Interview with Sangeeta Sundaram, Marketing & Communications leader at Capgemini
PW: How important is technology for the success of the modern marketer
SS: Today’s marketer cannot function without technology. It is an integral part of marketing.
We need technology for measuring the ROI. Marketing budgets are always under a scanner compared to other departments, and the use of technology to track data and analyze our returns and monetize the success of any media and communication is very important.
In large corporations like ours, with multiple geographies, deploying consistent brand assets would be impossible without technology. Today, monitoring the brand, ensuring consistency in its usage, reusability of brand assets and checks on communication guidelines, is all made much easier with archived portals and other such technology.
And most importantly, digital technology and the use of social media, our website and other digital properties have made it possible to interact with customers and respond and communicate to and with our target audience, making it the key support for marketing.
There are no doubt challenges in the adoption of technology in the marketing arena. A personal evolution is required. Awareness of ever changing trends and changing the composition of the marketing team is required today. While I have hired specific people with technology skills, I also ensure that my team members learn new things and update themselves constantly.
PW: What are your current marketing priorities & how does that translate to technology?
SS: If I have to identify my top priorities for the next 12 months, they would be:
- Brand development for both the internal and external audience in a manner that integrates the process completely. Ability to have a same brand experience internally and externally. A clear shift to digital advertising. Globally, Capgemini has already taken a decision to move its marketing channel from the traditional to the digital. In India, we have used some traditional medium in the past, but going forward it will be more digital media.
- Gear up to drive a content management strategy
- And, an Account Based Marketing approach for greater customer intimacy
PW: At Capgemini how has technology played a role in customer acquisition or retention?
SS: Well, apart from the obvious CRM system in managing the sales and marketing pipeline, we have used technology in a powerful way for our recruitment communication and process. For each recruitment communication campaign as well as all organic visits to the website we are not only able to track and analyse the statistics, conversion rates etc. we are also ensuring that the resume’s received are categorized and sent to the corresponding technical leader in the organization for review. The life-cycle of a resume is completely supported by technology at Capgemini making the process more efficient, effective and transparent. We are also able to drive efficiencies on our campaigns owing to this.
On the customer end we are still in the early stages of technology adoption in India but are clearly moving towards it. At the moment we are able to do some customer behavior analysis and tracking of sales leads etc. But what we would like to move towards is specific content for customers based on their requirement, more engagement and two-way communication.
PW: What is the level of collaboration between the CMO and CIO in your organization? Does marketing have a separate IT Budget?
SS: I think the level of collaboration between Marketing and IT is definitely improving. There is a sense of understanding of each others business needs which has led the two to work together. This in our organization was clearly important when communication to 37000 employees in over 8 locations in India had to be streamlined. But, it is also true that the CIO now involves marketing when evaluating vendors for some communication technology, or inputs are taken from our department when revamping a CRM system. Marketing is definitely an important stakeholder in any customer engagement or sales technology being implemented. This was probably not so true, say 2 years ago.
Globally, the marketing budget at Capgemini had evolved to include technology that was required. Here in India, we have slowly moved to get less and less dependant on the IT budget for technology that we need to run successful marketing programs. Be it an upgrade for the website and intranet, analytics and tracking or bandwidth for launching campaigns, we now manage it ourselves as IT has other responsibilities that require their attention.