2. Introduction
Despite agreeing on a common
digital agenda, it appears that senior
marketing and IT leaders in China
are struggling to work together.
The country’s explosive growth in
online and mobile channels, coupled
with consumers’ skyrocketing use of
technologies, is highlighting gaps in
the way marketing and technology
departments function in some
businesses—gaps that could seriously
inhibit growth in the digital space.
In broad terms, chief marketing
officers (CMOs) are increasingly
focusing on how they can use new
digital technologies to support
new channels to market.
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Should a retailer wish to create
an omni-channel experience, for
example, then its marketing team—
responsible for online sales—needs
to deploy the appropriate IT tools
to create a seamless customer
experience. Chief information officers
(CIOs), by contrast, are seeing those
new technologies more as a means
for transforming the entire business,
and do not feel that customer
experience is their responsibility.
This year’s Accenture survey of more
than 1,100 senior marketing and IT
executives around the world, entitled
Cutting Across the CMO-CIO Divide,
found that this disconnect between
marketing and technology chiefs is
preventing many companies in China
from reaching their full potential.
Specifically, the survey found that
insufficient integration between
marketing and IT departments
has now overtaken technology as
the key roadblock to improving
marketers’ performance.
It is an issue with challenging
long-term implications. Should
marketing and IT departments
remain siloed in this way, the
potential danger for Chinese
companies, is that it would be much
easier for the next generation of
omni-channel brands to rise and
overthrow the incumbent leaders.
3. China: the opportunity
China is experiencing a seismic shift
in online consumer behaviour. In
many ways, it has leapfrogged the
West in terms of its technological
ascendance and the country’s ability
to innovate quickly in a dynamic
digital world is allowing it to scale up
as millions of new consumers come
online. Leading platforms such as
Tmall, JD.com, Weixin and Taobao have
rapidly become some of the world’s
foremost e-commerce businesses,
driven by a generation of ‘digital first’
leaders who understand the fluid
nature of a digital marketplace.
China has the world’s largest
internet population at 632 million.
According to figures released by
the official China Internet Network
Information Center (CNNIC), the
number of internet users in China
rose 2.3 percent in the first six
months of 2014, up from 618
million at the end of last year.1
Importantly, digital consumption is
consistently high throughout the
country, regardless of consumers’
income level or location. What is
more, information, insights and
opinions from friends and family have
a tremendous impact on consumers’
buying decisions in China.
A recent survey revealed that
more than 90 percent of consumers
in China use social networks or
micro-blogs to get information about
companies’ products or services at
least a few times each year.2
As growth continues, businesses in
China are developing a more mature
approach to investing in the digital
space. The rise of internet giants
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent has
signaled a new era of transformation
through consolidation. With the
years of burning money now over,
the new way to compete is through
efficiency and profitable growth.
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4. Technology: the new marketing
priority
The digital landscape in China is
an ever-changing mix of consumer-to-consumer
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(C2C), mobile first and now
in-store services. While consumers
are adept at moving between various
platforms, there is a growing emphasis
on omni-channel experiences.
In most businesses in China, the
marketing department owns,
controls and operates the content
and e-commerce platforms, on top
of their digital marketing activities.
Marketing also operates across the
interactive touch points that are fast
replacing TV and print in China. At the
same time, the rise of offline-to-online
(O2O) services in China is encouraging
an increasing number of marketers
to adopt a more holistic approach
to customers’ evolving needs.
Given this backdrop, it’s not surprising
that technology is fast becoming a
marketing priority for business growth.
Results from the Accenture Interactive
2014 CIO-CMO Alignment Survey
show that no less than 88 percent of
the CIOs and 85 percent of the CMOs
surveyed in China see IT as a strategic
partner for marketing. In other words,
both groups recognize the importance
of greater cross-function collaboration
within their organizations to help
drive an integrated digital business.3
At the same time, combining
traditional marketing know-how
with IT capabilities—or ‘marketing IT’—
has risen to the top of IT priorities
for at least a third of both CIOs
(37 percent) and CMOs (33 percent)
in China, as shown in Figure 1.
