siliconindia | | February 20169and different business models all at once. As CMO and CIO you want to delight the customer with a seamless brand experience and things to perform in a manner that is consistent with that brand promise. Although, developing and managing a constantly evolving global eCommerce platform is difficult and expensive challenge. Careful thought and flawless execution is required to understand long term cost of ownership CIOs have to enable systems that are owned and driven by business stakeholders, while minimizing costs and preventing the malaise of the waterfall approach to building capabilities. Finding talent in an increasingly talent constrained global economy will become a much bigger challenge than what we have experienced this far. It is a gone time when India and China provided quality talent at low cost as they are themselves driving eCommerce activities at par with western economies. What will brands do to keep their talented folks and to manage their rise in wage cost and talent scarcity? Outsourced partnerships are possibility, but make no mistake about the implications of such an arrangement on competitive differentiation and potentially organizational culture. Outsourcing that may not be best course of action. Data management and advanced analytics will determine next winners and losers. Mere discounting and pricing is not the answer to sales. Differentiation of products and services afforded by the virtual world seems to be significant in terms of scale and variety. Tools that enable brands to understand customer types and preferences, allow for evolved personalized experiences will have a leg up on competition How will Big Data principles and capabilities drive the ability to crunch through petabytes of data to find insights and meaningful recommendations? Community based experiential marketing and sourcing of ideas will become a major CMO mandate. Clearly we see everyone evolving their marketing strategies to become more and more towards experiential. The clear implications of this are several--increased bandwidth on everything from content storage to dissemination to measurement. But increasingly the lines between where your site ends and where an external site begins is blurring. CMOs have to think through how and what is needed to make content extensible seamlessly? Security, privacy, phishing, fraud, legislation is not far behind where there is success. Increasingly online commerce has become the trading currency for making a point for hackers or those involved in extreme social causes. Whether it is carbon emissions or an overlooked security vulnerability on a website. The stakes are extremely high when it comes to impact on eCommerce both from a direct financial hit due to attacks or implications to brand reputation due to stolen credit card numbers or other personal information. As a CIO, you have to stay one step ahead of the discussion, as a CMO, you have to handle the community reaction when something terribly wrong happens and it's not in your direct control. Brands are increasingly using cutting edge tools and talent to protect themselves. A move towards customer advocacy and end to end ownership finally. The new measure of success for brands is increasingly loyalty and advocacy. The ability to measure social sentiment allows brands to understand where we are in our standing with our most loyal of customers and how we are doing in our quest to delight our existing customers so they may ultimately become advocates. As a CMO you are constantly looking for ways in which to delight existing customers with their repeat purchases and interactions. As a CIO you are working to build systems that enable flawless execution on your supply chain processes. You are working hard to react in real time to a complaint on social media about a problem the customer has on his or her recent purchase. Big eCommerce focused brands are pushing the envelope of what is aspirational from an experience standpoint. Others whose primary business isn't ecommerce are having to catch up with technologies and strategies to better serve their customers. The implications are big and ignoring them potentially catastrophic in the long run.A seamlessly integrated sales and marketing platform powered by social, mobile and digital considerations is core for competitive differentiation Ajit Sivadasan
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