I think the role of the Chief Digital Officer is going to be
dead soon. The reason I feel this is that Digital was a role which had to be
brought up as a channel independently. But today, with the advent of Social and
Devices, there is power in the hands of people. These are customers, both
Internal and External.
For Organisations looking to venture strongly into Digital,
need to first internalize the nuances of Digital Marketing with its employees
and mainly with key stakeholders. Nuances today are on two fronts : Are we
Conversational ? Are we giving the best Consumer experience ?
Conversations arrive from Content and Content arrives from
people internally. For B2B marketers it could be ‘trends’ on a particular
industry which drive conversations with their buyers. For B2C marketers it
could be ‘imperatives’ which are also known to align with ‘cost of delay’ or
‘immediate gratification’ that drive conversations.
Consumer experience aligns with everything we do – whether
online or offline. For example, stock availability at a retail store is
Consumer experience.
And Digital aligns with these both factors instantly. Like
if the stock is not available, there are reactions which now are on the digital
medium, social media.
When brands successfully provide immediate gratification,
there are reactions on the digital medium.
Now lets flip the story and lets say Brands only look at
external activity without appropriate internalization. Taking the stock
availability example, brands will need to huddle in for each such reaction and
look at how to respond and so on. This is not scalable.
So if Brands looking to embrace Digital need to know the
importance of internalization which will finally impact its brand promise and
this is a scalable model.
This is the very fact I have learnt with the organisations I
have worked with. And I would say it’s a difficult path as there is a lot of
change management required. But when there is top management buy in coupled
with champions within units, the ripples start to become waves.
Hence, when internal customers become more and more
digitally aligned, the role of digital officer will be dead. All Marketers will
have to be digital and Digital marketers will have to shun their complex
metrically aligned hats and wear pure marketing hats aligned to Customer
experiences and Conversations !