Both groups agree that the top
priority for Chinese marketers is to
become more relevant—to reach
their market more efficiently with
better customer insights, and extract
more value from their campaigns
and customer data—which requires
a renewed focus on marketing IT.
6. The CIO-CMO disconnect
Despite the need for marketing efforts
to keep pace with technology, around
40 percent of the CMOs and CIOs we
surveyed had problems implementing
their marketing solutions in the last
year largely due to a perceived lack
of expertise and availability within
their IT teams. (see Figure 2).
CMOs say IT departments
lack knowledge of the pace
of change in the market, and
install siloed technology that
cannot be implemented across
all channel platforms.
Frustrated at their inability
to control content, data and
experience management, many
of these CMOs are choosing to
outsource solutions instead.
But while cheap and widely available
social technologies and commoditized
cloud services may make it easy for
marketing departments to simply
bypass IT and ‘buy solutions’ if
there is no cooperation between
departments, the overall gain for
the company would still be limited.
After all, marketing teams that adopt
this kind of ‘self-sufficient’ approach
are simply creating yet another silo
within the organization.
At the same time, many CIOs feel
that their marketing counterparts
simply do not understand the
complexity of integrating new
data sets and cannot be trusted
to operate technology, given their
lack of skills. Among our survey
respondents, nearly 40 percent
of CIOs were frustrated at being
bypassed by their marketing teams,
while 60 percent felt that marketing
should be focusing on gaining
better customer insights, rather
than technology.
While both groups view improving interactions between marketing,
sales and channels as a key technology adoption priority for CIOs,
our results indicate that the CIOs also place a greater emphasis
on improving their operational capabilities than their marketing
counterparts would like.
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8. Why collaboration works
As we have indicated, Chinese
consumers expect to be able to
move freely from mobile and tablet
devices across all platforms, which
means marketers should to offer an
integrated, seamless experience when
customers go online. At the same time,
marketers in China should not lose
sight of more traditional channels.
Our research shows that while online
marketing has a slightly higher level
of influence than traditional media in
some industries, such as investment
products and mobile phones, television
advertising of consumer goods is
still the main channel of influence
for most Chinese consumers.
What this means is that both
outside and inside the digital
space, CMOs need to know their
target customers and how to
reach them. Customer insight
is crucial, along with a rigorous
segmentation approach that lays the
foundation for a personalized brand
experience—online as well as off.
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A more sophisticated approach to
segmentation can help companies
generate the insights they need to
prioritize their channel investments
and optimize their offers. This is why
marketers in China are increasingly
relying more on technology that can
offer them deep insights into the
characteristics, needs and preferences
of buyers, across all channels.
Furthermore, marketers are having
to integrate all of their businesses’
channels and platforms to reach
their goals.
All this means leveraging enormous
volumes of data—and for this, of
course, it’s critical that marketers
are able to draw on IT’s expertise
(see Figure 3). Try as a marketing
department might to create a seamless
customer experience, without the
IT team’s input, its digital enterprise
won’t achieve end-to-end integration.
By contrast, CMOs and CIOs working
hand in hand give businesses a
chance to offer an improved customer
experience and drive personalized
interactions with customers. A global
electronics company has, in recent
years, successfully managed to launch
a social collaboration platform across
its central and local brand teams
and agencies. This effort has allowed
its global marketing teams to share
knowledge, documents and creative
assets on a real-time basis and
through this digital transformation,
improve processes and speed to
market when it comes to planning
and implementing brand campaigns
or product launches. None of this
would have been possible without
the support of the IT department,
who had a clear understanding of
what the marketing team required
both on a global and a local scale.
Reforming marketing and IT responsibilities is no small task,
but without the necessary transformation, the repercussions
for businesses could be significant. An unintegrated
approach stemming from a legacy of ‘technical debt’ inside
the company could bring with it the risk that customers
will eventually start to fall through the cracks.
10. Recommendations
Our research shows that compared to their global peers, both
CMOs and CIOs in China are more confident in their ability
to exploit the opportunities that digital marketing channels
present. Companies in the fashion and luxury retail sectors,
for instance, already expect their teams to have a wider
range of skills in this area, from marketing and business
know-how to technical expertise. All this bodes well for the
future, when both functions will need to be working closely
together in order to address increasingly sophisticated
implementation issues.
