent source of truth.
The ultimate goal of all this, is to free up marketing resources from non-value added routine activities and enable them to focus on what is going on in the markets. Taking fact based tactical and strategic decisions based on business simulations, this is what marketing is about.
By using common definitions and based on the of the important marketing KPI’s “global market share” as an example, this approach delivers a consistent and reliable framework to compare global and local market share information. Users can deep-dive into one specific country and category, for example, to see which global brands gained or lost market share and how they performed over past periods against other brands and the total market. A guided root-cause analysis can help businesses understand which product strategies influenced the change of market share of a specific- or a competing brand. All of this can be made available to the business user in a simple – yet powerful – mobile app.
Find out how Marketing Performance Management services combines the expertise of the SAP Services organization with our software to address specific marketing department challenges. Contact Kristian Kauffmann, global service offering manager for Consumer Products at SAP.
