Kathryn Arbour
Partner, Deloitte Digital
Lisa Smith
Partner, Deloitte Digital
Companies are urged to think differently about their marketing and sales operating models and undergo a digital transformation to keep pace with how their consumers engage with brands.
Sector observers believe some organisations are slow to align themselves with the way customers use digital media channels to browse, shop and buy. Unless these organisations undertake meaningful transformation in how their sales, marketing and IT teams collaborate to deliver what customers expect, they will struggle to compete for sales and growth.
The interconnected ecosystem
Kathryn Stokes Arbour, who is a Partner at Deloitte Digital specialising in digital marketing and sales transformation, says traditional marketing organisations tend to focus on a linear shopper journey, encouraging people down a funnel to ultimately drive conversion at a point of sale owned by a third party or separate sales team.
“This isn’t how people explore, interact with, or purchase brands anymore.” She points to an increasingly complex ecosystem of content where people seek information and inspiration in places where the content is rich and the opportunity to buy is immediate, such as shoppable ads, discovery commerce, influencer/creator content and the metaverse. Such points of interaction, which “blur the lines between sales, marketing and technology,” are increasingly seized upon by nimble startups, while larger organisations struggle to engage.
Internal siloes
She indicates that many blue-chip organisations are still operating in siloes — with separate budgets for marketing, sales, IT and media — resulting in a lack of ownership, competing priorities and, ultimately, a disconnect with consumers.
“Organisations should rethink their marketing and sales operating models to be more agile, customer experience outcomes-based and integrated if they hope to keep up with their more nimble competitors,” she adds. Larger organisations that have changed their way of working have seen results. She points to one global CPG’s prestige beauty division as an example.
“They have observed higher growth percentages with fewer people because they work in this more agile, more connected, consumer-focused way, creating a place where people want to get inspiration and ideas — and buy while they are there,” says Arbour.
Organisations should rethink their marketing and sales operating models to be more agile, customer experience outcomes-based and integrated if they hope to keep up with their more nimble competitors.
Kathryn Arbour
Digital transformation
Lisa Smith, is a Partner in the Deloitte Digital practice and the UK practice lead for cross domain enterprise digital transformations. As a digital anthropologist creative, she is currently working with one of the largest global consumer product goods brand’s sales, marketing and technology domains, researching the socio-economic impacts of digital products on the shopper and consumer market personas.
“We believe the fastest way to respond to customer experience is to have product stewards own market sentiment of audience groups that is embedded in a digital product,” she says but warns that content, sales and brand marketing are suboptimised if not organised and integrated within cross-domain, multi-disciplinary teams from Operations and Technology, HR and Finance.
“The response to experience has to be completely reimagined within organisations, and we know that connectivity to the market is through the route of digital,” says Smith. She also underlines the importance of real-time feedback loops to know when to refine a digital product or introduce something new as consumer experiences infinitely evolve.
“Digital transformation is not just about cool technology but is a radical intervention that allows for an organisation to intuitively understand when the experiential consumer want a new way to engage with their brands.”
Fundamental shift
Deloitte has conducted research in this area with digital native brands and identified common themes that can help inform new organisational models. This found that digital startups were less likely to use external agencies; conducted creative aspects in-house, with the founder often the face and spokesperson of the brand; and formed pods of people working together on Instagram or TikTok, adopting a channel-focused approach or capturing customers at specific points along a transformation journey.
Digital transformation is not just about cool technology but is a radical intervention that allows for an organisation to intuitively understand when the experiential consumer wants a new way to engage with their brands.
Lisa Smith
“The lesson we try to bring to our clients is that they need to think differently about how their multi-faceted teams are working, empowering them to keep the customer’s needs front of mind. It is a fundamental shift from departmental KPIs and objectives,” explains Arbour.
Lisa rounded out by sharing that an Infinite Delivery™ outcomes obsession mindset is what Deloitte anchors its clients thinking around. Understanding the dynamic nature of the digital economy and that consumer experiences are now an aggregate of experiences across many brands, allows organisations to accelerate trust and decision making to multi-disciplinary digital product teams enabling them to innovate organically in response to the evolving customer needs.