Nishad pointed me an interesting post from Zeus Jones on the trend of convergence of marketing & operations.
They believe two themes seem to be emerging:
- The increasing focus on customer experience and usability within companies. Smart companies now realize that their core offerings shouldn't be wrapped with a customer friendly veneer. Instead usability and experience should be built in from the ground up.
- Marketing's move from creating images towards creating experiences. The best marketing today are tangible proofs of company values and ideals. People look past propaganda and focus on what companies actually deliver.
I personally think this is increasingly felt as a need amongst CMOs/CEOs. The current siloed structure of organziations creates huge challenges for the CEO to make this happen as there are divergent objectives and agendas in the company. In the future, there will be more budgets allocated for change management, customer experience mapping etc. as business heads, operations and marketing need to collaborate to make customer experience come alive. This needs ground-up thinking and execution amongst these stakeholders.