Paul Writer launches Innovative Marketer Dialogue , 
Video interview series with CMOs highlights marketing best practices
Lata Subramanian
VP Marketing
Sterling Holiday Resorts (India) Ltd
One thing that will shape the future of marketing…
The marketing role is really going to shift and going to be redefined. The fact that the power has shifted to the consumer means that marketing has to become more customer oriented. Marketing was always been service oriented, you have to be, otherwise how will you develop an effective strategy that speaks to the consumer because you’re saying this is exactly what you want, here is my product or a service that will fulfill your needs. Marketing has to become more service oriented for the simple reason that social media has changed the situation of marketing.
All marketers carry a KRA ( Key result area ), I would imagine that in every organization there is online reputation management, we’ve all heard that one thoughtless response created havoc, there’s a famous story about dominos. An errant employee posted something on poor quality ingredient, I don’t remember the details but they caused the dominos market share to see a huge decline before they could recover. So there is that angle that is coming into the marketing portfolio. Boundaries between CMO’s, CIO’s and CTO are blurring. Marketing will become an extremely important internal customer to the information technology department in an organization because every thing has to become more and more customer oriented and user friendly.
Technology teams are important because with the rapid evolution of technology, you have to keep pace. The technology you are using could be obsolete tomorrow so everybody is talking about being agnostic and future ready. I wonder how much of it is possible because in the IT industry, I’m sure some of them are working on planned obsoletes, already people are in the enterprise model so you can’t buy a product off the shelf, use it and then replace it when new technology comes. You are paying per user, there are so many things happening, the business models are changing. I think roles will also change largely dictated by the customer, they say the customer is King or Queen but I say the customer has become the emperor of the universe possibly.
“Marketing was always been service oriented, you have to be, otherwise how will you develop an effective strategy that speaks to the consumer because you’re saying this is exactly what you want, here is my product or a service that will fulfill your needs. Marketing has to become more service oriented for the simple reason that social media has changed the situation of marketing.”
