14th
On the nature of Job titles
A recent tweet by AdBroad : http://twitter.com/adbroad/status/10474922314 about who owns the brand in the future—marketing or technology—reminded me of an old post on job titles of the future. In my opinion, one can no longer afford to specialize in Technology, without considering the marketing implications of the field. Little of the “technology” spend in the future will be entirely behind the firewall, isolated from partners and customers. And, even that which is, has always had profound impact on business results, and business personel are in desperate need for sound “platform” advice from their IT brethren. Similarly, and perhaps more of an eye-opener, Marketing professionals who cannot grasp, or fail to even try to understand the technical underpinnings of many of today’s modern business trends (location, activity streams, social, UGC, assembled web) do so at their own peril—AND the peril of their campaign or brand!
As many pundits or “experts” will tell you, proper social strategies (and I’d argue that should read Marketing strategy) should start with the end goal in mind, and let the appropriate tools shake out from there. However, this assumes a deep familiarity with the tools, where, upon configuring the strategy, the nuances of each will reveal whether they should be implemented or discarded. While it is possible to hire this expertise (or rent from a consultant), the nuances also can deeply impact the strategy—meaning, a deep understanding of why and how consumers are using the tool, a broad understanding of how the tool works, will help guide ideas around the campaigns. It may even lead to insight into new forms of marketing—such as the Brand extension work you are seeing with iPhone apps that aid customers in a peripheral area of their life. Ultimately, I’d argue this becomes a core requirement of the modern marketing professional’s resume—not a niche area of expertise that can be ignored.
Finally, in the battle for internal resources and dollars, the long-term decisions a firm makes on things such as Facebook “connect”, iPhone/Droid, Open/Proprietary, Assembly Required/Pre-Assembled, can make profound impacts on what, where, when, how a particular marketing campaign can be executed. The days of outsourcing all components to an Agency for a particular campaign, are increasingly changing to (at best) a partial integration solution. In the future, IT and Marketing need to be perfectly in sync, and on a consistent 3 year road map, so that proper Technical Marketing direction can be provided to marketing partners/buyers/agency personnel.
In my opinion, this calls for a new, hybrid role similar to the chief revenue officer position we are seeing emerge. That of Chief Technical Marketing Officer, for all things external facing or that impact a brand’s presence or participation in its marketplace.
Thoughts?
ACEdge
