Marketers In Asia Pac Better Start Monkeying Around

Adobe’s recently released “Digital Trends Report” highlights the challenges Asia Pac marketers face in this, the year of the monkey.

Asia Pac marketers are facing plenty of challenges in 2016 that will require the wit and agility of this year’s Chinese Zodiac animal–the red monkey–to overcome.

We’re not just talking about technology anymore; we’re talking about how technology can be used to craft, test, and deliver initiatives for outstanding customer experiences.

These are the findings of the recently released Adobe “Digital Trends Report” for 2016. (Note: Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company.) Having spent the past 12 months honing their mobile-integration, mobile-first, and, in some cases, mobile-only strategies, the most advanced marketers are also effectively using big data to gain unprecedented insight into their customers to best respond to their needs.

We’ve stopped asking questions around technology. The “how” is less relevant because we no longer have to convince corporate boards to buy the right software. Now we’re returning to the “why,” and across the region there’s a renewed focus on effectively communicating the brand across different media.

As we do this, we’re seeing leading brands, such as Australia’s Telstra and Westpac, gaining deep insights into their customers through the adoption of a design-thinking approach to product development and service delivery.

Using this approach, marketing and brand are deeply embedded in product development from the very beginning, rather than something reverse-engineered onto a product or service at the end of the process.

This shift also means marketers and marketing departments will need to build on the digital and technological skills they’ve developed over the past few years, broadening their approach to include customer experience and end-user experts.

For the most senior marketing executives, this shift will require a deeper understanding of how to manage and set KPIs around diverse teams that have a mixture of technical, experiential, and digital skills.

It will be interesting to see how organisations integrate the customer-experience focus into their management teams. The customer experience has, to a large extent, been left under the control of the CMO or, in some cases, the CDO.

However, as customer experience continues to come to the fore, we’ll also see different approaches emerging, including executive appointments to CX-dedicated roles.

In addition to customer experience, the research shows that marketers globally also remain focused on the strategic use of data and the very real challenge of finding and keeping talented data analysts on their teams.

To be successful in 2016, CMOs need to tap into agile business processes, be prepared for rolling change, and find effective ways to integrate this change into their processes.

In other words, be like a monkey–smart, fast, creative, and just a little bit cheeky.

Gong Xi Fa Cai.