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James Wheless

Global Managing Partner, Consulting & Services Integration, Tata Consultancy Services

Lakshmi Ramesh

Head, Media Center of Excellence, Cognitive Business Operations, TCS

Highlights

Objective

  • The TCS 2019 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Study documents how the most— and the least—successful CMOs in North America and Europe are leveraging digital technologies to personalize the customer experience.

Methodology

  • We surveyed and interviewed more than 500 CMOs to uncover how the top performers or “leaders” and the less-effective “followers” use, and plan to use, digital technologies in multiple communications channels in four common stages of the customer lifecycle (awareness, conversion, support and retention) to increase revenue, profitability and value to customers and prospects.

Survey population

  • These global companies were a mix of B2C (60%), B2B (27%), B2B2C (5%), with a mix of B2B and B2C (8%). The average annual revenue of those surveyed was $10.6 billion; the median was $7.0 billion. The average annual marketing budget was $392 million; the median was $272 million.

Digital Marketing Trends

  • The way that large companies are marketing their brands and offerings is in a state of digital metamorphosis. Mass marketing through analog channels (especially broadcast and print media) is still happening, but digital channels are dominating. Companies in the digital marketing ecosystem (especially Facebook, Google and Amazon) have unprecedented, granular information on consumers and businesses. They and wireless communications providers know where these customers are. And artificial intelligence-infused analytics and other marketing technologies give companies powerful tools to identify potential customers and the ability to tailor messages that turn prospects into customers that buy and keep on buying.
  • Yet our research is finding that when it comes to using digital personalization technologies effectively, most large marketing organizations that we surveyed are not where they need to be. Only a minority is using digital technologies to personalize communications at every stage of the brand experience/customer life cycle, although businessto-consumer (B2C) companies are more proficient than business-to-business (B2B) companies. Most are not taking advantage of the customer data available to them. The study research indicates that the majority of CMOs anticipate migration to the cloud (for on-premises and off-premises) and a dramatic increase in the use of automation by 2020 across every marketing activity.