Paul Writer launches Innovative Marketer Dialogue, 
Video interview series with CMOs highlights marketing best practices
Deepali Naair
CMO
Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Ltd
On Challenges that Marketers face today …
The three critical challenges that marketing leaders face today are outside the world of brand and marketing. The first biggest challenge marketers face is to get the technology backbone ready in the organization because the consumers are moving at a very fast pace, the technology is moving at a very fast pace. The standard of the backbone technology used by organizations to be able to cater to consumers, to be able to reach out to consumers is a little lagging. We are constantly catching up because the velocity of change is dramatic so that is the first challenge.
Therefore the second challenge or the opportunity is, you have to forge a relationship with the technology team. The CMO and the CIO have to forge a relationship among themselves. The marketing team and the CMO’s need to increase their technology quotient and that’s not just in the space of digital, or in the space of social media. But in a space that is able to offer experiences to consumers on digital because consumers no longer use this digital space for information but also to post their customer service complaints, to understand more about other members or customers that the firm has and therefore it becomes challenging for the marketing team to up ( increase ) their technology quotient.
“The standard of the backbone technology used by organizations to be able to cater to consumers, to be able to reach out to consumers is a little lagging. We are constantly catching up because the velocity of change is dramatic”
The third challenge that I definitely face and most CMO’s talk to me about is ‘ How to hire the right skill in the marketing team that you have?” because you may no longer have partners or agencies who provide full service solutions to you across digital, across ATL or BTL so therefore you end up working with 5 to 6 different agencies and that means you need to hire specialist inside your team so you need loyalty specialist, a digital specialist, a social media specialist, a PR specialist and someone who has enough brand knowledge. You need to then ensure that these people work together so hiring them and getting them to work together is the biggest challenge that a CMO faces today.