But what’s the starting point? How should organizations
begin to go about building a more enhanced, collaborative
relationship between marketing and IT?
Here are some of our recommendations:
• Establish a shared vision
• Find an executive sponsor
• Be flexible
• Implement Digital Decoupling
Establish a shared vision
Companies should look at establishing
an internal framework that can help
with managing the collaboration
process. Setting a shared vision
where CMO and CIO objectives
are combined with business goals,
KPIs and budgets is a great way
to help build a common platform
so teams can develop initiatives
together. It also provides a channel
for more frequent and meaningful
communications. (see Figure 4).
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Often, this new vision would help
cut across key priorities in ways
that require both CIOs and CMOs to
collaborate. Strategic initiatives that
converge across user experience,
commerce and content can provide
a good basis from which to begin
to mesh marketing and IT teams.
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Find an executive sponsor
Many large global companies
have addressed the marketing–IT
disconnect by encouraging their CEO
to get involved in creating a more
collaborative environment. We have
also seen that the most successful
collaborations across IT and marketing
functions were those that have the
support and visibility from the CEO
or an executive steering committee.
Another solution currently gaining
momentum in China is to create
a hybrid role, such as a chief
marketing technologist or a chief
digital officer. Appointing someone
who can operate between both
IT and marketing functions and
plug gaps in terms of integration
can have many positive results,
including creating a better customer
experience and shortening time to
market. Success, however, requires
defining clear reporting structures
for the role, and closely mapping
goals and KPIs to the company’s
desired outcomes and culture.
For instance, by hiring marketing
technologists, a leading retailer
in China has been able to blend IT
and Marketing to provide a better
customer experience and quicker
time to market. Operations and
roll-out have also proved smoother
following the involvement of IT in the
company’s marketing campaigns.
In other firms in China, IT and
marketing have been combined
within specific departments—such
as e-commerce—to good results.
Yet while this drives home the point
that customer experience know-how
and operational excellence can
co-exist, a potential downside is that
it can create a silo between that
department and the rest of the firm.
14. Be flexible Implement Digital Decoupling
Keeping pace with the fast-changing
nature of digital marketing is
becoming ever more critical to
the success of Chinese firms in the
digital age. Rigid organizational
structures and job descriptions can
cripple a company in an era where
agility is a vital organizational
resource. After all, each business
initiative requires a special
formulation of skills—dominant,
supporting, or otherwise—and it is
the understanding of this fluidity
as well as the speed of change in
the marketplace that would help
companies to shape successful teams.
The digitally decoupled operating
model is about consolidating digital
production activities (including
content management, brand services
and campaign management) within a
central team, while keeping creative
design services flexible. This model
allows scale and efficiency while not
compromising on creative flexibility.
It has been successfully implemented
across many global brands, and
is now starting to be seen as an
important tool in a company’s arsenal
to help bridge the CMO-CIO divide.
We recently worked with a leading
global consumer goods company in
China, for example, who consolidated
all production on one platform, before
outsourcing their content management
and platform localization.
15. Fit for the future
In this new age of digital
collaboration, connecting the core
functions of marketing and IT is
becoming a vital new focus. There
can no longer be a balancing act
between the two. But executive-level
cooperation is not enough; a
restructured organization is also
needed. Companies should look at
establishing an internal framework
that can help with managing the
collaboration process, and enlisting
support from the CEO or an executive
steering committee to get this
new approach off the ground.
Equally important is the ability to
rethink rigid organizational roles and
consider configuring new, hybrid ones,
such as a chief marketing technologist.
At Accenture Interactive, we help
organizations understand their
customers’ requirements and growth
objectives. With deep knowledge
of technology platforms as well as
a consumer-centric approach to
digital, we can help you identify
the cross-capability solutions
which provide a great engagement
platform across marketing and IT
teams. Our experience in helping
clients shape their digital vision
in a way which better aligns
technology and marketing means
we are well positioned to help
organizations realign the CMO-CIO
disconnect and play to win.
After all, it is only by working
together that CMOs and CIOs can
ride the wave of opportunities
presented by digital transformation.
