Digital is driving fundamental shifts in how businesses operate. Instead of a handful of online and offline touch points, companies have the opportunity to meet customers anywhere and everywhere: in social media sites, inside their smart phones and on their favorite blogs. Since marketers are intruding in domains that are much more reflective of the personal interests of their targets, earning and maintaining the right to visibility on these channels requires a new and extraordinary level of content that reflects the wants and needs of the consumer. In other words: Messages need to be relevant. That requires eschewing traditional “push marketing” and instead offering information that is engaging and timely to individual consumers based on their specific interests.

This is relevance with a capital “R”. And to truly achieve it requires new skills and the alignment of resources so that requisite data can be mined to capture current behavior. It requires analytics to predict future intent before it is even articulated by the customer. It also calls for companies to adopt more flexible and scalable technology platforms. Today most aren’t. Digital initiatives are run on older systems with inflexible architectures and incompatible technologies. These legacy systems make it difficult, if not impossible, for brand managers to execute agile marketing programs that deliver rich and compelling experiences in a cost-effective, robust and secure manner. Through leading-edge platforms, companies can tailor experiences for consumers over all channels. And cost savings are driven down significantly through system consolidation, and improved efficiencies.

A ground-breaking new study on this topic, “The CMO-CIO Alignment Imperative: Driving Revenue through Customer Relevance,” was co-developed by Accenture Interactive and the CMO Council, a highly respected thought leadership organization for chief marketing officers (CMOs). Through more than 600 quantitative and 50 qualitative CMO and CIO interviews, across a range of global industries, this research explores the attitudinal, technological and professional gaps that are hampering both the marketing and IT functions’ digital marketing efforts. As our research shows, until alignment issues are addressed, the full potential of achieving customer relevance remains largely untapped by most companies. This Accenture Interactive point of view builds upon the research and offers steps for addressing the new alignment imperative wrought by the advent of the Digital Age.

Key findings include:

• Technology now underpins and shapes the entire customer experience (65 percent of CIOs and 50 percent of CMOs)
• Access to customer intelligence is critical to competitive advantage (53 percent of CIOs and 55 percent of CMOs)
• Reaching and engaging the market has become more digitally-driven (40 percent of CIOs and 44 percent of CMOs)
• Companies that can create an impenetrable CMO and CIO alliance—and a broader organizational alignment—will hold the keys to the digital kingdom. The payoff: customer relevance and lifelong loyalty—the only real currency in today’s hyper-competitive global marketplace.

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